The Clerk's Tale: A Medieval Mystery With Too Many Characters

 I purchased a used copy of The Clerk's Tale by Margaret Frazer from a library sale cart.  It's the 11th book in a mystery series.  There have been 17 books in this series.  I've read a number of them long ago before I was online which was late in the 20th century.  I don't recall having read this particular book.  I'm sure it didn't exist when I was reading earlier books in this series.

I've seen reviewers complain about an excessive number of characters making a novel too complex to follow.  This is the first time that I thought so.  Maybe I'm losing the ability to track all these characters that I once had.  All I know is that I had to page back more than once to where characters were introduced in order to identify them. I also wished that I had been reading this book on Kindle so that I could find past references to characters more easily.  It occurs to me that Kindle features have made me a lazy reader.  I don't have to remember a long list of characters and who they are, if I can find that information using Kindle searches.  It's a possibility.   

Now I need to get into other aspects of The Clerk's Tale, so I can consider this a proper blog review. 

 

                                   

 

While I was reading this book, it seemed odd to me that characters mentioned that Nichola was rather young to be a wife at sixteen.  I've read that it was common during the medieval period to marry girls in their teens to men in their thirties or forties.  I've seen many references in  books to fourteen year old medieval wives. Yet in a search I did for this review, I found an essay here called "This Is What It Was Like To Be A Teenager in the Middle Ages" by Oxford history professor Rachel Moss that indicated that marrying adult men to teen girls wasn't a common practice during that period, and states that medieval people were aware that teenagers weren't fully mature.  So it seems that  The Clerk's Tale is more accurate than other medieval novels that I've read containing teen brides.

Lady Agnes asks protagonist Sister Frevisse to read aloud a Chaucer tale that I've never heard of called "The Tale of Sir Topas".  Apparently, Chaucer intended it to be humorous.  The characters who listened to Frevisse read it laughed.  So apparently Chaucer succeeded in conveying humor to them.  I'm not sure if I would have reacted similarly.  Chaucer might have been disappointed with my reaction. When I read the summary which said that it involved a search for the Elf Queen, I thought that I would have been more intrigued than amused.  But then, I'm a fantasy fan. 

Getting into the mystery aspect, which didn't interest me as much as the historical context, I wondered why the jury for one of the murders was formed from people who experienced an event associated with the murder.  Perhaps during the medieval period objectivity wasn't considered as important in the jury selection process as it is now. It seemed like trials were ad hoc affairs, and that having the trial take place ASAP was a much greater priority than it is now.  The trial took place before an investigation was called for which seems backwards to me. 

 I've read many medieval mysteries that didn't seem so alien as this one did.  I think that the mystery aspect wasn't as strong as the history content.  Yet there was also some good character development which increased my estimation of the book.