England and France, 1346: a knight, the girl he cannot marry, a murder to avenge, Crécy — and then the plague comes up the roads out of the east and settles the argument for everyone. Haggard went to South Africa at nineteen and helped raise the Union Jack over the Transvaal; here he did the fourteenth century, and the Black Death chapters are the least consoling thing in his work. Fifty-three plates, from Vernet's Mediterranean shores to Munch's, keep the sea and its weather in view while the plague roads fill.
