Mud Slingers, Snigglers, and Fleas: A Tour of a 13th-Century Village
Jennifer M. Brown, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 9/13/2007
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Laura Amy Schlitz is a librarian at the Park School near Baltimore, MD, where each year students study the Middle Ages. Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village (Candlewick, 2007) began as a group of short pieces that she wrote for her classes to perform. Set in the shadow of a medieval English manor in 1255, these 21 dramatizations (19 monologues and 2 dialogues) address what it was like to live under a feudal system, where those who raised livestock and plowed the fields had to pay the lords who owned the land, and trades were learned through apprenticeships.
Through interrelated dramatizations, Schlitz explores the ways in which this class system affected village life, how people related to one another, and how quickly young people had to grow up. Her characters—all of whom are between the ages of 10 and 15—might be expected to follow in their fathers’ footsteps as physicians or millers, run the stables or the households, or marry to better the family’s holdings.
The village setting unites the characters, but there are also some direct exchanges between them. How did you decide which pieces to interlink?
I started with 17 monologues (2 of which did not make it into the book), wrote another 11, and then took out 5 [to wind up with 21]. The only characters that were connected in the original manuscript were Nelly [the sniggler, or eel catcher]; Drogo [the tanner’s apprentice]; Jacob [the Jewish moneylender’s son]; and Petronella [the merchant’s daughter]. So I started looking to see [which characters] I could piggy-back. I looked at the boys who threw the mud [at the lord’s daughter] and realized that it was really a girl [Barbary] who tossed the mud, and she’s genuinely sorry.
The monologue of “Barbary: The Mud Slinger” is especially moving, particularly when she observes, “It made me think/ how all women are the same—/ silk or sackcloth, all the same.” You give readers a sense that it is most often circumstances and the will to survive that hardens one fellow villager against another. Were you conscious of attempting to balance out the hardships these young people face with the compassion many of them demonstrate?
Fundamentally, I’m an optimistic person and that may come through. The other thing is, I think if you and I were transported back to medieval times, we’d be disgusted by the smells and inconvenienced by the hardships of life, but that doesn’t mean that the people who lived then were miserable. I think of children as being largely decent people, and because I was writing about children for children, most of the characters are decent.
You do not shy away from the obstacles that these young people endure—a scarcity of food, a rigid class system. Did the details you wanted to include help to shape the characters and situations? Or did you begin with the characters and the details followed?
I usually started with a situation and a name, and then the character began to take shape, like Nelly, the eel catcher. Nelly is such an optimist, and that’s something I did consciously. If you want to show that people had a hard life, you pick one of the lucky ones. Her stroke of good luck is that her uncle dies and her family gets his pigs. It’s that “no problem, no play” idea. So just about everyone has a problem. For Lowdy [who helps raise hunting dogs], the problem is fleas.
The form that you chose for the various characters was interesting, too. Through the two dialogues, for instance, readers can observe where the characters’ perceptions were off-base; the miller’s poem unspools with the same circularity as a mill’s wheel. Did the content of the pieces dictate their forms?
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| Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! (Schlitz) © 2007 by Robert Byrd |
I wanted to write the glassblower’s daughters, Mariot and Maud, as a dialogue because I liked the idea of a contrapuntal, showing their minds are headed in different directions, despite some overlap. While they debate who should marry their father’s apprentice, Piers, Piers [in his monologue] is worried about learning to blow glass.
The sidebars are chock-full of information. Where did you find the authentic pronunciations, the song that Alice adapts to serenade her sheep Jilly, and the doctor’s remedies that you include?
I had a crate full of articles about medieval craftsmen from the school library, and a lot of books. For some things I went a little farther afield—for instance, I interviewed a glassblower who was able to tell me what goes wrong the first time you try to blow glass.
How did you settle on the voice of the narrator? There were some lovely touches, such as “if you can roll the r, so much the better” (for the pronunciation of “caradog”) or “We won’t even talk about what happened to Saint Erasmus—it’s too disgusting” (in Drogo’s piece).
I wrote the sidebars conversationally because I was talking to my students; I wasn’t thinking of publishing [them]. While I knew the monologues would be public, because the children would perform them, the sidebars were between me and the kids.
What’s really good about the monologues is not what’s on the paper—apart from Robert Byrd’s drawings. They need to be performed. I wrote these back in 1996, so there are students who are now in high school and college who remember whether they were Thomas or Drogo. I like the idea of letting them step into the shoes of these characters. I think children have the ability to be somebody else for a little while. It’s a great way to learn.
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