Historical Romance Books set during The Black Death

King Edward III

King Edward III, a Plantagenet King, had the misfortune of reigning in 1348, when the black death first arrived in England.

And the first English victim was his own daughter, Princess Joan. Joan was only fourteen years old and had been sent abroad to marry. On the way, she stopped in France, where this new disease was rife.

It was months before her father got the word that his daughter had died, because of the slowness of communication as well as the loss of life in Europe.

The Black Death didn't arrive in England until the summer of 1348 and the first case here was in Dorset. It rapidly spread throughout the country, killing whole villages and towns, and it is said there were corpses piled up or just lying where they fell, as no one was left alive to bury them.

There are historical romance books set during this terrifying period in history or simply time travel books. One of my favourites has always been The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. It is also available in Audible.

When I first read that book, I could not drag myself away from it and was so deflated when I finished, I started again. Since then I have read it again and although still intriguing, looking back from 2022, I'm afraid Connie had little imagination about the future.

The story takes place in two eras, 1348 and (from memory) 2048. An Oxford University historian goes back in time to explore what she thinks is 1328. But the technician who sent her there was ill himself and made a mistake. She arrives with the same illness and by the time she realises she is in the middle of the black death, 20 years later, a lot of the people who have helped her are already contracting the disease.

The problem is, there is also a virus spreading throughout the city of Oxford in her own time and they have no way of getting their historian back.

My main problem with the story nowadays is that they were all sitting round in the twenty-first century hospital waiting room, taking turns to use the pay phone. Connie did not visualise mobile phones, but leaving that aside, it is still a great book. Oh, and nobody had embroidery scissors in 1348.

Isn't he a cheerful chappy? Imagine feeling really, really ill, black boils spreading over your body, fingers turning black, then he turns up. Hardly likely to make you feel better, is he?

However, the plague mask was not invented during the black death of 1348, but for the great plague of London in 1665. And it wasn't designed to resemble a bird's beak at all, it just turned out that way.

The theory was that a posy of strong smelling flowers held under the nose would prevent the plague germ from attacking. So, these plague doctors (and I use the word 'doctors' loosely) designed the mask to carry the flowers in the nose bit.

It turned out looking like a giant bird of prey and the flowers did no good anyway.

In the fourteenth century, most disasters were blamed on either witches or God. Or Jews.

It was believed that God had a hand in every part of everyone's life and it was compulsory to attend mass regularly, often three or four times a day, no matter what else they were doing.

When the plague first struck, the people would turn to whatever poor soul arrived in the village or town at the same time. Must be his fault. Next, it would be the Jews.

Throughout history, the Jews have been blamed for many disasters and shamefully, that was still going on less than eighty years ago in the form of the Holocaust.

The Jews were blamed for the black death; after all, they didn't go to church and they had strange religious practices (bathing after childbirth, for instance) so God must be angry about them.

Failing the Jews, one could always find some poor old woman who lived alone, perhaps was a herbalist, and if she also had a cat, well, she must be a witch; it must be her fault.

During the recent Covid outbreak, somebody who was supposed to be intelligent declared that the churches hadn't been closed since the black death. Obviously, not a historian. The one place they all congregated, was the local church.

That was where they went to pray, to ask God for forgiveness for whatever imaginary sins they had committed to bring this awful punishment down on themselves. And a lot of the time, they died there.

Then there were the flagellants, the monks who went about the country with the back of their habits torn down, whipping themselves with nasty looking instruments with metal balls on the end of each string of leather.

They had this idea that punishing the body would save the soul. In many cults they still do, wearing hair shirts and all sorts of other barbaric practices.

We have all recently suffered our own plague, in the form of Covid 19 and while it was a tremendous upheaval to our lives and our economy, not to mention our children's education, we did have the medical knowledge to attempt a restriction on how fast it spread.

We also had the ability to develop a vaccine which has saved many from suffering quite so badly as we would have done.

Many were not so lucky and died of the virus before the vaccine was available. I did meet someone who told me she didn't believe it was real, that the government had made it up. Though what possible motive they would have I cannot imagine.

I expect there were people in the fourteenth century who had similar ideas. If they knew no one who had the disease, then it could not be real.

Covid has not been so dirty or so fast as the black death, which we now accept was bubonic plague, although there are some scientists who question that. There were three different diseases associated with it: bubonic plague, where the sufferer developed hideous black boils beneath their armpits and in their groins; Pneumonic plague, which attacked the lungs and septicaemic plague, which poisoned the blood.

It was said that sufferers would have breakfast with their families and supper with the Devil.

Historical Romance Books set during the Black Death

I have four books set around the Black Death of 1348. Pestilence is a trilogy of three books, separate stories with characters who merge, and The Secret of Ainsley Gate, a standalone novel.

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