Author(s): John Hatcher

History

This text is from a leading expert, a unique, character-driven and compellingly written narrative of the devastation wreaked on a small English village during the fourteenth century when the Black Death ravaged the countryside.In this new and fresh historical approach to the history of the Black Death, Professor John Hatcher recreates everyday life in a mid-fourteenth century parish in rural England. By focusing on the experiences of ordinary villagers as they lived, and died during the Black Death (1345-50), Hatcher vividly places the reader into the tumultuous fourteenth century and describes in fascinating detail everyday life amidst the tragic effects of the plague. The story is peopled with characters developed from the villagers named in the records. And a series of dramatic scenes are created which portray how contemporaries must have experienced the momentous events- what they knew and what they believed, from the horrors of disease, pestilence and death to the desperate rumors, frightening tales, and fearful sermons they heard as they tried to make sense of all that was visited upon them.In this unique style and innovative approach, the hindsight, judgments and perspectives of the twenty-first century historian have been banished from the text, and the reader is given a view of the Black Death entirely from within the fourteenth century-and one that is unlike any other book on the Black Death.