Agency in Other Times

I listened to Dan Jones, the legit medieval historian who has started writing historic fiction (Essex Dogs) being interviewed about the difference in that type of writing. The first thing he mentioned was that people of all other eras and places did not have the agency we take for granted in out culture.  Their lives were constrained in a hundred ways that they could hardly articulate because it was just the way life was, and we can scarcely understand because we do not live in such a world. He finds that hard enough to capture when writing actual history, but is even more intense when writing fiction.  You want a character to do something, then remember that "Oh no, he can't.  And it would hardly occur to him." But the choices that they do have are as real as ours, and often have consequences greater than our small decisions. The whole society lives on the margin and is vulnerable more than we are, and hired men-at-arms even more so. 

The novel is first person from the POV of two soldiers in the Essex Dogs, a band of ten landing in Normandy and heading toward the Battle of Crecy. He illustrates their limited scope and perspective by describing even the battle scenes entirely in terms of the experience of the single individuals, with no overview of strategy and troop movement and arrows drawn on maps that we are used to.  Only later do fragments of that come in. 

It doesn't sound like my sort of thing - it might be Grim's or David Foster's - but I thought that single reminder important in all consideration of history and even international relations now. I do forget their lack of agency, and often. We rail at the loss of our freedoms and are right to, because they are indeed rare, not automatic. We sometimes talk that we resent their being taken away because we think they should just be a given.  Perhaps they should, but that doesn't mean they are thereby common and assumed. 

Tangential note about Walking.  Both Jones and Patrick Wyman who interviewed him spoke about the importance of walking to gathe thoughts and put them in some order.  Ann Althouse linked to a monk who walks thousands of steps as meditation (counting the steps is important to him.  I sometimes do that.)

But now that there is apparently something else wrong with my foot and it is not healing (Charcot's Disease based around a microfracture has been suggested.  If so it is longstanding - like years.), what will I do for thinking?  I won't think too far ahead and solve problems not yet in evidence, yet I think I will have to at least retain some strolling over shorter distances - and figure out something else for exercise. But the idea of giving up walks...