10
The accounts of the sickness and deaths of John Chapman and Robert Helpe in this chapter are based on the best fourteenth-century descriptions of the signs, symptoms, and prognoses of the pestilence which was the Black Death, and on modern medical knowledge of the characteristics of bubonic plague and its progression in patients. Given the vast distance in time and expertise between the two sets of sources, they are reassuringly compatible. Gabriele de’ Mussi, a lawyer in Piacenza, wrote in one of the more detailed of surviving descriptions, “So that the conditions, causes, and symptoms of this pestilential disease should be made plain to all, I have decided to set them out in writing. Those of both sexes who were in health, and in no fear of death, were struck by four savage blows to the flesh. First, out of the blue, a kind of chilly stiffness troubled their bodies. They felt a tingling sensation, as if they were being pricked by the points of arrows. The next stage was a fearsome attack which took the form of an extremely hard, solid boil . . . as it grew more solid, its burning heat caused the patients to fall into an acute and putrid fever, with severe headaches. As it intensified, its extreme bitterness could have various effects. In some cases it gave rise to an intolerable stench. In others it brought spitting of blood, for others, swellings near the place from which the corrupt humors had arisen . . . Some people lay as if in a drunken stupor and could not be roused. Behold the swellings, the warning signs sent by the Lord. Some died on the very day the illness took possession of them, others on the next day, others—the majority—between the third and fifth day.”
While some of the symptoms given by de’ Mussi are not unique to plague, their presence in conjunction with each other is highly significant, as are genuine buboes, the large and exquisitely painful swellings of the lymphatic glands. As modern medical texts tell us, the first symptoms of bubonic plague are chills, headache, and backache, restlessness and high fever, followed rapidly by prostration. Within one or two days from the onset, a bubo develops, which is often followed by secondary, smaller swellings elsewhere on the body (see figure 24). Vomiting and delirium are common, as is a strange stench. Death usually follows in a further three to four days. Though de’ Mussi devotes most of his description to symptoms and prognosis that fit the bubonic form of plague very closely, references to “the spitting of blood ” and to death “on the very day the illness took possession” fit well the two other variants, pneumonic and septicemic plague. Fourteenth-century authorities tell us that no one who vomited blood survived, which is the case with untreated pneumonic plague. Victims who are reported as dying suddenly during the Black Death, often within hours of the onset of illness and without exhibiting external signs, could well have been victims of the rarer but equally lethal septicemic variant, in which the plague bacteria pass directly into the bloodstream.
It is probable that it was primarily bubonic plague which ravaged Walsham from early April to early June, killing half the population. If so, it would have been introduced into the village a number of weeks before the human epidemic flared up. The epidemiology of plague indicates that it often took more than two weeks for the enzootic and epizootic phases to run their course, that is, for plague-bearing fleas to infect and then decimate the rat population to such an extent that the fleas could no longer feed. Then a further two weeks for the endemic phase, when the infected rat fleas began biting human hosts, and those human hosts incubated the disease and began to die. From the first sprinkling of human deaths to a full epidemic with multiple deaths might take a further two weeks or even longer. Of course, if human fleas, or the fleas carried on birds and animals other than rats, were also effective transmitters of plague in 1348-1349, the process of dissemination might have been considerably faster.
The cottage of John and Agnes Chapman, which lay in the far east of the parish, was among the first to be struck by the pestilence when it showed its terrible face in Walsham. John was taken sick just after Easter Day, April 12, almost four years to the day since their wedding. It was the second marriage for both of them, their former spouses having died, and Agnes became pregnant soon after the wedding had been blessed. They now had a three-year-old daughter who was also named Agnes. The Chapmans lived in a tiny cottage and cultivated a small field to the rear, which they rented from Edmund de Welles, the lord and lady of the submanor of High Hall. John was in his early fifties, of modest means but well respected, and over the years he had been entrusted with a number of supervisory posts in the village. Agnes, who was significantly younger than her husband, came from a large and modestly prosperous villein family. She was the daughter of Gilbert Helpe, who had died suddenly in spring 1338 at almost the same time as his father. In keeping with the customs of the manor, her four brothers—Robert, John, Gilbert, and Henry—had inherited the eighteen acres her father and grandfather held in Westhorpe, and they farmed it together until the spring of 1347, when Henry sold his share to his brothers and left the manor.
