Excerpt–
England, summer, 1326
IT WAS A golden summer. Everywhere they travelled in England, people remarked on it. At every village and town, people paused from their work to stand and bask in the sun, as if they were afraid that it would wink out in the next moment. “Forty years of wet misery had we,” one Devonshire farmer told them. His broad face was creased with an almost personal resentment. “Bad harvests. No harvests. People eating each other they be so hungry. The winter snow bury the county for months, and the summers the rain come down like it be poured out of a pitcher that never emptied.” He closed his eyes and raised his face again to the sunshine. “This be back now. For a while now, maybe. We be enjoying it while we can.”
The halcyon weather was of far more interest than the royal to-ing and fro-ing across the Channel and the countryside, but one thing was abundantly clear across all levels of society. The English felt they had been taxed beyond endurance, and what was worse, to no purpose. Such careful inquiries as to more profitable markets for wool that Jaufre felt safe enough to make were greeted everywhere with interest, if not outright enthusiasm. Further, many of the people he spoke to lay blame for a generation’s worth of drought, flood and famine squarely on the doorstep of the ruling family, whose fraternal disorder since the reign of Edward Longshanks had clearly roused the wrath of God Himself. God had visited His displeasure upon the English with forty years of drought, flood, blizzards and famine, and defeat after defeat in the continual war with the Scots culminating in the shameful battle of Bannockburn. Everyone, it seemed, had a brother or a son or a nephew killed at Bannockburn, and what had they died for, indeed, when ever since the bloody Scots raided the border at their whim?
Dana sez–
Two of the many books I read that helped inform the narrative of Silk and Song were Dan Jones’ The Plantagenets and Brian Fagan’s The Little Ice Age. Edward II and Edward III–yep, pretty much as I wrote ’em. European politics were, ah, fluid, to say the least, and any excuse would do for yet another war or invasion.
Europe was just coming off the 500-years long Medieval Warm Period, during which ice melted far enough north that the Vikings could pillage as far south as Constantinople. Round about 1300, the polar ice built back up and weather returned with a vengeance. Crops failed, people starved, yes, cannibalism was a thing, and, of course, disease was rampant, including, about twenty years from the time of Silk and Song, the Black Plague.
I like to think that since Johanna and Jaufre chose to settle in a relatively out of the way place that they survived something that took out a third of the population of Europe. And that they survived the subsequent overturning of the entire social order, too.
They’re traders. They know how to adapt.
