An epic reflection on human glory – and shame

Title: Tillers of the Soil

Author: Mark Clavier

Publisher: Sacristy Press 2025

ISBN: 9781789594041

Price: £14.99

What do you do when, while walking in open country, you come upon the remains of an oversized and once ornate Roman bath-house? If you are a historian, a passionate lover of the natural world, a deeply grounded pastoral and moral theologian, a gifted writer and parish priest called Mark Clavier, you take this unlikely object in this lovely place to heart, and you imagine the last year of its life before it began to be a ruin; and in due course a work of historical fiction emerges.

Tillers of the soil is a grand romance, the author’s offering of love to the All that makes for beauty and honour and kindness while redeeming and repurposing human shortcomings. The story is skilfully woven within the dramatic unities of one theme, one place, and one period of time. The result is an epic reflection on human glory and human shame.

The year is 396 AD. The Roman empire, threatened by enemies without and corruption within, is advanced in decay and its military legions are beginning to withdraw from Brittania. In the land that would later be called Brecknockshire, lay a villa that had been established several generations previously. In recent times it was owned and wisely governed by one Roman family. The villa’s familia made up a substantial population that thrived under the benevolent rule of its dominus. Through his eyes the reader sees the land that sustains the people who care for and live from it as the enduring protagonist of ‘Tillers of the soil’. The stories of those who interact with the villa and its landscape make up the action of the book, but it is the land itself that enfolds them all.

But the integrity of the land and its people are now under threat, from Saxons in the east and, more immediately, Irish from the west. Preparing to withstand the threat provides the impetus of the novel. Within that frame, the story acquires an explicitly spiritual character by the summoning of an aspiring hermit to be the priest of this essentially Christian familia. Against murderously real foes, the eucharistically-fuelled loving kindness that characterises community relations in the villa will prove indomitable.

There is beauty in the architecture and the execution of this novel. There is much interweaving of the changing circumstances in the lives of some five or six main characters, but these sub-plots are handled deftly, and always with clarity. I cannot imagine any open-hearted reader who would not be nourished by being absorbed into this story.

Doug Constable