When WAS the fourteenth century?

When I tell people that my current novel is set in the medieval period, they will often say something like 'Oh, I love the medieval period, it's fascinating'. And it is, I'm not arguing with that. But I'm never quite brave enough, then, to go on and find out exactly what they mean by 'the medieval period'. Wikipedia – repository of all instant knowledge - defines it as covering a period from the fifth century to the beginning of the sixteenth century. In other words, a millennium that includes the Dark Ages. I think that's a bit broad, myself and would probably have the medieval period beginning somewhere about the reign of Alfred the Great in the mid-ninth century, though others prefer to refer to anything prior to 1066 as The Anglo-Saxon period and to see the medieval period in England as the years between Conquest and Tudors. Fair enough.

But, even if you limit it to the period 1066 to 1485, the medieval period still totals 419 years, which makes research for the historical novelist quite tricky. I mean, life was very different in 1066 and 1485. OK, not as different as between 1485 and 419 years later in 1904, but still, very different.

Even when you narrow things down to the century I'm interested in - the fourteenth - things get very little easier. As I've mentioned before, the fourteenth century was an eventful, happening time and to assume that things in 1400 would look anything like those in 1301 would be a big mistake.

Most of all, the century is hard for the historical novelist (and, by the same token, wonderful) because of the HUGE event that sits bang smack in the midlde of it. 1348 -1350 - The Black Death. It changed pretty well everything, some things immediately, some things slowly. But it changed them. And if you try and research the fourteenth century so that you can get your historical details right, it's sometimes very difficult to find out which bit of the fourteenth century people are talking about.

For instance, I've done a certain amount of research into medieval church wall paintings. Now, there are, sadly, few mural works left in medieval parish churches because of the iconoclasm of the Reformation. What's left was whitewashed or plastered over and is, therefore, not always in the greatest nick. However, conservators all over the country are conserving and writing about the examples that are left and their work is invaluable to people like me. The trouble is, because of the poor condition of the paintings, they can't always say when, exactly, they were painted.

So, when I read - in a reliable source - that it was widely believed 'in the fourteenth century' that to see an image of St Christopher would keep you from dying a sudden death that day, I was delighted. (Clearly, I'm easily pleased.) Surely, I thought, everybody who was afraid of dying of the plague (ie everybody who was alive) would be buying up St Christopher medals and painting images of the saint on their church walls like nobody's business, wouldn't they?

It seemed like a sensible assumption until further (a lot further) research revealed that this belief seems to have come about as a result of the Black Death and that, therefore, those remedies were not immediately available at the time of the Black Death. Most of the surviving St Christopher wall paintings seem to be late fourteenth or fifteenth century. They wouldn't have been there for people to look at while the plague was raging, they were there as a prophylactic, should the plague return.

So the nice device of having people relying on the fact that they wouldn't die that day because they'd taken the trouble to go and look at St Christopher carrying the Christ-child across the river was a goner. As was a point of contact between my characters and my readers – after all, most people know who St Christopher is; they're likely to be far less familiar with the story of the Three Living and the Three Dead which every medieval parishionner would have known. (I'll tell you another time if you're interested.)

And, though I am interested in wall-paintings (as any reader of Testament will know) that's not why they make an appearance in the book. You couldn't possibly have a character walk into a church in the period before the mid 1540s without knowing that the plastered walls of any parish church would be covered in paintings. Our austere way with bare stone was unknown to medieval people and they would have found it incredibly barren and unhelpful. Their religion was very different to anything practised in Britain now. And not just different but bigger. Much bigger. Bigger than most of us can possibly imagine; as big a social factor (though not in the same way) as Islam is in, for example, modern Iran or Saudi Arabia. And, of course, for 'religion' think Roman Catholicism, the only brand of Christianity then flourishing in Western Europe.

But any unwary novelist who assumes that medieval catholicism can be mapped straight on to pre-second vatican council Roman Catholicism is going to get things wrong.

Take a small example. The hail Mary. Even non-Catholics, like me, know that this goes:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen

As such, with its references to the hour of one's own death – which was pretty much in the forefront of everybody's mind during the Black Death – it seems to be the perfect prayer for my main character to be muttering pretty constantly.

