Pam C. (PamC) reviewed A Fool and His Money: Life in a Partitioned Town in Fourteenth-Century France on + 117 more book reviews
From the back cover: A pot of gold is found in a drain in a town in southwestern France during the Hundred Years War. Does the money belong to the man who claims it, or to his befuddled father-in-law?
The case of the missing coins allows Ann Wroe to investigate in detail, and though particular people, what life was like in a fourteenth-community that was partitioned (as so many are today) between rival political factions. The people in her story must deal with everyday problems of competence and conscience, and they do so humorously and poignantly against a background of mutual prejudice, threatening authorities, and war. Their fears, their jokes, their superstitions, their struggles to make ends meet, and their efforts to reach across the border all are examined in their own actions and their own words, retrieved and brought vividly to life from the obscure documents which Ann Wroe uncovered in the city archives.
The case of the missing coins allows Ann Wroe to investigate in detail, and though particular people, what life was like in a fourteenth-community that was partitioned (as so many are today) between rival political factions. The people in her story must deal with everyday problems of competence and conscience, and they do so humorously and poignantly against a background of mutual prejudice, threatening authorities, and war. Their fears, their jokes, their superstitions, their struggles to make ends meet, and their efforts to reach across the border all are examined in their own actions and their own words, retrieved and brought vividly to life from the obscure documents which Ann Wroe uncovered in the city archives.
