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Debt Price

HISTORICAL NOTE

Dusk Peterson

Illustrated by H. Rose Melenche

[This note includes minor spoilers for "Debt Price."]

Modern films of sixteenth-century Europe often emphasize the terrible inhumanity to humanity that occurred at this time, with guilty and innocent alike being cast into prison and, in some cases, "suffering," the term at that time for execution.

But people of the pre-modern era may have had more pressing matters on their mind than transitory human battles. A writer in medieval England eloquently describes the effects in 1315 of too much rain:

The dearth began in the month of May and lasted until the feast of the nativity of the Virgin [September 8]. The summer rains were so heavy that grain could not ripen. It could hardly be gathered and used to bake bread down to the said feast day unless it was first put in vessels to dry. Around the end of autumn the dearth was mitigated in part, but toward Christmas it became as bad as before. Bread did not have its usual nourishing power and strength because the grain was not nourished by the warmth of summer sunshine. Hence those who ate it, even in large quantities, were hungry again after a little while. There can be no doubt that the poor wasted away when even the rich were constantly hungry. . . .

Four pennies worth of coarse bread was not enough to feed a common man for one day. The usual kinds of meat, suitable for eating, were too scarce; horse meat was precious; plump dogs were stolen. And, according to many reports, men and women in many places secretly ate their own children.

—Johannes de Trokelowe, Annates (longer quotation and credit)

H. Rose Melenche's rendering of the story's estate house is based upon Hardwick Hall, a sixteenth-century estate house that is described in an old jingle as being "more glass than wall."

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Illustration copyright © 2002 H. Rose Melenche. All rights reserved.

This text was originally published at duskpeterson.com as part of the series Master/Other. Copyright © 2002-2003, 2008 Dusk Peterson. Some rights reserved. The text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0). You may freely print, post, e-mail, share, or otherwise distribute the text for noncommercial purposes, provided that you include this paragraph. The author's policies on derivative works and fan works are available online (duskpeterson.com/copyright.htm).