Except that more detailed research reveals that the second part of the prayer was only added in the late fifteenth century, almost a hundred and fifty years after the Black Death.

Drat; another point of contact with modern readers gone.

So many things changed as a result of the Black Death – the value of labour, the standard of living, the status of English, the respect people gave to the church, the relationship between the land and the towns, the feudal system – that the early and late fourteenth centuries turn out to be very different times. People literally thought differently about life after it. Not immediately, of course, but the outlook and world-view of the generation that was born after 1348 is different in many ways to that born, for instance in 1308.

The unwary historical novelist has to tease all this out. Every reference to things 'in the fourteenth century' have to be explored, teased out, evaluated and pinned down to exactly WHEN in the fourteenth century. Otherwise, the howlers generated would be as bad as having a hip and trendy character putting a record on the gramophone in the year 1999, while they smoked their medically endorsed cigarette from a chic ivory holder.

The dangers of oversimplification

Sorry for the dearth of recent posts here – the promenade play, plus a couple of other work-related matters have been keeping me very busy. But, as I have now subdued the Reformation, so to speak, and am well on the way to finishing the last playlet (Dickens) I thought I’d post a few reflections on what I’ve been doing.

As John Fisher and Nicholas Ridley were both Bishops of Rochester and were on opposing sides (as it were) of the Reformation, we thought it would be interesting to have them confronting each other over an altar (which could plausibly act as a symbol of the whole Reformation argument as all altars moved from being stone, carved and ornate with beautiful hangings to being plain and wooden and bare – Rome vs. Puritanism).

But trying to distil the complex Reformation arguments of theology and religious practice into something around nine minutes long proved surprisingly (or, perhaps, unsurprisingly) difficult. Take into consideration the fact that this promenade play is not being written for an audience already well-versed in Church of England practice and history but for anybody from Rochester and the surrounding Medway Towns district who fancies a bit of casual Saturday afternoon entertainment and saying anything meaningful in such a short space of time moves into the realm of ‘distinctly tricky’.

So, I’ve slipped a bit of Why the Reformation Happened 101 into the transition from the previous scene to this one (as the characters and audience walk from the High Altar through the Quire and down into the nave, since you ask) and I’ve gone for lots of visual imagery so as not to make the whole thing too wordy. Oh and introduced two chaplains to the bishops who are basically into a whole game of ‘my bishop’s better than your bishop’. So we’ll see what everybody else involved thinks at the first production team meeting on Monday.

But one thing has struck me and that’s how easy it is to slip into saying things which are so simplified as to be scarcely recognisable as the actual truth. Strangely, my elder son came across this phenomenon when he was studying A-level biology. ‘Don’t worry about what you were taught at GCSE’ the class was told ‘because that was so over-simplified it was, basically, wrong. ‘ Actually, they were given to understand that, compared to the wonders that they would discover on a degree course should they choose to pursue the wonders of biological science, they’d discover that A-level wasn’t exactly 100% accurate either.

But then, isn’t it true that the more you look into anything, the more complex and multi-faceted it becomes? Nothing is simply cause and effect; everything is a multi-layered confection of causes, effects, spin-offs, unforeseen consequences, more effects and further causes of the next major upheaval.

When I was writing a speech for John Fisher (who fell foul of Henry VIII’s determination to divorce Catherine of Aragon in pretty much the same way as the more famous Thomas More did) on the whole sorry episode of ‘The King’s Great Matter’ I found myself making him say ‘If Catherine of Aragon had borne Henry a healthy son there would have been no break with Rome, no suggestion that the king was the ‘supreme head of the church in England’.
But is that true? If the sons Catherine gave birth to had lived to young manhood (bear in mind he was married to her for sixteen years before Anne Boleyn came on to the scene) would he really have been content to stay under the sway of the Pope? Would he have left the monasteries alone or did he have his eye on their great wealth anyway?

The problem with research is that you need to do it otherwise you’re in trouble; but the more you start asking questions, the more complicated everything becomes and you can end up in trouble anyway.

But ain’t that true of life in general?