The Reeve's Tale

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The last clouds of yesterday’s rain were no more than high white wisps across the summer-vaulted sky, tattered out and carried away on a warm west wind that bid to hold fair for the next few days and the weather with it, perfect for the haying that needed to be done before St. Peter and Paul. Seated on the bench under the squat-trunked oak at the church-end of the village green, Simon Perryn let the satisfaction of that almost-certainty sink deep into him along with the day’s June warmth.

If all held as it was, there’d finally be a harvest worth the name this year, after three years of rain and cold and more of the crops rotting in the fields than ripened. It had been a famine winter this last year, with everything brought near to the bone; but not so near as it would have gone if the nuns had not done their part, somehow managing to buy rye from somewhere the harvests hadn’t been as bad and sharing it out with the village, and even then word was that they had been living on the hunger side of things, too.

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