Immediately on hearing that a number of villagers who lived close by had been taken ill with a mysterious affliction, John and Agnes retreated into their cottage. They left it only to tend their animals and crops, and then only when no one else was about, and they were especially careful to keep their daughter always within sight. Despite these precautions, John began to feel unusually weak and listless one late afternoon while pulling up the first crop of weeds, and the next morning he returned unexpectedly early from spreading their cow’s manure onto the vegetables in the croft at the back of their cottage. He complained, with slightly slurred speech, of tiredness and an unusual tingling sensation in his painful arms and legs. Agnes put him to bed, praying that it was simply a heavy cold. But her instincts told her this was unlikely. John had been perfectly well the previous morning, and he had become too weak too quickly, and now he was slipping into a fever and was strangely disoriented. She feared that he had caught the pestilence and would soon die.
Agnes did not sleep much that night, being overcome with fear and disturbed by the tossing, heavy sighing, and sporadic moaning of her husband beside her, as well as the intense heat he radiated. At first light, as he slept, Agnes began to explore for signs of the pestilence. She put her hands gently around John’s neck and thought she felt a slight swelling, and when she touched the inside of the thigh that was pressed against her knee, her fingers traced the contours of a very small but distinct hard mound close to the groin. With that she leaped to her feet, pulled on her clothes and shoes, and ran from the cottage.
Agnes hurried through the early morning mist and was soon banging on the door of the ancient midwife, Juliana Denys, who had helped her when the birth of her daughter became complicated. With calm efficiency the midwife had probed inside Agnes, and when her fingers touched feet rather than a head, she swiftly turned the child in the womb, with the result that she had been born without further stress. Juliana was also a successful healer. For a penny or two she would help the sick with advice and medicines derived from her wide knowledge and extensive collection of herbs and potions, and she happily dispensed cheap charms that worked well against ill fortune or curses. The two women had struck up a form of friendship, so Agnes was surprised when she was refused entry into the cottage. The midwife insisted on speaking through a window, and despite Agnes’s pleas, she could not be persuaded to visit John. Anxious to see Agnes depart, the old woman hurriedly made up a potion with secret ingredients, which she passed through the window in an old clay bowl. A little of this, Juliana instructed, should be fed to John, mixed with his pottage, and also rubbed into his swelling thrice a day. She refused to take any money from Agnes, not wishing to handle it, but as Agnes was leaving she tossed her a polished stone attached to a leather string to wear around her neck at all times. Wishing Agnes and her husband well, Juliana slammed the shutters closed.
When Agnes returned home, she found that John’s condition had worsened. He was extremely agitated and tried to get up and walk, but fell to the floor. Agnes struggled to get him back into bed, but there was no reasoning with him, and he would not respond to her pleadings. Eventually he tired and she managed to get him to bed. Agnes then took the little rough wooden carving of St. Katherine from its place in the alcove near the window and put it under the covers for his protection. She fetched some water to bathe her husband because he was so hot and feverish, and began by mopping his brow and wiping his face, while John clasped her other hand tightly. When she bathed his abdomen, she was relieved to find that the swelling she had felt on the inner part of his right thigh was no more pronounced. But then she was startled to notice a patch of blackened skin close to his right ankle and quickly rubbed it with the potion from the midwife. When Agnes finished, she moved quickly to the corner of the room and grabbed her sleeping daughter from her bed and ran to her eldest brother’s cottage.
When Agnes banged on Robert’s door, it was her brother John’s voice which answered from inside, saying that Robert was unwell and it could be the plague. Now in a state of panic, Agnes ran to the house of John Wodebite, which stood about half a mile away. As the eldest son of wealthy William Wodebite, John had inherited the fine dwelling from his father four years before, and Agnes had often worked for him, as she had for his father, cleaning and cooking and looking after his livestock. John opened the door but did not invite Agnes in, and he quickly waved her back when he heard the reason for her visit. She pleaded with John to care for her daughter for a few days while she nursed her husband. Though fond of Agnes, John was at first very reluctant to agree. But seeing that neither Agnes nor her child appeared to be at all ill, he eventually relented. When Agnes had gone, John waved the little child round to the back of his cottage and ushered her into a small barn. There little Agnes was left to be looked after and fed by his servant girl for the next two days, before she showed by her abundant energy and absence of marks on her skin that she was completely free of the pestilence and was allowed by John into his house.
