Havoc in Its Third Year

Author's Note In early seventeenth-century England -- the time and place of this novel -- men of property were gripped by fears. They feared enemies without and within. Massing at the gates were the fanatical, brainwashed followers of the pope and the Catholic armies of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire determined to extinguish their liberties, religion, heritage and institutions -- what today we would call their very way of life. Since peaceful coexistence was unthinkable, there had to be wars, and when there were not wars, there was the inevitability of such. Vigilance was paramount; there were spies, traitors and fifth columnists among the very highest of the land and among the lowest, biding their time, waiting for the opportunity to strike.England's external enemies greatly benefited from the lamentable condition into which the country had been allowed to sink. At least so the godly believed. Looking balefully about, they saw the poor living idle, morally suspect, semicriminal lives; women raising bastard children on the parish; disrespectful youths and apprentices shirking work and challenging authority. They viewed with a mixture of alarm and disgust the landless laborers and masterless men, mixed with impoverished Irish, Gypsies and other incomers and foreigners, who wandered in vagrant gangs through their towns and villages begging for food, searching for shelter. They were outraged by the law's failure to control thieves and robbers or punish wrongdoers with the severity their crimes merited. They wanted things settled and known.For this new leaders were required, not the jumped-up, scandal-prone small men so indifferent to the breakdown of society and its values. And, in towns and parishes up and down the country, new men did indeed emerge as magistrates, mayors and aldermen, masters and governors. Inspired by Scripture, with a burning vision of a just, godly, disciplined community, they determined to uphold the law, reform the manners and habits of the poor, protect true religion, and maintain orthodoxy in thought and deed. They were often sincere, energetic and compassionate; they were also intolerant and merciless (their principles demanded no less). Their ideal was uniformity, and they brought to their great project fearsome dedication.What follows is a fictionalized imagining of one such experiment in the remodeling of a community in the north of England in the early 1630s. I have seen no evidence to support the assertion that when history repeats itself it does so as farce. Tragedy, it seems, comes round again and again. Copyright 2004 by Easter Productions Ltd. Chapter One When the women found milk in her breasts, and other secret feminine tokens, Scaife, the constable's man, an archdolt, was dispatched across the windswept moors and icy mountains to fetch Mr. John Brigge, coroner in the wapentakes of Agbrigg and Morley.Brigge was reluctant to answer the constable's summons. His wife was pregnant, she was bleeding, and the neighbors and gossips had been called. But the law is the law, duty is duty, and a man defrauds his own name if he but once neglects his office. And this was Brigge's office, his calling. The coroner went wherever there was a sudden or unnatural death, wherever there was a body to view.A body, for his purposes, might be no more than a jawbone and a finger, or some parcels of rancid black meat worried up by the dogs. It might be a young man gored by a bull, his bowels hurled out, or a gummy old crone brought by despair to a rope fastened from the timbers of a barn. Or it might be, as it was in this case, a birth-smothered infant.Brigge lived with signs and saints; they were everywhere in his life. To his mind nothing in the world was without signification: dreams were portents, phantoms real, and only a fool believed in such a thing as chance. He could not but note the naBennett, Ronan is the author of 'Havoc in Its Third Year', published 2004 under ISBN 9780743258562 and ISBN 0743258568.