Will Sparrow's Road (18 page)

When I decided to write a book about a child in Elizabethan England who runs away and joins a troupe of "oddities and prodigies” traveling from fair to fair, I knew the child had to be a boy. In the often brutal sixteenth century, a girl on the road would not have long survived. And I did not believe a girl could successfully disguise herself as a boy in a world with so little privacy. So the child had to be a boy—my first major boy character. That took a lot of thinking, research into young male behavior, and input from my editor, but I finally developed a character who seemed to fit. And I set him on the road to the fair.

Many of us have enjoyed recreations of medieval or Renaissance fairs with their costumes, flowery "Milady”- laden language, quaffing mugs, and roasted turkey legs. These fairs, alive with music and dance, archers and knights on horseback, are based on the traditional fairs of medieval and Renaissance England, equally colorful, raucous, and outrageous.

Fairs have a long history in England. There is conjecture that Neolithic sites of 4000–3000 B.C.E. were in fact a sort of fairgrounds for the trading of pelts and primitive tools. Many fairs developed as temporary markets where goods, livestock, and produce were sold or traded, and people traveled, sometimes for many days, to meet those they needed to buy from or sell to.

The number of fairs increased dramatically after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Between 1199 and 1350, more than 1,500 charters or royal decrees were given to lords of the manor or dignitaries of the church, permitting them to stage fairs and markets for the trading of goods and the celebration of feast days.

A fair was usually tied to a specific Christian religious occasion, particularly the anniversary of the dedication of a church. Such fairs might then continue annually, usually on the feast day of the patron saint to whom the church was dedicated, and last from one day to many weeks. This custom was kept up until the reign of Henry VI (1422–1461), by which time a great many fairs were kept on these festivals—for example, at Smith-field in London on St. Bartholomew's day (the famous Bartholomew, or Bartlemas, Fair attended by the diarist Samuel Pepys and dreamed of by Master Tidball). Over the centuries, when the rivers in England froze hard enough to support traffic, frost fairs were celebrated on the ice. During the winter of 1564–65, the Thames River froze, and Londoners could enjoy archery and football and dancing on the ice, vendors' booths, and performances. Even Queen Elizabeth I visited that fair.

Exhibitions at fairs sometimes included what were called oddities or prodigies, displayed in a sort of sideshow. People are often fascinated by anything different or unexpected, and fairs provided plenty of examples: two-headed cows, conjoined pig fetuses, dwarfs and giants and albinos, and creatures such as sea monsters and beasts from foreign lands, many of them as false as Tidball's mermaid.

The seventeenth century was the heyday of prodigies and oddities. James Paris du Plessis produced an early chronicle of these exhibits, an unpublished three-hundred-page book entitled
A Short History of Human Prodigies and Monstrous Births, of Dwarfs, Sleepers, Giants, Strongmen, Hermaphrodites, Numberous Births, and Extreme Old Age, Etc.

The diaries of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) describe yearly visits to St. Bartholomew's Fair, where he saw monkeys dancing on the rope, a goose with four feet and a cock with three, a legless man who danced on his hands, and other oddities.

The oddity Grace Wyse was inspired by the portrait of Antonietta Gonzales (1552–1614) on the cover of
The Marvelous Hairy Girls
by Merry Wiesner-Hanks. Antonietta, her father, and most of her brothers and sisters suffered from hypertrichosis, an extremely rare genetic condition that made them unusually hairy. There have been fifty documented cases worldwide since the sixteenth century. The Gonzales family is probably the most famous because of the number of paintings, books, and medical case histories that feature them. Unlike most people marked with such irregularities, the family was not shunned or mocked; they dressed in ruffs and elaborate jewel-trimmed gowns and were welcome visitors in the courts of Europe, though sometimes treated more like pets than people.

Duchess, the learned pig, is also based on a real individual. In the sixteenth century, Londoners flocked to see "Marocco, the thinking horse,” who, among his other talents, could total figures on dice, count coins, and identify playing cards. If a horse could, could a pig? I wondered. Indeed. A learned pig, taught to respond to commands in such a way that it seemed able to answer questions by picking up cards in its mouth, caused a sensation in London during the 1780s. The pig even had its own song—"The Wonderful Pig.” Sheet music could be bought for only sixpence. In New England in 1798, William Frederick Pinchbeck displayed a "Pig of Knowledge” who could read, spell, tell time, and distinguish ladies from gentlemen. The original learned pigs were followed by other trained pigs, which subsequently became a feature of fairs and other public attractions in Europe and America into the nineteenth century. Shamu the whale and his relatives are modern examples of amazing trained animals.

Today attitudes toward people who are different in any way are more humane and more respectful. So-called freak shows fortunately are things of the past. And modern medicine can solve many of the problems and cure many of the disorders that led to people being classed as oddities.

In a world with no radios, CD players, or iPods, music was mostly something people made themselves for themselves. The songs in
Will Sparrow's Road,
whether just titles or full lyrics, are all traditional ballads or drinking songs from the sixteenth century, although at times Will makes up his own words. The songs sung in the book are "Barbra Allen,” "The Wee Wee Man,” "Greensleeves,” "Tomorrow the Fox Will Come to Town,” and "We Be Soldiers Three.” Most people were familiar with them, and illustrated broadsides with the words and/or music could be had for a penny. Many of these songs are still sung today, although there is much variation in words and melodies.

