There are many ways to write history. In fact, no two people will tell a complicated story in the same way, since no two people have the same life experience, the same information, the same attitudes. In the middle of the fourteenth century, 75 million people, more than a third of the population of Europe, died in a plague we call The Black Death. How does one write about such a tragedy? Mostly with an attempt at insight--and a liking for people. If you don't like people, why bother writing about the death of so many?
The British historian John Hatcher, a specialist in the Middle Ages, has both insight and a liking for people, and what he has done in his new book is provide an unusual rendition of a frightful time. Most historians who write about the Middle Ages write about the Church, the kings, the nobles, the squabbles over land, with maybe a few melodramatic chapters about the Crusades. Instead, John Hatcher gives us a riveting account of five years--between 1345 and 1350--in a small village in England, five years in a time of horror.
It's indeed a horror story, an archetypical horror story that was part of a thousand years of misery. The Black Death of the Middle Ages is traditionally considered to have been an outbreak of the bubonic plague, a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the disease spread by fleas carried by animals, especially by the black rat. In recent years, some epidemiologists have argued that the disease may instead have been a viral hemorrhagic fever. But whatever the actual pathogen, the magnitude of the pandemic depended more on human political and social conditions than on viral or bacterial biology. Some people like to think of the Middle Ages as a glorious tranquil time of castles, knights, pretty ladies, and lovely pastoral images with the strings of a lute plucked in the background. Maybe a more accurate view is that the European Middle Ages comprised a thousand years of theocracy, superstition, illiteracy, ignorance, food and water contaminated by sewage, common infanticide, short lifespan, and both nobles and peasants marked by various skin diseases caused by destructive personal hygiene. There's a reason why the time is called The Dark Ages. The "dark" does not refer to candlelight, it refers to ignorance--really an enforced ignorance, the enforced ignorance necessary to maintain the autocratic power of a theocracy. With institutionalized ignorance, fleas on the backs of rats can kill 75 million people in a few 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.
John Hatcher. (2008; paperback 2009). The Black Death: A Personal History. New York: Da Capo Press. 318pp. $16.00.