Ahead of the Tide: To Calais, in Ordinary Time

To Calais in Ordinary Time by James Meek

Cannongate

Pp. 389

Mixing elements of The Canterbury Tales and Shakespearean comedy, this story takes place in South-West England in 1348 as a group of bowmen (led by a man called Hayne) travel through the country from Outen Green in Gloucestershire to Calais to fight the French, as the plague is advancing steadily towards them. As the novel was published in 2019 all the reviewers drew contemporary parallels with Brexit and the existentialist threat of the climate crisis, but anyone now would automatically think of the Covid pandemic.

The novel is narrated from three different people’s perspectives, all with a clearly different voice. Will Quate is a serf who is bound to work the land of a nobleman, and he is betrothed to local beauty, Ness, but he sees a better future in proving himself an archer and buying his freedom through his service. The Lady Bernadine is the daughter of the aforementioned nobleman and betrothed to his friend in a deal done between them which favours the old men and not their promised daughters. Seduced by romantic notions inspired by a French novel, Le Roman de La Rose, she believes herself in love with a young knight, Laurence Haket who happens to be the owner of the troop of archers. Lastly, Thomas Pitkerro is a proctor or clerical administrator from Avignon on secondment to Malmesbury Abbey, who just wants to go home. He provides a record of the journey and acts as a substitute priest to the travellers.

The bowmen are earthy and brutal: with the exception of Quate, who has joined them later, they are rough men who kill, kidnap and rape. There are stories of fights and people being put in the stocks; there are set pieces of violent battles and startling frank sex scenes. Lady Bernadine thinks she is in love with Laurence Haket, but he has failed in her ideas of courtly love and has got a country woman, Ness, pregnant. While she steals away from her father, she disguises herself as Madlen, who is pretending to be Lady Bernadine, but Madlen is actually Hab – a rough young serf, pretending to be his sister, Madlen, wearing a dress he stole from Bernadine. Will Quate has agreed to marry Ness, but he falls for Madlen, while knowing she is an incarnation of Hab. It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world indeed; one could almost call that a Shakespearean plot.

Some of the etymology is intriguing in itself: a river full of fish is ‘fishous’; once a woman is pregnant, she becomes the responsibility of the man who impregnated her – she must marry him and become his burden/ burd/ bird. The language is part French and part old English: the common-folk do not understand the words of the nobles and vice versa. The adventures and exploits will end at the sea, but for some, it ended when they left their village. “Only in Merioneth are there true things. Only there is the world true and forever. Here, or in France, everything is a tale. All shifts. Everything haps once, no more, and then it’s gone, out-take that some bard like me minds it.” If stories aren’t remembered, they might as well never have occurred. James Meek suggests that we need a common language to understand them.