Although this is a stand-alone novel, capable of being read without knowledge of, or reference to, anything that has gone before it, it is, nonetheless, a sequel to Clothar the Frank, and it chronicles the events of Clothar’s life in the aftermath of his meeting and befriending Arthur Pendragon, High King of All Britain. The story features many of the same characters and places involved in the previous book, and that means that much of what I wrote in my preface to Clothar the Frank is no less relevant and appropriate here than it was there.
Be warned, then, that readers familiar with Clothar and his previous exploits will find much of what follows here to be familiar, but I have chosen to repeat it for the benefit of new readers who are not familiar with the fifth-century world of which I write.
I have said before that, in approaching this story, I was forced to come to terms with a few historical realities that bore heavily upon my vision of how the legend of King Arthur came into existence. In my mind, the entire story revolves around the Arthur/Guinivere/Lancelot triangle, and everything that occurs in the legendary tale is attributable to the humanity—and the human weaknesses—of the King himself, the dysfunctional nature of his marriage to Guinivere and their joint attraction to the brilliant foreign warrior known as Lancelot.
But Lancelot’s full name is Lancelot du lac, Lancelot of the Lake, and it is a French name. Lancelot himself, the legend tells us, was a French knight who crossed the sea to England expressly to serve as a Knight of the Round Table at King Arthur’s Court. Well, even making allowances for legendary exaggeration, that simply could not have happened in the middle of the fifth century, because in those days England was still called Britannia and the land now called France was still Roman Gaul.
Not until more than a century later, when the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain finally came to an end and the tribes called the Angles emerged as the dominant force, would Britannia begin to become known as the land of the Angles—Angle land, and eventually England. By the same token, Roman Gaul would not become known as France until much later, when the invading Franks finally established their dominance over their arch-rivals, the Burgundians. Over time, the Frankish territories became the land of the Franks—France—while the Burgundians remained in their own territories of Burgundy.
Reputedly wonderful horsemen, the Franks are the people generally credited with bringing the stirruped saddle to western Europe, and from the time of their first appearance in the Roman Empire, along the Rhine River in the third century, they had a reputation for being blunt spoken and utterly tactless, probably because their original tongue contained few of the subtleties of Latin or Greek. Be that as it may, we still use the term “speaking frankly” to denote directness and an unwillingness to mince one’s words.
Clothar, then, is my interpretation of Lancelot. Academic opinion indicates that the name Lancelot probably developed from the Latin word lancearius, a Roman military denomination that was probably similar to the European lancer regiments of the nineteenth century. In Clothar, I have posited a Frankish horse warrior who, as a close and trusted friend and companion of the High King, Arthur, earns himself an undying reputation as an archetypal hero, the character who will be called Lancelot centuries later by French storytellers who have heard of his fame and his exploits but have lost awareness of his real name.
The major difficulty any author faces in writing historical fiction is that of language, because language is constantly evolving and we have no real knowledge of how people spoke and sounded, in any language, hundreds of years ago. We cannot even comprehend how people from different regions of a tiny country like Britain were unable to understand, or speak to, one another as recently as a hundred and fifty years ago, but the truth is that people from Yorkshire, from London and from other regions of the country spoke dialects so different from each other that they were, in effect, completely different languages. I have chosen to write in standard English, but even that is a relatively new development, since the language was only “standardized” in the nineteenth century. Before that time, there was no orthographically correct way to spell anything.
Most of the characters in my stories would have spoken in the ancient Celtic, Germanic and Gallic tongues—tongues that are completely lost to us nowadays—while the major characters, the kings and leaders, may or may not have conversed in Latin. And in those instances where people of mixed tongues met and mingled, they would have spoken the lingua franca of their time, although the real lingua franca—literally the language of the Franks—had not yet come into common use. But throughout history, whenever people of mixed tongues and races have come together to trade, human ingenuity has quickly developed basic, fundamental languages to fit the needs of the traders. In Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that language was Swahili. In Oriental Asia, it was Pidgin. We do not know the name of whatever trading language was dominant in fifth-century Europe, but I have chosen to call it the Coastal Tongue, because the coast was the interface point for most traders.
One unusual word used quite widely in this book is Magister. It is a Latin word that has given us our modern words magistrate and magisterial, but it was a word in common use in the Roman army in the fifth century. It appears to have had two levels of meaning, and I have used it in both senses here. The first of these was the literal use, where a student or pupil would refer to his teacher or mentor as Magister (Master), with all appropriate deference. The second usage, however, resembled the way we today use the term boss, denoting a superior—officer or otherwise—whose status entails the accordance of a degree of respect but falls far short of the subservience suggested by the use of the word Master.