The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history. It struck in the mid-1340s, and killed about half the population of Europe within four years. The death toll worldwide is put at 75m. It had momentous social and economic effects. Although the authorities strove to reimpose serfdom once the pestilence was over, the depleted workforce seems to have been able to sell its labour at market value, so it arguably spelt the end of the feudal system and the birth of capitalism. It may also have permanently weakened religious belief among the common people, since the mighty bombardment of prayers and penitential rituals that the Catholic church mounted against it was obviously and embarrassingly ineffective.

Yet, despite its colossal impact, surprisingly little is known about it. It is thought to have started in central Asia, but its cause remains mysterious. Precisely what disease it was and how it spread are also uncertain. It used to be identified as bubonic plague, which is carried by the fleas on rats, but that is now disputed, and there are theories that it was some kind of anthrax or maybe an Ebola-like virus. What is clear is the terror it caused. In the introduction to his Decameron, Boccaccio includes an eyewitness account of the panic and anarchy it brought to Florence in 1348, and of its horrible symptoms. It first showed itself by tumours in the groin or armpits, sometimes as big as an apple, and these swellings quickly appeared on other parts of the body, together with black or purple spots on thighs and arms. Most sufferers died within three days. It spread like wildfire, seemingly carried on the air. Fugitives sought remote hiding places and shut themselves away, but they still died.

What ordinary people thought and felt, how much they understood and what they believed, it is impossible to say. The vast majority were illiterate, so they have left no trace of their inner lives. This is the aspect that John Hatcher seeks to rediscover, using a new method that he calls literary docudrama. He focuses on the Suffolk village of Walsham le Willows, which has unusually good records of the transactions between the lords of the manor and their tenants in the village's two manorial courts during the 1340s. From these it can be deduced that the Great Pestilence, as it was called, reached Walsham around Easter 1349, and killed rather more than half of the population of about 1,500 within two months. At its height the death rate was probably 50 a day. The court records provide only names, and details of fines, taxes and death duties. But Hatcher fleshes these out by drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources both British and continental - sermons, chronicles, mystical treatises - and ascribing the ideas and feelings they contain to the villagers of Walsham. Obviously, this entails a high degree of fiction. Obviously, too, by turning Walsham into a representative village, where virtually anything associated with the Black Death across the length and breadth of Europe can be assumed to have happened, Hatcher forfeits the particularity and uniqueness that his focus on a single village might have been expected to give. All the same, his reconstructed account is suspenseful, informative and appropriately horrifying.

The most pitiable aspect is the faith that people placed in preventive measures, and the readiness of quacks and fraudsters to exploit their credulity. The trade in relics boomed as the plague approached. Itinerant holy men offered bones from the skeletons of saints that could be kissed for a halfpenny or bought for fourpence. There were tussles to get hold of the stubs of Easter candles from the church, since wax amulets made from these were held to ward off infection. Nothing is known of Walsham's parish priest; not even his name. But Hatcher fills the gap with a fictional incumbent called Master John, based on Chaucer's idealised parson in The Canterbury Tales. In response to the frantic calls to penitence issued by the Pope and the bishops, he organises twice-weekly processions in which the devout smear themselves with ashes and crawl on all fours or wriggle along on their stomachs. Despite the risk of contagion, a group of villagers joins the throng of pilgrims heading for the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, where a phial of Mary's milk is preserved, and the faithful can purchase a miraculous drop of it, diluted with holy water and sealed in a small lead flask. Meanwhile, practical measures are taken to prevent refugees from infected areas from entering the village. Strangers are driven away with stones and threats, and guards mounted on the approach roads prevent them coming back.

The Church taught that the plague was God's merciful way of turning people from their sins so that they might be saved eternally. It was also presented as God's just punishment for various kinds of reprehensible conduct, ranging from the trust that ill-advised inquirers placed in astrologers and mathematicians to the shamefully tight skirts worn by fashionable women. In Hatcher's account, fear and grief drive even usually docile parishioners to question these arguments. He imagines parents who have watched their children die demanding why God should punish the innocent. Master John's reply is that it is yet another sign of His mercy, for had they lived their children would have sinned, and risked eternal damnation, whereas by taking them while still pure God allows them to escape that danger. Scenes such as these, based on the terms of contemporary religious debate, show the strength of Hatcher's dramatic method. Just occasionally, though, you wonder where he has got his evidence from. He says, for example, that the English victory at Crécy in August 1346 was eagerly discussed by Walsham's villagers, and helped cheer them up in the hungry winter that followed. This seems to suggest an interest in current events, a communication network, and a robust sense of patriotism more typical of the newspaper age than the lifestyle of a feudal serf. As a professor of economic and social history at Cambridge, Hatcher is scarcely likely to be mistaken, but it would be good to have a note on his sources.

Inevitably, his most telling points come from the historical part of his work. A fascinating series of entries in the court records charts the fight put up by a determined young woman, Idonea Isabel, against her feudal lord Nicholas de Walsham and his wife Margery in the years 1345-7. She refused to help reap his corn for free, though required to do so by her tenancy obligations, and accepted wages from another employer instead. She was fined for this, but continued to display her rebelliousness by becoming pregnant, but unmarried, and by refusing to weave a cloth for Lady Margery. These misdemeanours attracted further fines, but she boasted in open court that she would not pay them or work for the de Walshams for nothing. None of this corresponds to how young medieval women are generally supposed to have behaved. Idonea died in the Black Death. But she would surely be pleased to know that the freedom she fought for eventually prevailed.

The Black Death by John Hatcher
Weidenfeld £20 pp302 Buy the book £18.00 plus free delivery

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