When my children left home, I took a job dealing with the aftermath of natural disasters. At the same time, I challenged myself to learn something new and decided to study the Middle Ages. I learned how to make poisons, how people prepared bodies for burial, about feast days and diets, how chess went to England via Normans in Italy, and so much more.
Despite my research, I could only retain the information when I invented characters who lived in those times, so I began writing vignettes of daily life. When I focused on the Norman Conquest of England, my university studies in political philosophy came into play, and these scattered pieces of information congealed. Eventually, it became clear to me that I was writing a book. I went to England to see the places my characters traveled, to follow their journeys along old Roman Roads and nearly extinct waterways.
Serendipity accompanied me each trip. Entirely by chance, I was allowed to climb a dark spiral staircase to Westminster Abbey’s archives. Amid stained glass windows and blackened oak furniture, as my white-gloved hands caressed ancient texts, I wove my way into the past. Driving for the first time in England, I got stuck on a roundabout. After circling it several times, I managed to spin off in the wrong direction—and met a historian of the period, who shared knowledge and insights, while packing for a month-long journey beginning that same afternoon. Magically, it seemed, I met caretakers who guided me to one adventure after another.
I searched for Alaric’s birthplace among the Norman castles predating the Norman Invasion. I found it at the base of a grassy mound—the only thing left of Ewyas Harold, which I call Ewyas. I found the Thames at Cricklade, a brook. But Cnut and his 160 warships landed there fifty-one years before my character, Genevieve (Elise).
One March night, I got lost trying to find Tutbury Castle. Pulling onto a dirt road, I drove into an isolated field and got out of the car. Alone, in complete darkness, I spotted a comet. Someone standing in the same place in April 1066 would have seen Haley’s comet. Did they shiver as I did from the chilly night—or from fear? When I stood atop Tutbury’s motte, I decided Alaric would build Tutbury’s first Norman castle a year or so before historians think it was built. Like me, Elise would look out at the forest, at River Dove, and beyond.
In the evenings and on weekends, I found writing about knights or English rebels less stressful than my day job surveying collapsed freeways or buildings toppled over from an earthquake. Imagining my characters crossing the Narrow Sea seemed less precarious than navigating steel twisted by a massive hurricane, or searching for whole towns washed away by a 30-foot wave. One January, while in tropical Saipan after a typhoon, I wrote about a freezing Yorkshire winter, then flew back to England for more research. Years later, I had a rough, horrible, 2000-page tome, from which Knight’s Pawn emerged.
As a novelist, I made adjustments no historian would. The Medieval calendar began on December 25th or March 25th. In Knight’s Pawn, the year starts on January 1st. England, as we know it today, barely existed then. The dominant peoples were the Angles and the Saxons, but they were scarcely the only groups. I call them all “English.” Likewise, I use the term “Norman,” although the invaders and occupiers included people from elsewhere. Englelond is a 13th-century term for the land and people, including all occupiers. I refer to the English language as Saxon, the Norman-French as French, and use modified Old English words and modern Gaelic. I chose Hewisa, a spelling variation for the name of an actual person, and “William” to distinguish the duke of Normandy, king of England, from others having the name Guillaume.
My apologies to the descendants of Harold Godwinson, Archbishop Robert de Rouen, and Count Eustace de Boulogne II. I gave them fictional relatives to link my characters to the competing factions of the time. Excepting his fictional involvement with my characters and the dubious charge of mutilating Harold, Eustace’s actions noted in this novel are well documented, including his conviction for treason.
I hope you enjoyed my recreation of a long-gone era. I wanted to share my reverence for those resilient people who experienced the same love, fear, pain, and joy as we do. For more information about my research and other books, see my website at: www.alkucherenko.com.