Agnes walked slowly home, relieved that her daughter was safe. But as she neared her cottage, a dread seized her. She suddenly realized that she had many times looked directly at her husband’s face since he had become ill, completely forgetting that to look into the eyes of a victim was the surest way of catching the pestilence.
As each hour passed, John Chapman’s health deteriorated appreciably (see figure 25). He became increasingly distraught with physical agony and mental terror, and intermittently seemed to be possessed by demons or to have lost his senses. His condition alternated between violent ravings, during which he would rise from his bed and stagger around the cottage, and comatose prostration, during which he seemed to be scarcely breathing. Though the blackened pustule on his ankle did not get much worse, the lump on his inner thigh swelled ominously and became luridly inflamed and exquisitely painful. The medicinal potion was clearly having no effect, nor was the holy water Agnes sprinkled on her husband. The image of St. Katherine she had placed in his bed had been kicked by his restless legs across the room, and Agnes retrieved it and placed it at the base of the bed. Despite her exhaustion and despite the impossibility of avoiding looks from her husband, whose wild eyes often stared at her, Agnes felt no symptoms of illness. Gratefully, she gently rubbed the stone amulet around her neck, which was still protecting her from infection.
Soon after sunrise on the fourth day of John’s illness, Agnes shouted to passersby that her husband was dying and begged them to go to the church and fetch a priest. She also asked her neighbors to call again on the midwife. When neither the priest nor the midwife had arrived by the afternoon, Agnes went the mile or so to the church, which she found deserted except for a single lay helper. He told her that so many people were sick in the parish that the priests were able to respond only to those who were very close to death. Having asked Agnes when John had first fallen sick and what was his present condition, he assured her that a priest would call in good time, well before John’s death.
By the following morning the carbuncle in John’s groin was the size of a duck’s egg, blackened and leaking pus, and John was delirious and only sporadically conscious. As Agnes nursed him through the day, she began to dread the brief periods of consciousness when she had to hold him down as he struggled to rush from the house to throw himself in the river to cool his pain. Once he grabbed a knife intending to slice open his festering lump. By dusk, as John lay exhausted from his struggles and seemingly close to death, Agnes decided to run again to the church, to beg for the priest or one of his chaplains. To her relief she soon encountered Master John on a tired mare trotting slowly along by Cranmer Green, returning, physically and emotionally weary, from visiting the sick, administering the last rites, and arranging funerals. When Agnes stopped him and begged him to come to her husband’s deathbed, he smiled weakly, patted her on the shoulder to comfort her, and then turned his drowsy horse around and gestured for her to lead the way.
The priest found John half conscious, breathing heavily, sweating profusely, and wracked by intense pain. Agnes lifted the cover to show him the angry black and purple swelling in his groin that had grown to the size of an apple, and John nodded gravely. He quickly left the room to unpack his saddle bags and asked Agnes to help carry candles, a crucifix, a Madonna and child, and various boxes and cups to the bedside. Master John paused for a moment breathing heavily and wiped away the sweat trickling down his forehead and into his eyes. As they settled by the bed, he told Agnes that, from his experience, he feared her husband was going to die soon, and he asked her if John had confessed his sins. Agnes shook her head and explained that she had not thought to do this.
“Have you forgotten already the letter from the bishop permitting lay confession in extremis, which I read out in church only a few weeks ago?”
“I remember, but I do not understand. Can it really be true?” she replied.
Master John patted her arm sympathetically. “Then I will hear his confession now,” he said.
Despite Agnes’s repeated attempts at soothing, John remained distracted, failing to respond to any of Master John’s questions and refusing to look at the image of the Madonna placed before his eyes. When asked to kiss the cross, he pushed it violently to one side, almost wrenching it from the priest’s hands. After many attempts to offer a Communion wafer to John’s lips, only a few crumbs were ingested, and those only with Agnes’s assistance, holding his mouth firmly closed until saliva dissolved them. Agnes was in a state of despair at her husband’s inability to confess, and at his sacrilegious violence in the face of death and Master John. He was surely possessed by devils and his soul was bound to be lost if he would not relent and accept Christ’s salvation. But the priest remained calm and tried his best to ignore John’s agitations and occasional blasphemies, while resolutely continuing through each stage of the sacred ritual.
