The Apostate's Tale

Author’s Note

One problem in writing books set in medieval England is that people “know” what the Middle Ages were like, when all too often what they know are the Victorian clichés that were too often based more on nineteenth century narrow-minded arrogance than on facts. So readers find elements and attitudes they think are “modern” in these stories but are not. Take, for example, the idea of disease being contagious-a modern notion the primitives of medieval England could not have had? To the contrary, the words “contagion” and “contagious” date from at least the 1300s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and are probably older. Also “infect” and “infection.” There was even speculation that disease was caused by some manner of animals so small they could not be seen, but their existence was deduced from the observed evidence. A theory of germs before they were ever seen under a microscope.

Likewise, the words “detect” and “investigate” were in use in medieval England, putting paid to the idea sometimes expressed that to have a detective at all in medieval times is inaccurate because nobody understood about detecting then. Admittedly, the word “detective” is centuries later, but there are books extent from at least the 1200s detailing how to go about investigating a crime.

They were not fools in the Middle Ages. They were as varied a people as we are now-some wiser, some more foolish; some more capable, some less; some skilled one way, some skilled another-all living a complex and multi-layered life, not sitting about in squalid ignorance waiting in dull-minded violence for the Renaissance to enlighten the world (which it did not; it merely threw a different light).

In more cheersome vein, there are young Edward’s “boules,” which could not be “marbles,” although they so obviously are. Games with small balls made out of various materials go back into antiquity as well as forward to our own time, but only after machinery was developed in the 1600s that could readily shape stone into small balls did these small balls become known as “marbles.”

The lack of politics in this story may have been noted. There was a major confrontation earlier in this year between the Duke of York and the King’s party, but it did not come to battle, and so little more than rumor and slight report were likely to have reached northern Oxfordshire and then would be quickly lost under the more immediate interests of people’s lives. An advantage, perhaps, to not having twenty-four-hours-a-day streaming news: Without it, people have chance to go more deeply into their own lives, rather than distracting themselves by skimming along the surface of myriad other people’s.

Of course that very narrowness is what would drive someone like Sister Cecely out of a nunnery, while at the same time being what someone like Dame Frevisse values. Two different desires of how to live a life, and Sister Cecely’s tragedy coming because she was forced into the wrong one for her and she could not bear it.