7 Quotes by Juliet Barker

The first duty of an Author is --- I conceive --- a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature; his second, such a conscientious study of Art as shall enable him to interpret eloquently and effectively the oracles delivered by those two great deities.--- Charlotte Bronte

Aquitaine, or Gascony as the English preferred to call it, was actually a duchy subject to the French crown which had been inherited by English kings after the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II. Its status had long been a source of dispute and conflict between the two kingdoms, leading ultimately to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War in 1337.

If England was first and foremost a trading nation this was because its temperate climate and fertile soils, particularly in the south and east, allowed it to produce a surplus to sell.

Something like one in thirty men in England in 1377 was either a member of a religious order or a fully ordained clergyman.

The fourteenth century saw a transformation in the diet of the English lower classes from one composed mainly of cheap cereals, beans and pulses, with coarse black bread (made from rye or barley) and the occasional flitch of bacon to one with a high proportion of meat, particularly beef and mutton, and bread made from wheat.

As a result of the pandemic the population of England, which had probably peaked at around five million in the first half of the fourteenth century, suddenly plummeted by between a third and a half. What is more, further outbreaks in 1361–2, 1369 and 1374–5, though not as severe in their mortality, prevented any recovery in population levels, which remained stagnant at between two and three million from the mid-fourteenth century until the end of the fifteenth.

The idea that medieval people rarely washed is a nineteenth-century fallacy. Every courtesy book stressed the need to wash one's hands and face daily and it was also customary to wash the hands before eating: guests might be offered water scented with garden herbs or flowers or even, in the wealthiest households, with perfume imported from the east.