My Bloge of Yearnings of Days Past

Been thinking a lot about the 1340s
by Hanselman
June 1361 - 11:04 PM
Temperament: melancholic

Hail and well met!

Sorry about the delay in my update. I have been under the weather for the past few weeks nursing a witch's ache within both my shanks. The priest has seen to my needs and a knifewife has opened cuts to bleed my shanks into a pail and I believe they are better. I just haven't had the energy to write a bloge post. Been mostly sleeping and laying upon a soiled blanket picking lice from my hair. This has given me far too much time to think about things. As I approach my golden years - 26 and 27 - I recall with great fondness the days of my youth.

Have you ever thought back to those simpler times of 1348 to 1353?

I think first I recall the songs of this period. Compared to the music this day they were so much better. Who can listen to these children with their instruments? When I was young a man would stand in the road and wail his dirge to the sky. Can you recall "Bones for the Scotsman" or "Sores on My Cheeks"? No, because each man made his own song and recalled no others and none were written in some fancy book. But we knew how to sing well.

I also recall the women of the time and how they dressed. They didn't go for this modern perfumery. They would wallow in mud and pig slop with the hair matted to their scalps and would sell you their whore-laid child for a copper coin. In the barn where a madman taught me the name of all the clouds one of my fellow classmates was named Idetha Harrowwinch and I will never forget the day she showed me and the other lads what was hid under that part of a sack she shared with her sisters.

Of course I'd seen it on my mother when she was laying down with the men from Burgundy that sacked our village and chopped off the hands of all the men, but never on a girl my age. Of course I also remember that day because it was the day Idetha was crushed beneath a wagon.

The food. Oh, brothers, the food. Let me tell you there were so many more worms on our bread in that day. My mother made this incredible stone-hard bread that would cut apart your gums and fill your mouth with blood. Truth be told, some days I will run my fingernail across the toothless sockets in my mouth and swallow stones I find to recreate this memory. Do you remember the pies old Ulbecht used to place on his windowsill? We would stick our fingers into them when he wasn't looking and this is how Ulbecht caught plague from little Vincenzo the Italian who suppurated into the custard and lamb innards pie. My favorite meal was my grandmother's specialty. She'd lure cats into her house with bits of fish and then drown them in sacks and serve them boiled and served in a trough over dandelion leaves. I can still taste it!