Catherine, Called Birdy

As Birdy’s diary comes to an end, she is still balking at the continuous lessons designed to turn her into a lady and dreading her impending marriage to Shaggy Beard: “The bear is safe and I am doomed,” she notes (152).

Her personal musings are interrupted by the difficult labor of her mother and the eventual birth of her sister, Eleanor Mary Catherine. When it appears as if mother and child won’t make it through the delivery, Birdy’s father comes home; he banishes the priest sent to give last rites and sits through the night with his wife. When he emerges, he declares that mother and child will survive. Birdy is thrown into a great confusion, as her friend Aelis informs her that she is to marry Robert. First, he saves the bear, then he has become an object of attraction to her friend, Aelis. Birdy reconsiders all that she has ever thought about Robert and Aelis: “I think sometimes that people are like onions. On the outside smooth and whole and simple but inside ring upon ring, complex and deep” (157).

As she counts down the days until Shaggy Beard arrives and she is to be married, Birdy becomes overwhelmed. Resigned, she frees all of her birds, writing, “I who must be caged could leave them no longer in cages” (159). She leaves the popinjay—who cannot care for itself—to Perkin, along with the rest of her betrothal silver so that he can pursue his dream of being a scholar.

Unable to accept her fate, Birdy runs away to Uncle George’s house. He is away, but Ethelfritha is there. Unfortunately, Birdy quickly realizes that her aunt’s schemes to help her are nothing short of delusional musings brought upon by her illness. Birdy must figure out how to save herself.

Eventually, she remembers the story that the Jewish matron once told her, about the man who forgot himself and has an epiphany: “And it came into my head that I cannot run away. I am who I am wherever I am” (162). She finally realizes that her life and all she loves will travel with her no matter where she goes. As she writes, “I am like the Jews in our hall, driven from England, from one life to another, and yet for them exile was no exile. Wherever they go, they take their lives, their families, their people, and their God with them” (162). Birdy decides to marry Shaggy Beard, though she will not make her submission easy for him.

George returns and takes her back home, where she is both welcomed and lectured. Then she finds out that Shaggy Beard has been killed fighting over a woman in a bar brawl. Stephen, his son, wishes instead to marry Birdy in order to honor the marriage contract. She wears the pin he gave her of a bird“ with a pearl in its beak” (163). At the conclusion of her diary, she is eager to marry Stephen, feeling caged but less painfully so. Thinking of names for their future children, Catherine—who will no longer go by Birdy—writes, “[t]he world is full of possibilities!” (164).

The author includes a lengthy final note explaining to her young readers the realities of the medieval period in which Birdy is writing. It is a “foreign country, ”she writes, with notions of identity that differ widely from her readers’ own; there is no real sense of “individual identity, individual accomplishments, and rights,” such as the ones taken for granted today(165). Instead, everyone in a medieval community has their rightful place, and “[f]ew people considered moving out of their place” (165). Even people’s surnames—Baker, Steward—are reflections of their occupation and what they provide to the village.

In addition, the English people of the 1290s were defined by their relationship to the land. Noblemen owned the land, while the villagers rented the land and provided service to the noble class. This system of serfdom lasted for hundreds of years and moved in time to the religious and seasonal cycles. The author reminds readers that there were no watches or clocks during this period; life moved in time to the rising and setting of the sun.

The gender roles of the time were also strictly enforced. Young men were apprenticed to their professions, and there was little choice in the matter—the author notes that Perkin’s desire to be a scholar instead of a goat boy was a rarity for the time). If someone was from the noble class, they were often fostered—like Geoffrey—to another noble estate where they trained to be a knight. Women were “mostly trained for marriage” (167). They were seen as property, rather than individual people, and bartered to other noble families to increase landholdings or wealth in general. As the author explains, “Birdy fought years of training and tradition in opposing her marriage to Shaggy Beard” (168). Without any real alternative, most young women simply consented.