Creative History

                    On the Monday after Easter all work and farming in the Medieval English village comes to a halt.  The town is completely quiet.  Yesterday had been spent in church; in prayerful reflection on the divine mystery of Christ’s sacrifice, but today is being spent in relaxation for the old and on playful flirtatious diversion for the young. With the early springtime sun shining down, birds twittering in the trees and a gentle breeze blowing in the air about two dozen teenagers, young men and women in the prime of life, gather in an open field. Four of them are carrying stools.  The four stools are arranged on the field in a circle with each stool being placed, approximately, twenty yards away from the other.   One young maiden stands in front of one of the stools with a flattened stick, a bat, in her hands.  A young man, possibly a potential suitor, stands in the middle of the...

            Friday morning begins normally enough.  It is cloudy and overcast, a little gloomy with a slight chill in the air but it is nothing that the residents of New England aren’t used to.  After all, this time of year the temperature does fluctuate rapidly, with one day being warm and humid, summerlike, and the next cold and stark almost like winter. It is May 19, 1780 and the New England and Mid-Atlantic states have been in the grip of America’s War for Independence for over five years.  Much of the countryside is ravaged, many of the cities are still under British control, but led by George Washington, the Continental Army of the United States continues to survive and the spirit of American patriotism is proving resilient and indomitable.  There is reason for both hope and despair, but no one expects what this day is about to bring. At around ten in the morning the overcast sky begins to change colors turning from a pi...

   North of London in the county of Suffolk sits the medieval village of St.  Mary of the Wolf-pits.  The village is equi-distant from the Channel coast and from the town of Bury St. Edmunds which is home to an abbey and a thriving monastic community. St. Mary of the Wolf-pits could be described as rural; the type of place where nothing much has ever happened and where nothing much is likely to ever happen.  The village’s only claim to fame is the large “wolf-pits” for which it is named that ring the outskirts of the community.  The wolf-pits are six foot deep holes dug in fields around the town that are lined with stone and are designed to protect livestock and townspeople alike from the ferocious and marauding wolves who reside in the forest nearby and routinely venture near town looking for easy prey to devour. It is not uncommon for the villagers to awake in the morning and go out to find a helpless wolf trapped in the deep hole, howling and strug...

“They were merely walking skeletons without clothes to cover their nakedness...covered with lice and vermin from head to foot.” --Captain Alexander Coffin prisoner aboard HMS Jersey 1781 As day breaks you can see it rising like a flat-topped hill in the distance.  The gutted hulk sitting there motionless and sunk in the mudflats of Wallabout Bay that you’ve heard about in rumors, the most infamous of rumors, among men in the army.  Your heart rate quickens as your footsteps take you closer. While you’re still over two hundred yards away from it, already, you can smell it.  The stench of the combined filth and decay of over 1,000 starving and dying men being lifted to your nostrils as it’s borne aloft by the early morning breeze. Your knees tremble.  You feel faint and think of running away.  But one glance to the right and left and you see the Redcoats standing guard over you and you realize that any attempt at escape will end either with a British b...