Benjamin's Latin is as correct as I, nearly fifty years after my last Latin class, could make it. Tobias's incantation, however—
Hey fortuna, numquam credo, passe, passe, et flotatus, fugit, fugit, levitatus!—is
a mix of ungrammatical Latin words commanding the egg to rise and fly.

Tobacco was new to England in the sixteenth century, although it had long been used in the Americas. English and European explorers introduced the practice of smoking, or "drinking smoke,” to their homelands when they returned. In England most men used simple white clay pipes, and pipe parts are still sometimes found in the mud along the Thames River in London.

The "wicked Irish” that Will imagines himself riding against were those fighting for Irish independence in what was called the Nine Years' War (1594–1603) against English rule. The struggle did not end with the end of the war.

If you want to read more novels set in this time period, try these books:

Blackwood, Gary.
The Shakespeare Stealer; Shakespeare's Scribe; Shakespeare's Spy

Cheaney, J. B.
The Playmaker; The True Prince

Crowley, Suzanne.
The Stolen One

Hassinger, Peter.
Shakespeare's Daughter

Hooper,
Mary. At the House of the Magician; The Betrayal; By Royal Command

Horowitz, Anthony.
The Devil and his Boy

Kolosov, Jacqueline.
The Red Queen's Daughter;
A
Sweet Disorder

Meyer, Carolyn.
Loving Will Shakespeare

Rinaldi, Ann.
The Redheaded Princess

Sutcliff, Rosemary.
Brother Dusty-Feet

Thomas, Jane Resh.
The Counterfeit Princess

Wrede, Patricia.
Snow White and Rose Red

Selected Resources:

Addison, William Wilkinson.
English Fairs and Markets.
London: B. T. Batsford,1953.

Bates, A. W. "Birth Defects Described in Elizabethan Ballads.”
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
93 (2000):202-7.

Bondeson, Jan.
The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Cameron, David Kerr.
The English Fair.
Thrupp, U.K.: Sutton, 1998.

Crystal, David, and Ben Crystal.
Shakespeare's Words:
A
Glossary and Language Companion.
London: Penguin, 2002.

Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs in England and Wales to 1516.
www.history.ac.uk/cmh/gaz/gazweb1.html
.

Jay, Ricky.
Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women.
New York: Villard, 1986.

Malcolmson, Robert, and Stephanos Mastoris.
The English Pig:
A
History.
London: Hambledon, 1998.

Pepys, Samuel.
Diary.
www.pepysdiary.com
.

Singman, Jeffrey L.
Daily Life in Elizabethan England.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995.

Strutt, Joseph.
Sports and Pastimes of the People of England from the Earliest Period.
On
www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/index.htm

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, ed.
Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body.
New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry.
The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

1. The Dung Heap

W
HEN ANIMAL DROPPINGS
and garbage and spoiled straw are piled up in a great heap, the rotting and moiling give forth heat. Usually no one gets close enough to notice because of the stench. But the girl noticed and, on that frosty night, burrowed deep into the warm, rotting muck, heedless of the smell. In any event, the dung heap probably smelled little worse than everything else in her life—the food scraps scavenged from kitchen yards, the stables and sties she slept in when she could, and her own unwashed, unnourished, unloved, and unlovely body.

How old she was was hard to say. She was small and pale, with the frightened air of an ill-used child, but her scrawny, underfed body did give off a hint of woman, so perhaps she was twelve or thirteen. No one knew for sure, least of all the girl herself, who knew no home and no mother and no name but Brat and never had. Someone, she assumed, must have borne her and cared for her lest she toddle into the pond and changed her diapers when they reeked, but as long as she could remember, Brat had lived on her own by what means she could—stealing an onion here or helping with the harvest there in exchange for a night on the stable floor. She took what she could from a village and moved on before the villagers, with their rakes and sticks, drove her away. Snug cottages and warm bread and mothers who hugged their babes were beyond her imagining, but dearly would she have loved to eat a turnip without the mud of the field still on it or sleep in a barn fragrant with new hay and not the rank smell of pigs who fart when they eat too much.

Tonight she settled for the warm rotting of a dung heap, where she dreamed of nothing, for she hoped for nothing and expected nothing. It was as cold and dark inside her as out in the frosty night.

Morning brought rain to ease the cold, and the kick of a boot in Brat’s belly. Hunger. Brat hated the hunger most. Or was it the cold? She knew only that hunger and cold cursed her life and kept her waking and walking and working for no other reason than to stop the pain.

“Dung beetle! Dung beetle! Smelly old dung beetle sleeping in the dung.”

Boys. In every village there were boys, teasing, taunting, pinching, kicking. Always they were the scrawniest or the ugliest or the dirtiest or the stupidest boys, picked on by everyone else, with no one left uglier or stupider than they but her. And so they taunted and tormented her. In every village. Always. She closed her eyes.

“Hey, boys, have off. You’re mucking up the path and my new Spanish leather shoes. Away!

“And you, girl. Are you alive or dead?”

Brat opened one eye. A woman was there, a woman neither old nor young but in between. Neither fat nor thin but in between. An important-looking woman, with a sharp nose and a sharp glance and a wimple starched into sharp pleats.