The Black Death: A Personal History [Hardcover]

John Hatcher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2008

In this fresh approach to the history of the Black Death, world-renowned scholar John Hatcher re-creates everyday life in a mid-fourteenth century rural English village. By focusing on the experiences of ordinary villagers as they lived-and died-during the Black Death (1345-50), Hatcher vividly places the reader directly inside those tumultuous times and describes in fascinating detail the day-to-day existence of people struggling with the tragic effects of the plague. Dramatic scenes portray how contemporaries must have felt and thought about these momentous events: what they knew and didn’t know about the horrors of the disease, what they believed about death and God’s vengeance, and how they tried to make sense of it all despite frantic rumors, frightening tales, and fearful sermons.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In an experimental narrative for an academic historian—blending some fiction with solid facts—Hatcher, of Cambridge University, offers a literary docudrama that looks at the lives off ordinary people during the Black Death that devastated Europe in the 1340s. Focusing on the English town of Walsham de Willows, Hatcher helps readers understand the deep terror that prevailed, including rumors of awful omens, including rains of frogs, serpents, lizards, scorpions, and venomous beasts. He describes the plague itself, which caused coughing up of blood, carbuncles and boils on the neck, underarm and groin, and death in a few days. Especially affecting are accounts of the psychological agonies of those who, in a deeply religious age, saw their often delirious relatives die without proper confession. Finally, Hatcher notes the socioeconomic upheaval wrought by the plague, including poor people unexpectedly inheriting land from relatives killed by the plague, and a severe labor shortage as a third of Europe's population was wiped out.. While a glossary would have been helpful (will readers know what a rood of land or a heriot is?), this is a fine work that gives an intimate sense of the Black Death's horrors. Maps. (June)
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Review

Fifty Plus
“A fascinating read…A welcome addition to our understanding of this poorly documented catastrophe.”

Augusto Metro Spirit 7/09/08
“A brilliant overview of the plague…Intricate personal portraits create a dynamic sense of reality.”
 

Kirkus 4/15/08
“Hatcher effectively portrays the collective hysteria that gripped the land.”

Maxim June Issue
“Tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the unstoppable killer plague that devastated a 14th-century English village. Pass the sad juice!”

Booklist, 6/1/08
”Evoking the medieval mind-set, including anxiety about composing the soul for eternity, Hatcher’s fictional scenes and characters are secured to actual events in village affairs as the Black Death kills half of Walsham’s inhabitants. An unusual yet unusually gripping way to capture the distant past.”

Sunday Times (UK), 6/1/08
“[Hatcher’s] reconstructed account is suspenseful, informative and appropriately horrifying…Scenes show the strength of Hatcher's dramatic method.”

New York Post “Required Reading” column, 6/15/08
“For those whose only knowledge of the plague comes from Monty Python, but are willing to learn more, Cambridge Professor Hatcher takes a serious, but very readable look at the epidemic.”


Rutland Herald 6/18/08
“This is a hard-hitting and thought-provoking book which stands out….The story is compelling and emotional and the plot is fast-paced, with well-drawn characters…This is a book that readers will remember for a long time to come.”


Simon Winchester, New York Sun, 6/25/08
“Totally absorbing…Presents the best account ever written about the worst event to have ever befallen the British Isles. In the hands of John Hatcher…the extraordinary tragedy of the great plague…has been brought to life in a manner rarely attempted, and with a level of success even more rarely achieved…A history book like very few others, and a triumph at that…A book—half fact, half highly informed speculation—that can have few rivals.”
 

Library Journal Xpress Review, 6/24/08
“A very readable, engaging work…An accessible and informative introduction to the topic.”


ON American Airlines
“Hatcher masterfully portrays the personal story of the rural English village.”


King Features Syndicate
“One of the most fascinating accounts of the Black Death ever written…[An] incredible book…What gives this story its legs is Hatcher’s attention to detail and his intimate knowledge of the period…This is living, breathing history written by a gifted writer at the top of his game.”

 

The Times Literary Supplement, UK
“A haunting combination of unobtrusive expertise and considerable imagination…The intimate history reads like a masterfully constructed thriller…Neither a work of bloodless historical analysis nor a piece of historical fiction, but a gripping combination of the two.”


Roanoke Times, 08/03/08
“The book is interesting and provides a good view of English life in the 14th century.”


Charleston Post & Courier, 08/03/08
Vivid scenes…Hatcher exhibits a crisp narrative style that lends itself easily to this kind of storytelling.”

Pop Matters, 8/18/08
“Hatcher is able to build outward and ultimately give life to every facet of the community…Hatcher’s deft illustration of this foreboding terror is chilling. Hatcher has produced a riveting account…Thanks to Hatcher’s meticulous research and vivid imagination, [the lives taken by the plague] are no longer invisible.”

HuffingtonPost.com
“John Hatcher gives us a riveting account of five years…John Hatcher’s book is a special excursion into a dark past, a careful and sensitive account of the sudden calamity of ordinary people in a generally miserable time. It’s history as art and a magnificent achievement.”

