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Today, I am chatting with Carolyn Hughes about Fortune’s Wheel, the first novel in her Meonbridge Chronicles.
Set in the aftermath of the Black Death, Fortune’s Wheel explores what happens when a community devastated by loss must begin to rebuild. But this is also a time of change. Old certainties are being challenged, surviving workers are discovering that their labour has greater value, and the established social order is beginning to shift.
Carolyn joins me to talk about the inspiration behind Meonbridge, the lives of ordinary people in fourteenth-century England, giving medieval women a voice, and how a novel that began as part of her Creative Writing Masters ultimately grew into an entire series.
But first, let's check out Fortune’s Wheel
Publisher: Riverdown Books
Page Length: 324
Genre: Historical Fiction
Fortune's Wheel begins in June 1349, after the Black Death has passed through Meonbridge rather than during the plague itself. What inspired you to focus on what happened after the devastation and the enormous challenge of rebuilding a community?
I’ve always been interested in social history, how ordinary people in particular are affected by societal change. And the change wrought by the Black Death was huge: maybe as many as half of Meonbridge’s population could have died. I learned that Hampshire suffered greatly from plague deaths, and of course losing so many people in a community where everyone really did know each other, and worked side by side day in day out, would have had enormous emotional impact on those left behind, as well as a practical and an economic one. And the event did mark the beginning of a change for the better for working people: the feudal system, which was already faltering, was essentially swept away; working people began to have more control over their lives and were able to demand higher wages and better conditions. But of course, the upheaval affected the gentry too: the old world was changing and they didn’t like it. It’s an interesting period of history, and I thought it would be fascinating to explore how people of every stratum of society dealt with the problems.
Meonbridge is a fictional Hampshire manor, but it feels firmly rooted in the medieval landscape. Having spent much of your life in Hampshire, how did your knowledge of the county influence the creation of the village and its surrounding countryside?
Many of the villages in this area (the Meon Valley) have medieval beginnings, and medieval buildings, so it’s not too hard to imagine them as they were in the fourteenth century. Quite how the geography of Meonbridge developed in my mind I honestly can’t remember. But I do know it’s changed a couple of times over the ten years or so that I’ve been writing my Meonbridge Chronicles, because I have three maps, drawnn over the years to help me locate characters’ homes and the church and the various other features of the village. Having lived in this area for a long time, I do know broadly, from simple observation, how the villages are positioned in relation to the river Meon and the downland (called Riverdown in my books). I used that knowledge to create a plan for Meonbridge, although I think I had to tweak it a couple of times when a storyline meant my original plan didn’t quite work! Anyway, Meonbridge and its relationship to the countryside around are now reasonably settled in my mind, and I find I can visualise it quite clearly.
The loss of so much of the population gives surviving workers something they have rarely possessed before—greater bargaining power. What fascinated you about this shift in the relationship between medieval landowners and their tenants?
That newly achieved bargaining power caused considerable social disorder, with unwelcome change for the landowners and improving conditions for ordinary working people. And also, specifically, for women, who did to some extent enjoy a degree more freedom, though what they gained wasn’t to last beyond a century or so. Conflict is, I think, the backbone of thought-provoking fiction, and I thought the inevitable struggle between the rulers and the ruled in Meonbridge, and indeed between the men and the women, which is the basis of Fortune's Wheel’s story, would probably make for an intriguing and potentially stimulating plotline.
Alice, Eleanor, and Margaret occupy very different positions within Meonbridge society, yet it is ultimately the women who step forward when the men cannot resolve the growing conflict. Why did you choose to place these three women at the heart of the story?
When I first started writing Fortune’s Wheel, I knew that my main characters would be women, as the lives of women, and especially women on the lower rungs of society, were rarely documented in history. I wanted, as do many other, especially female, writers, to “give women a voice”. At the time, it did just seem the natural thing to do to put them at the heart of the story, especially as I’d learned that the “social upheaval” of the time did extend to women having a bit more control over their own lives.
The novel explores grief on both an individual and community level. How did you approach portraying people who have endured extraordinary loss but must nevertheless continue working, raising families, and rebuilding their lives?
