26 AUGUST 1995, Page 31

An everyday story of 14th- century folk

Gillian Tindall

A FOOL AND HIS MONEY by Ann Wroe Cape, £15.99, pp. 244 Since almost all of us are fated to pass not only from life but from memory, the idea of random, posthumous renown is irresistible. Surely the Washingtons, com- memorated today in a plaque in Durham cathedral as a family 'whose name was to become celebrated in lands to them unknown' would have been gratified? Simi- larly impressed, one hopes, would the peas- ants of Montaillou have been around 1300 had they been able to see what Le Roy Ladurie would make of them in the 1960s. And I like to think that the obscure lives of certain 19th-century French villagers have gained an extra dimension by their docu- mentation in a book of mine.

Ann Wroe's cast of real people belongs in the same Languedoc as Ladurie's (though to the north of the Cathar heresy belt) and a little later in the same century. The difference is that, while Ladurie had the luck to uncover records of an exotic nature, with that amalgam of religion and sex that is the scholar's equivalent of the pot of gold, Wroe's subjects owe their recall from oblivion to their very ordinari- ness. They are simply the citizens, stone- masons, cloth-merchants, butchers, lawyers, priests, sergeants and local busybodies, who happened to be alive in Rodez in 1370. They were witnesses to the finding of an actual pot of gold in a blocked house- drain, and to the subsequent dispute over its ownership.

By the operation of time and chance the records of Rodez have been better pre- served than those of many towns; by chance of another kind Wroe was casting round for a suitable subject for a doctoral thesis when

the academic map of mediaeval France, just like the political map, revealed it as a huge collection of overlapping fiefs in which certain professors already sat in jealous possession.

Balked of anywhere famous and sunnier, she therefore settled on Rodez, high in the Aveyron, a land of sheep runs and 'slate roofs as dark as the rain', a town that had developed by the 14th century into two dis- putatious entities, the City and the Bourg. Each had, in theory, its own churches, mar- kets, rulers, taxes, allegiances and gates that were shut each night, and both (since this was during the Hundred Years War) lived in endemic fear of raids by the English or their henchmen.

It is this densely populated but culturally divided place that is the real subject of this book, and why no street plan, however con- jectural, is included I cannot imagine: the text cries out for it. Wroe is excellent, in a circuitous, deceptively casual way, on the true nature of mediaeval life, a world where religious belief permeated every- thing but where

people stood for Mass, jostling each other, talking with barely lowered voiced, dropping litter. . . kissing the painted images or pray- ing aloud, while small children relieved themselves behind the pillars.

Poor people were buried in the same mar- ket place where cabbages and cheeses were sold and blows readily exchanged. Yet it was also a world in which fine cloth and jewellery played an important part, and in which even a family in pecuniary embar- rassment might cling to such luxurious signs of gentility as large wax candles, spiced wine, white bread and green gowns.

The family in question is that of the Fool of the title, Peyre Marques, owner of a cloth shop, a bossy wife and a grasping son- in-law. His occasional appearances are poignant; as Wroe remarks, his is probably one of the first recorded cases of incipient Alzheimer's. A companion, who had noticed his distress while they were riding on a business trip, testifies:

Peyre burst into tears and told me he was a wretched man . .. he couldn't remember where he had hidden his money because he was only young then.

The trouble is, we never do learn much more about Peyre, or even whose claim to the gold was ratified in the end. The author's attempt to focus her research on a whole society by making him into a key fig- ure is graceful, but does not have enough facts to support it: in consequence, one spends too much of the time trying to keep track of the larger cast and to see where they may fit into Peyre's story before realis- ing that this is not actually the point.

I admire this book, and the stored knowl- edge that has gone into it, but its origins are a bit too obvious and I can't help feel- ing that a more straightforward thematic approach might have been more satis- factory.

Gillian Tindall's Celestine: Voices from a French Village is published by Sinclair Stevenson at £17.99.

'You spoil that granny.'