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; 1St Edition edition (June 3, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306815710
• ISBN-13: 978-0306815713
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #386,749 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As If a Reporter Were on the Scene, June 18, 2008

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Black Death: A Personal History (Hardcover)

The Black Death continues to fascinate us, even though it took its great toll on Europe in the fourteenth century. There have been scores of books about it. One of the world's experts on the plague, John Hatcher, is a professor at the University of Cambridge. He has written a great deal about medieval history and about the Black Death in particular, but has taken a completely new method in _The Black Death: A Personal History_ (Da Capo Press). There are first person accounts of the plague in Boccaccio and Petrarch, and there are plenty of records about how the plague raged through Britain, but there isn't a comparable story-telling description for Britain. Until now, for Hatcher has written one. He has chosen the locale of Walsham le Willows, a Suffolk town that has many good records for the years of the plague, but he explains, "Even in the best documented of places, the sources surviving from the fourteenth century are silent, or severely deficient, on most of the issues that were central to the lives of the villagers. There are no diaries, reminiscences, or correspondence, and no accounts of what people believed or how they spent their days." He feels, however, that "... this does not mean that historians should give up and leave the telling of it to novelists, dramatists, and filmmakers."

The result is a book for which, Hatcher says, "I have had to invent situations and dialogue and employ techniques reminiscent of docudrama." He has had also to invent characters, such as Master John, the parish priest of Walsham. The result is not really a historical novel; there is little character development or plot. As befits the work of a historian, this is more of a history, as if there were a reporter there at the time to interview characters and describe what was going on. Much centers on the idea that God was punishing those other villages, but Master John taught that he would spare those in Walsham who showed that they deserved mercy by acts of confession and public and private abasement. There was no way to understand the disease except as a message and punishment from God, but as the illness worked its way into the land, there were many who questioned how God could be treating them in this way. Sinless infants fell to it, as did the devout, as did many a sincere priest. Also mystifying was that the great pestilence God had wrought for the sins of the people led to no improvement of their behavior or their lot in any social stratum. In Walsham, as in other areas, the death toll was around 50%, and the loss of population created economic and social chaos. Hatcher vividly describes the frustrations of the likes of the lordly master of Walsham's High Hall, who found that those who had toiled for the manor for centuries now discovered themselves a scarce resource so that they could demand high wages. The plague also raised the ire of the lords and the clergy when the survivors, widows, and widowers quickly took up new partners, often cohabiting without benefit of marriage. Such behavior was not only sinful, it robbed officials of marriage fees due to the manor.

Hatcher's experiment in telling a social history using fiction based on a historical foundation is a success. He has not only told about what the villagers were going through during the terror, but has cleverly called upon other sources to come in and give background information. For instance, Master John rides to the town of Bury St. Edmunds to speak at the abbey there with his friend the infirmarer, the medical authority for the monks. He thus gets an earful of how physicians at the time explained the disease, although they had no more effect against it than religious authorities. In another section, a carter regales the crowd at Alice Pye's alehouse with a description of the appearance and behavior of a procession of flagellants he has seen, come to London from across the channel to whip themselves bloody so that the plague would be cast out of the land. The details provided here give an unforgettable picture of a society thrown into chaos by microbes, and it is not too far a stretch to think that we might in our own way go through the same sorts of responses to the chaos when the new SARS or Ebola comes for us.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Dreary, Tedious, September 25, 2008

By 

J. Aubrey (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Black Death: A Personal History (Hardcover)

Again I pay the price of failing to adequately preview a book before ordering it. I knew I was in trouble halfway through the preface, when the author explained the need to mix fact and fiction to add a "more vivid dimension" to the Black Death. He even describes the book as a "docudrama."

I couldn't take anymore after 150 pages. The writing is mediocre, the pacing is ponderous, repetition is rampant, and the "fiction" insipid and spiritless without a hint of "drama."

You learn some interesting things about the stifling predominance of Christianity and other aspects of everyday life in rural, medieval England, but that is little consolation for the sheer effort of forcing yourself to turn the page.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The 14th Century comes to life, April 9, 2009

By 

Wayne Engle "Wayne Engle" (Madison, IN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Black Death: A Personal History (Hardcover)

John Hatcher has taken us back to the horrendous bubonic plague of 1348-49 as if he possessed his own personal time machine. Working carefully with existing parish and town records for Walsham, in a rural area northeast of London, Hatcher brings the people of the English countryside of the 14th Century vividly to life.

Fictionalizing where necessary, but also utilizing the unusually detailed historic records for Walsham, Hatcher uses the selfless parish priest Master John as a human pivot around which his story turns. Master John works tirelessly day and night at his pastoral duties of hearing final confessions and conducting last rites as lords and ladies of the manor, merchants, townspeople, and peasants alike fall victim to the horrible Black Death which killed half the people of Walsham in a period of about two months in the spring of 1349, during its relentless march across most of Europe.

In the days after the plague has subsided in Walsham, Hatcher relates how the peasants who survived the Black Death begin to take advantage of their scarcity by demanding much higher wages to work in the landlords' fields. He also tells how the surviving lords and ladies, or their surviving heirs, struggle to force the peasants to work for the lower wages they had accepted before -- to return things to the way they used to be. But the Black Death caused societal changes that were never reversed.

Hatcher turns dead names from the 14th Century into real people in this unique history-cum-historic fiction work. It's well worth the read.