By Christopher Harper
I’ve found an antidote to the swirling morass of bad news and vibes in current affairs. I’ve started reading a variety of books—both fiction and fact—about even worse times in history.
Author Bernard Cornwell provides an incredible array of terrible tales.
I just finished a quartet of books, The Grail Quest, which follows the trials and tribulations of an English archer, Thomas of Hookton, during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France in the 14th Century. In the books, the English are ravaging and raping their way through Frances, including some of the bloodiest battles I have ever read. Two of his women die, and another is blinded. He’s excommunicated from the church as a heretic, and his village has been destroyed.
At the time, the Catholic Church was corrupt and split between Avignon, France, and Rome. The plague has killed one-third of the European population. Much of the population lives under corrupt counts and lords.
In the books, Thomas, the bastard son of an English priest, becomes entangled in the search for the grail, the cup used at the Last Supper. He runs into cardinals and kings who are trying to find the grail. Eventually, he locates the grail and tosses it into the sea because of all the evil it has wrought.
If you think times are tough now, you wouldn’t survived England or France in the 1300s!
Another book, The Wager by David Grann, puts today’s troubles into perspective. The nonfiction book isn’t about a bet but an English ship called by the name.
The ship left England in 1740 on a secret mission to capture a Spanish ship during a war between the two countries. En route, The Wager was wrecked on a remote island off the coast of South America. There, roughly 100 men divide themselves into three groups: those who follow the captain, those who follow the first mate, and those who follow neither. Many sailors die from starvation or extreme weather.
Amazingly, each of the three groups sees some of the followers make it back to civilization, where some are considered mutineers, and the captain is a murderer for shooting one of them without due process.
As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the government convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life and death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.
The final rulings reflect the desire of nearly all governments to put some sort of spin on what events happened and what they mean.
Happy escape to historical reality!
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