FOR THE REMAINING THIRTEEN years of her life, Maud lived quietly outside Rouen. While Henry was away consolidating his empire—which stretched from the border of Scotland to the Pyrenees—Maud was virtually Regent of Normandy. Charters were issued in both her and Henry’s names, and he relied on her to manage his affairs in his absence.
In the last year of her life, as was not uncommon with great ladies of her time, Maud took the vows of a nun at the abbey of Fontrevaud. Before her death on September 9, 1167, she had lived to see her eight grandchildren, two of whom, Richard the Lionheart and John, would become kings of England. One granddaughter became queen of Sicily, another queen of Castile. Her descendants ruled England until the start of the Tudor dynasty at the end of the fifteenth century. It was not until five hundred and eighty-two years after the death of Henry I that a woman, Mary Tudor, ruled as Queen of England.
While I traveled to Normandy, Angers, Le Mans, and England to research this novel, most of the work was done through the Research Library of UCLA. Of the many books consulted, I would gratefully like to acknowledge the following historical works as having particularly stimulated my imagination and upon which I relied most heavily. First and foremost is Empress Matilda, by Nesta Paine (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1978), an excellent and sympathetic biography of Maud. (The chroniclers of the time, as well as some modern historians, tend to paint a rather unsympathetic portrait of her.)
Then there are Daily Living in the Twelfth Century, by Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1952); England Under the Angevin Kings, Vol. I, by Kate Norgate (Macmillan, London, 1887); Gesta Stephani, editor and translator K.R. Potter (Nelson Medieval Texts, London, 1955); Life in a Medieval City, by Joseph and Francis Gies (Thomas Y. Crowell, Apollo Edition, New York, 1973); Life in a Medieval Castle, by Joseph and Francis Gies (Harper & Row, New York, 1974); The Saxon and Norman Kings, by Christopher Brooke (B.T. Batsford, Ltd., Great Britain, 1963); and Sex in History, by Gordon Rattray Taylor (Vanguard Press, New York, 1954).
For those who wish to know more about this period of the twelfth century, there are numerous other books available.