More Yonge being pro-Papist, despite her presumed Protestantism, because she's writing a book set in the civil war and the Roundheads are far too anti-establishment for her. I think. My grasp of the theological issues is nonexistent, so what I read was a novel about the dangers of extremism, the difficulty of civil war, the art to know well to die, and -- possibly what really attracts me -- the skilled heavy labor and complex social backup needed for even `subsistence' living, in most of history.
It's sort of a Boxcar Children novel; children orphaned and made houseless by disease and ill-controlled soldiers move into a collapsed hermit's hut in the woods, make mostly good. But: neighbors would have taken them in, taking all their surviving goods in exchange; leaving the land would have broken the ?feudal? right to it, which they keep despite their poverty because the lady of the manor can't afford to rebuild their house (she owes them housing if they owe her labor); and they only survive because they can act in the market, in a small way, for instance to get a spinning-wheel and salt in exchange for their butter.
Minor oddity; referring casually to the `slime' of the Bristol channel. I suppose it was silting up already in the 17th. c.
Project Gutenberg file #6006, Under the Storm
So wrote clew in Fiction (19th c.).