Although both sides executed prisoners without compunction, the Turks saved important nobles, as was the practice, for ransom. Even though challenges to papal supremacy were coming and going throughout the century, the Church occupied such a central part in everyone’s life, that there was always high respect/obedience with regards to all religious matters, especially since the Church was the “only institution” to offer salvation, and it also “affirmed the man’s life on earth” [1978: 34].

In the chapter entitled 'The Worms of the Earth Against the Lions' I was just about to cheer wholeheartedly for the weavers of Ghent until I read of the way they in turn oppressed the lower class fullers; and my sympathy was with commoners of Anjou demanding tax relief until "In a frenzy of triumph and unspent wrath, the people rushed to rob and assault the Jews, the one section of society upon whom the poor could safely vent their aggression. There was the aforementioned Black Death – the bubonic plague – that caused pus-and-blood-filled buboes (inflamed lymph nodes) to appear on the groin, neck, and armpit.I am going to try to keep this review short, maybe a reaction to having just completed Tuchman's extensive opus. Christians lost faith in the Church as priests too hid in fear or charged exorbitant fees to perform last rites. He had had one temperamental and extravagant wife eight years his senior, and a second approximately thirty years his junior. The 14th century was a time of innovative and sometimes bizarre religious practices, prompted in part by the horrors of plague and wars but also by the Papal schism. Alongside him in the fields the peasant woman binds sheaves wearing a skirt caught up at the belt to free her legs and a cloth head-covering instead of a hat.

This made her narrative often read like an exciting story or myth set at this specified time, rather than this broad historic narrative of the Middle Ages. Her culminating chapters are some of her best, and it doesn't even matter that the people and events she's describing are so old and of so little relevance to your daily life that you will probably never hear them mentioned again, not even on Jeopardy. So while the Edwardian Era War and the Caroline War are depicted in complete detail as well as related battles with the Bretons, battles in Italy, in Spain, in Belgium and finally in Bulgaria (contemporary country names used), only a quick summary of the Lancastrian War is given. For the aborted 1348 French invasion of England, the French packed a vast prefab camp with numbered panels. Indeed, reading about 14th century economic upheaval one is reminded of Karl Marx’s scathing observations four hundred years later.I personally found the review of the plague to be fascinating and macabre in equal measure, and the tale of devastation is well told. Drawing heavily on Froissart's Chronicles, Tuchman recounts the histories of the Hundred Years' War, the Black Plague, the Papal Schism, pillaging mercenaries, anti-Semitism, popular revolts including the Jacquerie in France, the liberation of Switzerland, the Battle of the Golden Spurs, and various peasant uprisings. In his book written in 1387, The Tree of Battles, he asked “Whether this world can by nature be without conflict and at peace? I hadn’t studied the 14th century at all before reading Tuchman, but that was part of the charm the book: it was look into a world that was so thoroughly bizarre that I couldn’t not interested by it. The status of nobility was in “flux”, and the modern state, as we know it, did not yet exist: there was “the vassal-to-lord relationship and not citizen-to-state” [1978: 5].

Both England and France were ruled by minors and prey to factions, but the seeds of effective rebellion and reform would lie dormant for many decades more. Now, as a way of stopping plague this is probably not the most obvious or the most effective treatment, and I guess we all know without reading this book that it actually helped to spread the disease. Today, as I finished off the last hundred pages, I found myself reading long passages aloud, the way you do when you read Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the first time, or some other uncannily good novelist.About only thing I knew about the 14th century when I started this book was that this was when the bubonic plague spread across Europe from Asia and I only knew this because I’ve read Connie Willis’ superb Doomsday Book in which a time-traveling historian gets stuck in 1348. And despite the many sorrows of the 14th Century, Tuchman is keen to remind us – at several points in her story – that for most people, life went on as usual. For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.