Themes and Setting in History
Grief and love, ambition and greed are the themes of the novel.
The story is set in the real town of Shrewsbury, in the period of the Anarchy, when King Stephen is on the rise after a very rough year in 1141. Empress Maud moved into Oxford, but sent her closest ally, Robert of Gloucester off to Normandy to persuade her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, to give her more help. Military action is away from Shropshire, at Wareham and Cirencester, leaving the focus in June on doing the tasks of agriculture and sheep shearing, delayed by the late frost (longer spell of cold weather in the spring).
The main characters of the plot reveal the life of the skilled craftspeople and merchants in the commonalty of the era. The widow is wealthy because she inherited her father's business, there being no sons. She learned every aspect of the business of making cloth from wool, from her father. The men who have an eye on her and her successful operation are all in the same stratum of society: her foreman, her cousin, a man with large flocks of sheep, a prosperous dyer and fuller, and a bronze smith. Because her father has died, she has an unusual amount of freedom to choose in marriage. But the pressures on her from those seeking a merger by marriage, or a marriage of love, are constantly rising as her clothier business remains prosperous.
All the aspects of the clothier trade are described as the story unfolds, from sheep shearing to carding the wool, to dyeing, fulling and weaving it, including the sources of the dyes. This era is in the start of the formation of craft guilds in England (Middle Ages Economics). Much of the clothier crafts grew in the countryside, outside London, where innovations in process took hold more quickly.
Read more about this topic: The Rose Rent
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