Barbara Willard and Mantlemass

I just finished rereading all of the Mantlemass novels by Barbara Willard, plus the short stories she added in The Keys of Mantlemass. The novels take place from about 1479 to 1644, and one short story is set (I think) contemporaneously to when it was written around 1980.

The books were fairly well-known in the UK in their time, but I think less so now, and are close to unknown in the U.S. They take place in the Ashdown Forest of Sussex (the same location as the Hundred Acre Wood from the Winnie-the-Pooh books), and follow the lives of several families as they interweave through generations, usually focusing on young members for at least part of each book.

The forest setting is an ongoing character, including the way it changes over time through development and the foreshadowing of industrialization. Seasonality is another constant companion, with detailed description of harvesting, food preservation, effect on travel, fauna, and water variation in streams. The events of English political history are a backdrop: the end of the War of the Roses, ongoing religious upheaval, war with Spain, and the English Civil War. 

A bridle path in Ashdown Forest, present day. www.geograph.org.uk

Willard's characters are strong, memorable, and fairly gender-balanced, which was unusual even during the 1970s, considering she wrote about these particular time periods and this place. I always appreciated that about her work.

Her weakness for classism is less positive, though I think she was of two minds about that. As an American, it's hard for me to sympathize with the deference some British people have for royalty and their "betters" generally, which shows up here.

There are strains of belief in "good blood" behind some of Willard's characterization choices — genetic essentialism that is not borne out by science. The best example is the character Robin Medley, who in one book is a fine young man, and in the next — just six years later! — has become an unstable jerk, with only the explanation that his father (who had almost nothing to do with his upbringing) was a jerk. (Those books are The Iron Lily and A Flight of Swans.)

Conversely, though, in the prequel The Miller's Boy, the titular character is the hard-working grandson of a miller, whose friend is from the gentry, and Willard treats their relationships with great understanding of how that would feel for the working-class boy. In the short story "A Different Day," from The Keys of Mantlemass, the two characters meet again as middle-aged men, and that complexity goes even deeper. There are a number of other examples where the forest people are shown to be "just as good" as the gentry, but it always seems as though there's a tug toward valuing, or valorizing, the upper class characters a bit more.

Finally, rereading the last book, Harrow and Harvest, in combination with my recent read of Rosemary Sutcliff's Simon, made me think about why so many English people left their native land for the North American colonies in the mid-17th century, as more than half of my ancestors did. They were fleeing war and the aftermath of war, like other migrants since then and many today. And there was a continent just "waiting" for them to exploit it, with people to colonize or convert. Disease would run ahead of them, emptying the path. Opportunity (!). But even so, the thing they were leaving behind was terrible, or they wouldn't have taken the risk.