Tidelands by Philippa Gregory

Philippa Gregory is a knowledgeable historian who also happens to be an accomplished writer of historical fiction.  I don't know how many people have this skill but I'm guessing that not many people (apart from Hilary Mantel) could distill all the research into a really gripping novel.

I learnt so much from this book, which is set in the 1600s in the time of Oliver Cromwell, and I must confess that there was a gaping black hole in my knowledge of history around this period.  The storyline covers the arrest and trial of King Charles I, but the main focus is on a little family who live in the tidelands around Sealsea on the South coast of England.  Alinor Reekie is a young mother whose husband has disappeared leaving her to fend for herself and try and take care of her two children in a tiny house perched on the edge of the river.

The book is filled with detail of what it was like to live in constant hardship where people have to work themselves to the bone just to stay alive.  An abandoned woman is in a particularly perilous state as the rest of the community cannot afford to support her and she runs the risk of being driven from the parish by her neighbours.  Alinor is the local midwife and healer, and while this is a source of income for her, it also poses a risk if people suddenly decide that she has any kind of supernatural powers and decide to declare her a witch.  In the seventeenth century most of the population still feared witchcraft, and any wise woman who could create potions and understand the healing powers of plants was never far from suspicion.  

All the characters in the book feel authentic to their time and there is a real sense of the local class structure and how people understood their place in society.  These days it is difficult for us to understand how careful poor people had to be when they were in the presence of someone socially superior, as a local land-owner could force them out of their property, and deny the whole family of their livelihood.  All aspects of life were perilous and for women it was particularly difficult as they had very few rights of their own and they were expected to do hard manual work while bearing and raising their children.

The plot in the book builds slowly at first but once it gathers momentum the pace of events had me almost on the edge of my seat.  By the last few chapters the tension is tremendous and the whole story is a real triumph.  There is another book following the Tidelands family called Dark Tides and I will certainly be looking out for that in the library.