When he had finished, Master John comforted Agnes: “I am sure it is the pestilence and not devils that have taken over your husband’s mind. Deep inside he was struggling to participate.” Then he gestured for Agnes to remove the sheet so that he could anoint John’s body. John screamed with agony and the priest recoiled from the blackened skin and engorged bubo which looked set to burst. He hurriedly dabbed a few droplets of oil on John’s forehead, hands, and ankles, explaining that the amount of oil was not important, and that he had to save as much as possible in case the pestilence spread. Then Master John pronounced, “Into Thy hands O Lord I commend your spirit. You have redeemed John, O Lord, thou God of truth.”
It had been a brief and methodical procedure rather than the elaborate and emotional ritual Agnes had witnessed many times before at the deathbed of loved ones. With apologies for her insolence, she begged Master John to do more. The priest assured her, “I am certain your husband has confessed inwardly. Yet, should he regain his senses, however briefly, you must help him confess further.” He then hurriedly rehearsed with her a few key phrases, but Agnes’s mind was whirling and she stumbled over the words as she repeated them to herself and forgot some of them altogether. When Agnes suggested fetching her brothers to support her and pray for John, the priest shook his head and urged her not to leave her husband for any length of time, but to stay with him so that he could further confess his sins if he was able.
As Master John rode off into the night, his mind was deeply troubled. Almost all the victims of the pestilence that he and his colleagues had so far ministered to had been incapable of responding to the questions put to them, and unable to confess adequately or to express sufficient contrition. In fact, few on their deathbeds had shown sufficient awareness of the rites being performed on their behalf. John vowed that somehow he and his clergy must try to see the sick earlier in the onset of their disease, when they were still conscious and rational. But, he also mused, visits must not be made too early, for confession must take place when close to death, and certainly no one who might recover should knowingly be anointed. Moreover, however vigilant he and his clergy might be, it was the family or neighbors who had to decide when to send for a priest. He determined that his clergy should act on the experience they had accumulated over the years, and had absorbed from their predecessors, rather than on fear of the pernicious progress of this horrible new scourge.
What was happening in Master John’s parish was entirely without precedent. The numbers of dead and dying were already almost unmanageable for the clergy, and yet were rising daily. Yesterday there had been five burials, and these had stretched the resources of the church almost to the limit. A backlog of funerals was building up, to which Master John made a mental note to add John Chapman’s, as so much time was being devoted to the administration of the last rites. Furthermore, there were processions to organize and attend, an abundance of Masses to be sung, and the confessions of the healthy to be heard. And, added to all this, he had been told that morning at the bedside of his most trusted church-warden that the newly ordained assistant who been taken sick a few days ago had died, and that one of his most experienced chaplains had fled to a neighboring parish thought to be free of plague.
Though Master John had promised to tell friends and neighbors of her husband’s impending death, no one called on Agnes during the night. She became increasingly distressed that, in his pain and delirium, her husband had not openly confessed his sins. As dark thoughts whirled around her head, she began to grasp the full awful meaning of the words she had heard many times before: “Death gives no certain respite to departing creatures, but takes them suddenly.” Seared into her mind was the terrifying vision of the fate of the damned painted on the chancel arch of St. Mary’s, which she had seen more than once every week of her life. As a child she had been horrified by the depiction of the damned, for their faces looked just like her family and neighbors. Falling beneath God’s left hand, naked and chained, they were being dragged by tormenting demons and cast wailing and weeping into the huge fetid mouths of monsters or the everlasting fires of Hell. Nor could Agnes keep from recalling words that she had heard many times before about the souls of unshriven sinners being cast into darkness, and from the pulpit Master John had often proclaimed, “Without confession the just man is judged to be graceless, and the sinner is held to be dead.” Her husband had not been a bad man, but she had been well taught that even the smallest sins can stain the soul.
Agnes sat up with John all night, intermittently mumbling prayers and falling into fitful and troubled naps, only to be confronted by a crowd of grinning demons striving with their infernal claws to snatch away her husband’s soul; once she thought she saw them bearing off her beloved daughter as well (see figure 26).
John did not regain his senses, and soon after sunrise he stopped breathing.