To be honest, I’m not sure I know the answer to this one. I certainly haven’t experienced any such devastating loss myself, so I’m not writing from personal experience. I’ve had to do what novelists do with all manner of unknowable situations to which they subject their characters: just try to imagine myself into their shoes, envisaging their responses to events, the conversations they might have had, how their emotions might have been impacted and their psyches potentially harmed, as they continued to, metaphorically and literally, put one foot in front of the other day after day. I suppose that, despite my own lack of “disaster” experience, I do try to comprehend how modern-day people also meet the challenges of the aftermath of catastrophes. The practicalities are different in detail but the essence of endurance is surely much the same, and I imagine too that the emotional impacts would be similar, even if medieval people did have a different perspective on the causes of disaster, tending to ascribe every disaster, be it the loss of a child, the failure of the butter to churn, or devastating plague, either to God’s will or the Devil’s work.
Your original inspiration for writing historical fiction came from rediscovering a handwritten medieval novel you had begun in your twenties. How much of that early idea survived when Fortune's Wheel eventually began to take shape?
To be honest, none of it! Apart from the fact that the novel was set in a rural community and in the fourteenth century, none of the plotline, such as it was, carried through into Fortune’s Wheel. But the location and the timeline were enough to set me thinking that I wanted to learn more about the medieval period, and it was that background reading that led me to the plague and the turmoil of its aftermath…
Everyday life is enormously important in Fortune's Wheel, from work and family relationships to the obligations binding lord and tenant. What aspects of ordinary fourteenth-century life did you most enjoy researching and bringing to the page?
I really love discovering the minutiae of life for fourteenth century folk, and I think it is my inclusion of those everyday details in my books that readers so much enjoy. As I’ve written each novel, I’ve tried to visualise the day-to-day aspects of everyone’s lives, and I’ve had to read lots of books – about housing, clothing, food, gardens, farming, artisan skills, religious life, social practices, marriage, childbirth, the law, travel, geography, weather, a myriad different topics! – to discover what I didn’t know, which was a great deal. But I’ve then been careful not to overload my novels with endless detailed descriptions of what I’ve learned, but rather aim to reflect it briefly, almost in passing, so that my characters act and behave naturally in their personal landscape, their everyday lives vivid and relatable to modern readers.
Fortune's Wheel became the beginning of the Meonbridge Chronicles. When you first created Meonbridge, did you already imagine returning to this community for further novels, or did the idea of a continuing chronicle develop as you wrote?
I really don’t think I did initially envisage writing more about Meonbridge after that first book. I wrote Fortune's Wheel as the creative piece for my Masters in Creative Writing, and I’m sure I was thinking of it as a one-off. But, as I recall, by the time I’d finished writing it, I was already hooked on “Meonbridge” and some of the individual characters, and I wanted to find out, and therefore write, much more about them. And thus began The Meonbridge Chronicles…
Looking back now that Meonbridge has grown into a much larger series, what do you think Fortune's Wheel established about the village and its people that has remained at the heart of the chronicles ever since?
Years ago, a reviewer referred to Fortune’s Wheel as somewhat akin to “an everyday story of country folk”, which BBC Radio 4 listeners in the UK might recognise as the erstwhile tagline for The Archers, the long-running (75 years!) radio drama about a fictional village, peopled with characters from all walks of life, who interact with one another, both positively and negatively, grow and develop, get into predicaments and (usually) get out of them one way or another. If you’re an Archers devotee, you might have known some of those characters all your life, and all theirs! You will have seen (heard) them grow and change, behave wisely or otherwise, become old (and, in some cases, die). And I think it’s this close connection that listeners have with the characters that has kept The Archers going for so very long…
I feel it’s much the same with Fortune’s Wheel. I created characters, women, men and children, with well-defined and engaging (or unlikeable but interesting) personalities, and put them into situations that readers could not only enjoy witnessing but also relate to, despite the 700 years’ time gap between then and now. Then, over the course of the series, those characters have developed and changed, children have grown up, new characters have come and gone – just as happens in a real-life community. I believe readers really relish seeing how the ups and downs of life continue to affect people they’ve essentially come to know, almost as friends, which is why a “saga” like The Archers, and like the Meonbridge Chronicles, can be so enjoyable.
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