A Summer of Discontent

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The people who had the misfortune to live in the tiny Fenland village of Colne led miserable lives. Their homes were little more than hovels, with walls of woven hazel twigs that had been plastered over with mud from the nearby river. The crude thatching on the roofs leaked, allowing water to pool on the beaten-earth floors and to deposit irregular and unpleasant drips on the huts’ inhabitants. Winter rain and biting winds had stripped away some of the walls’ mud, so that Ralph could see the orange flicker of a hearth fire through them in the darkness. He shifted his position, uncomfortable after the long wait in the frigid chill of a February night. In one of the houses, a dog started to bark. Its yaps were half-hearted, as though it, like its owners, was too dispirited to care much about someone lurking suspiciously in the shadows outside.

Ralph huddled more deeply into his cloak, grateful that he worked for a man who provided clothes that kept him warm through the worst of winter and boots that were equal to wading through the thick, sucking muck of the country’s roads. The same could not be said of the people who lived in the cottages he watched. These were villeins, bound by law for their entire lives to the estates of Lady Blanche de Wake. If their own crops failed and they had not stored enough food for the winter, then they would starve. Blanche was not obliged to help them, and they were not permitted to leave their vermin-infested homes to seek a better life elsewhere. Ralph sniffed softly, thinking that what he was about to do might even help the poor wretches in their cramped, stinking huts, shivering near meagre fires lit with stolen wood.

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