Agnes arose and looked vainly around the bare room and peered out of the window and door for the support of friends, family, and neighbors, for herself as well as her dead husband. She lit the candle the priest had sold her and recited the Placebo as best she could. But the words of the prayer, which she had known well since she was twelve, kept slipping from her mind. As she washed John’s body, she was shocked to see that much of his skin was now blotched and blackened, and that there were a number of swellings as well as the carbuncle in his groin. She folded him into a clean sheet, just as she had her former husband, John Cristmasse, after his death. Then she fetched some sticks of wood that she washed and dried, and placed them at the edge of the embers in the hearth and waited till the ends blackened and burned to ash. Taking them up, she allowed them to cool and then carefully traced a cross on the shroud, and smoothed and shaped it with her fingers.
As Agnes was leaving to tell her brothers of John’s death, Margery Wodebite called to offer comfort and a candle. Margery, who lived close by, was renowned as the most devout and intense of parishioners, whose eyes had rained tears of grief at the remembrance of Christ’s Passion at the Easter Mass a few days before, and whose body shook convulsively with emotion at any religious experience. But today she was unusually calm and announced that her well of tears had run dry. Agnes could not help but note that even Margery was taking great care not to go near John’s body, and instead prayed with Agnes from the outer hallway, shaking quietly with fear and apprehension.
“I am sorry that I have taken so long to call on you,” Margery apologized, “but I have been visiting the sick and dying all around High Hall. The pestilence is spreading so quickly around here, and also into the rest of Walsham, that it seems to me as if the end of the world might be coming.”
Margery then reeled off a list of a dozen or more names of people she had visited on their deathbed, and many more than a score who were dying. The dead and sick included some of the richest farmers in the village as well as their servants, the poor, the landless, and the totally indigent.
“Most terrible of all,” Margery said, “is the fate of the children. There are so many young orphans. Even as we speak, I fear there must be young ones who are the only live beings in houses of death. We cannot leave things like this, despite the dangers of infection. Did you know that both the Goche brothers are dead, and one of their wives also, and the other sick? Their five children, all under ten years of age, have been left entirely alone to fend for themselves, for their servant girl has fled. I am doing all I can to help, but I am old and I have to spend a long time each day praying for forgiveness and begging the Blessed Mary and Christ to make sure that God does not forget me or my good works.”
Seeing Agnes in tears, Margery hesitated to confirm that her brother, Robert Helpe, was dying. Instead, she assured her that she had seen her daughter the previous day and that she was in good health, adding that God had seen fit so far to spare the Wodebites from the pestilence. Agnes gratefully accepted Margery’s offer to arrange for John’s funeral when she visited the church for matins that evening.
Agnes was not expecting to meet many people on her walk to her brother’s farm, but as she came to Market Way she noticed in the distance a small group standing outside old William Cranmer’s house on the green. As she drew nearer she saw they were gathered around a funeral cart. Just a week or so before, William’s death would have been major news in the village, and Agnes, although not a close acquaintance, would have joined the procession to St. Mary’s churchyard. But now she just hurried off, worrying about her own safety and the health of her brother. As she walked, Agnes touched the stone amulet around her neck and silently prayed for protection for herself and her daughter and for the soul of her husband. On the rest of the way to Westhorpe she saw only a handful of other people, most in the distance, and those who saw her hurried away before she drew near.
As Agnes approached her brother’s cottage, she heard loud shouting and saw John and his wife, Alice, struggling with Robert near the door. She ran forward and helped restrain him, which was not a difficult task as he was desperately weak. She was told that he had jumped from his bed and run from the house naked, and that after a lengthy search had been found a quarter of a mile away lying in Harteshall Brook. Robert had been sick for four days now, and Agnes recognized that he had the same sickness as her husband and that it was following a similar course. As they looked down on him, lying motionless on the bed and scarcely breathing, Agnes gently suggested that he might be close to death. John agreed, saying that a couple of hours ago Gilbert had gone in search of a priest, but nothing had been heard from him since. Recalling her own desperate experience, Agnes urged John to go and help his brother to find a priest.
John Helpe returned in midafternoon accompanied by one of the laymen Master John had trained to hear confession. Agnes and Alice recognized him as the kind old man who helped clean the church and polish its sacred metalwork. However, they were disappointed to learn that he had brought nothing with him but a vial of holy water and a small painted image of the Madonna and child on an oak board. To their dismay the old man explained that he did not have any of the powers of an ordained priest and was not permitted to administer the last sacraments of Communion and annealing. However, he assured them that he was trained to hear her brother’s confession and would do so in case he died before a priest could come. Then he ushered them from the room. A few minutes later the old man emerged and, after offering some brief words of encouragement, hurriedly departed saying that he had to rush to another sickbed.
