The 14th century was ‘a bad time for humanity’. In the words of the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman:
If [those years] seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labour for the fields… and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God.
It was a century when the four horsemen of St John’s apocalyptic vision – Death, Famine, War and Conquest – became a miserable band of seven, joined by Taxes, Bad Government and Schism in the Church.
Alison Weir’s latest offering, the third volume of her study of the medieval queens of England, assesses the five women who were married to the four kings who ruled England during this period.
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