I began my review of The Bastard's Tale eighteen months ago with the following words: This is not Dame Frevisse in village detective (medieval Miss Marple) mode but out on the stage of history playing a pivotal role (albeit reluctantly) in the plotting and counter-plotting that lay behind the visit of Henry VI to Bury St Edmunds in 1447 and the death there of his uncle and heir, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. It was this death (whether or not he was actually murdered, or suffered a stroke as a result of being arrested and man-handled) that in effect triggered the civil war (the War of the Roses) which devastated England for the next forty years and brought to an end the Plantagenet dynasty and the medieval world (at least as far as England is concerned).
This is another such novel, in which the plot, the murder, is intimately bound up with the political situation.
It is now the summer of 1450, three years closer to the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, and Jack Cade and his band of rebels are marching on London from Kent. The people of London feel safe enough, they can close the bridges and the river will protect the city, but then they hear that more rebels are approaching London - from Essex this time, and between London and Essex there is no river, no means of defence.
These rebels are not like the rebels of 1381, when Richard III was a boy, they are more in the nature of protesters demonstrating against the corrupt and ineffectual government of Henry VI and the Duke of Suffolk who has for years been governing in Henry's name.
What is more, the rebels have the sympathy of many middle-class merchants, and of Parliament, which has already indicted Suffolk; indeed, he only escapes the executioner's axe because the king sentences him to five years in exile before he can be brought to trial. However, this does not save his life, for his ship is attacked and sunk during the crossing to France.
Now Dame Frevisse is in London, the unwilling emissary of her cousin, Suffolk's widow. She has to collect, then deliver to her cousin, a large sum in gold coins that has been brought in from somewhere on the Continent. But Frevisse soon discovers that this gold has been smuggled in by a Jew - which is strange, because for years no Jew has been permitted to enter England, on pain of death. Then a grisly, pseudo-ritualisitic murder is committed, and a mad Dominican friar immediately blames the Jews for it.
This is a cue for another glimpse of Frevisse's fascinating background and childhood. "Heresy must not be allowed to thrive, destroying souls," all right, but Frevisse in her childhood spent wandering with her parents had seen a little of the Inquisition's work. [...] 'The death-wielders' numbers are growing,' her father had said once, when the small band of players with whom he and her mother and she were presently travelling were sheltering through a rainy night in a barn somewhere in France, having left a town by one gateway as the Inquisition in the form of five Dominican friars rode in through another. Frevisse still remembered the firelight on tired faces, the rustle of rain on the roof, the warmth of her mother's arms around her. Remembered what her father had said because the word 'death-wielders' had stayed with her.
But the murder and who might have committed it are almost forgotten when, that evening, Jack Cade and his rebels succeed in crossing the bridges and the city finds itself under attack.
Considered simply as a kind of documentary - life in London during the Jack Cade rebellion, with the added bonus of a graphic portrayal of the situation of Jews in England in the 15th century - the book is superb; it is also one of Margaret Frazer's best murder mysteries.
JM