In all this time there was no sign of Gilbert, but it was a great relief that a chaplain arrived later that evening, apologizing profusely for his tardiness which he excused by the extraordinary numbers of sick and dying in the parish. By now Robert was close to death in a half-conscious state of delirium and oblivious to all attempts to encourage him to participate in the struggle to guide his soul to salvation. The chaplain stayed only a few minutes, and Robert died shortly afterward.
Agnes, exhausted and tormented by grief at the death of her husband and her brother within a day of each other, insisted on walking back to her cottage in the gathering darkness to pray over her husband’s body and tend her poultry and animals. The news of the rapid spread of the pestilence rekindled her fears for the safety of her daughter, and she worried whether John Wodebite’s household had been infected. As she walked along the lane to her cottage, she expected to find that the elderly couple next door had milked her cow for her, leaving the milk in a wooden bowl by her doorway, as they had often done in the past. But as she drew near she heard the distressed bellowing of the animal and then the desperate cries of the old lady next door, who pleaded for help as her husband was sick and she had become too weak to look after him.
Agnes lowered her head, closed her ears, and mumbled an apology while hurrying past. As she entered her cottage and lit a candle, she shuddered, partly with sobs but partly with fear at the sight of the shrouded body lying across the bed. Agnes gathered the carving of St. Katherine from the bed and reverently placed it in the niche by the window, and lit a tiny fragment of candle on a metal tray. Her heart jumped as the light flickered across St. Katherine’s face. Could it be that her dearest saint was crying? Holding the candle close to the rosy cheek on the left hand side of the carving’s face, Agnes peered closely and saw that there was indeed a tear where there had been none before. She felt it tenderly with her finger. The wood had definitely swelled, round and smooth, under the eye, in the shape of a tiny teardrop. Despite her entreaties to God, St. Katherine had been unable to stop the deaths and now she was crying for the world, and especially for Agnes and her daughter.
Urged by the old lay confessor who visited Robert Helpe’s house again the next day, Agnes and her brothers agreed to combine Robert ’s and John’s funeral service and burial. The old man apologized that their bodies would not be permitted to lie in the church for fear of contagion, a rule which Master John had been forced to institute because so many people had begun to avoid going to pray or hear Mass when there were bodies within. But the verger readily assured them that a full service would be held at the graveside, and many Masses would be said for the souls of the brothers on the day of their burial and for long afterward. However, it would be necessary for both bodies to be picked up from the same cottage. Reluctantly they agreed that the funeral procession should start from Agnes’s home, since that was closer to the church, and John undertook to carry his brother’s body to her cottage early the next morning.
The cart that arrived at Agnes’s cottage to collect the bodies was not the usual clean and polished funeral wagon, for that was in use elsewhere. The cart also lacked the special pall to drape over the bodies, although in its place the carter produced a clean white linen cloth. A dozen or more neighbors and friends gathered with the families of the deceased, and two servers soon arrived, one with a bell and the other with a plain wooden cross, followed by a chaplain new to the village carrying a prayer book. Eventually, some time after the cortege was ready to leave, a small group of shabbily dressed poor folk, a number of whom were not recognizable as locals, turned up to serve as mourners and pallbearers. They did not apologize for their tardiness, and before they would agree to walk beside the cart to St. Mary’s graveyard, carrying candles and wooden crosses and chanting psalms, their spokeswoman demanded an advance payment of three halfpence each, rather than the accustomed two. When Agnes returned to her cottage from the graveyard, she found her cow lying dead in the field behind.
Despite her own cares and grief, Agnes had been leaving her elderly neighbors a bowl of lentil soup at their doorway each morning. But the next morning she found the bowl from the previous day untouched, and she received no answer when she called out to them. A couple of days later, since she did not have her daughter to protect, Agnes joined a handful of mourners to walk to the church behind their coffin cart. Those who attended were shocked to find that among their little group they could compile the names of well over a score of villagers living in the east of the village who were already dead of the pestilence, and another score who were sick with it. While death was scything through her village without mercy, Agnes decided she would quietly tend her sheep, pigs, and poultry, and weed her little plots of beans and corn.