Although this story is fictional, it takes place against a backdrop of real events. England was an unstable place in June 1217; the victory at Lincoln depicted in The Bloody City had led to the capture of a number of French and English rebel leaders, and the retreat of the invading forces towards the south-east, but Louis himself was still free, still at the head of a sizeable army, and still backed by his all-powerful father, the king of France, not to mention his formidable wife, Blanche of Castile, granddaughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Many of the nobles whose allegiance had wavered – Earl William de Warenne among them – were now firmly back in the royalist fold, but that didn’t mean that everyone trusted them. And the chaos caused by having two proclaimed kings meant that there were plenty of opportunities for those who wished to gain land or power by less than honest means. What was one more suspicious death in a land riven by civil war?
The earl is a real person, as are his sisters and their husbands, although I have made the whole family a few years younger than they probably were in real life (hard facts such as birth dates are difficult to come by for people living at this time), in order to feature their children as youngsters. There seems to be some doubt about the order of their birth: most scholars agree that the earl was the eldest, but as to the sisters, the Dictionary of National Biography gives it as Isabelle, Maud and Ela, while the Plantagenet Roll has Ela, Isabelle and Maud, and other sources vary. I have therefore felt free to compromise with my own order of Isabelle, Ela and Maud.
All four of the siblings were or had been widowed, and by the summer of 1217 all the sisters were married again to the husbands you see in this book. Isabelle had actually already married Gilbert de l’Aigle of Pevensey by this point; I only realised this after writing The Sins of the Father, so I thought I’d better introduce them to each other sooner rather than later! Ela was the widow of Robert of Naburn, and her second husband really was called William Fitzwilliam of Sprotborough; Maud was the widow of Henry, Count of Eu, and she and her second husband Henry de Stuteville (sometimes spelled d’Estouteville) did leave England permanently to settle on his lands in Normandy.
Those familiar with the layout of Conisbrough castle will notice that I have put the chapel (as I did in The Sins of the Father) on the lower floor rather than in its true position higher up in the keep; I have also allocated as the armoury the stone building next to the inner gatehouse whose origins are obscure.
Mediaeval weddings differed in some respects from modern ones. There were of course no civil services: all services took place at a church. The wedding itself was solemnised outside the door in order to make it as public as possible, and then the party would go inside for the nuptial mass afterwards. Brides wore their best dress, but not white (white bridal gowns didn’t become popular until the early nineteenth century). Noble weddings in particular were more of a business arrangement between two families than a statement of affection between two people – it would not have been unusual for the bride and groom not to set eyes on each other until after the match had already been arranged by their relatives, especially if they were young. The declarations the couple made were more about lands than love. If they happened to care for each other (or at least to have the potential to do so) then that was something of a bonus – and we do have evidence of couples forming very strong bonds during their married lives – but it was by no means a prerequisite to the match. This is probably the only instance I can think of where the lower orders in the thirteenth century might have been a little better off than their noble counterparts; although arrangements did often involve family negotiations over lands or chattels, the peasant couple were much more likely to know each other and to have formed an attachment before their wedding day.
Once in a marriage, a noblewoman had very little power, or at least not officially. She was, in effect, owned by her husband – all her goods became his and she was obliged to obey him in all respects. Marriage was not a partnership of equals. Of course, not all couples featured a domineering male and a cowering female, but nobody would question the idea that the husband had the right to beat his wife if he saw fit. I thought hard before writing the scene in which William Fitzwilliam hits his wife: to me it is a repellent act, but in a noble household in the early thirteenth century nobody, frankly, would bat an eyelid. It was, in effect, the ‘happy’ ending for all concerned, or at least for the men in the room, in that what they saw as the natural order had been restored. The wife would do as she was told in future.
Although they had few legal rights, noblewomen did have some pleasures available to them. Hawking was one of these: although women did not take part in the fast-pursuit hunting of larger animals such as boar and stags, hawking was considered a more ladylike activity where men and women could ride out together in search of their prey. This must have been a rare and enjoyable experience for those women who did not appreciate their normal sequestered living conditions.
Another form of leisure available to the nobility was the enjoyment of literature. A wide range of narratives in a variety of genres were produced at this time; they were meant to be performed in public rather than read privately, and professional minstrels would travel the country visiting castles, cities or fairs in order to perform texts they had rehearsed. The feats of memory required to memorise stories which were thousands of lines long were astonishing, so minstrels would have trained from an early age. Although the constant travel would have made for a hard life, a good minstrel with a decent repertoire would have found a warm welcome almost anywhere.
Among the most popular texts were chansons de geste (literally ‘songs of deeds’), long poems which told epic tales of knightly heroes and their feats in battle. The Song of Roland is one of the great examples of the genre, depicting the battles of the ninth-century French emperor Charlemagne and his nephew Roland against the Saracens. It was probably originally composed in the eleventh century, but it enjoyed enduring popularity for hundreds of years throughout western Europe. There are nine original manuscripts of it still surviving, and the text has been edited by numerous modern scholars. The quotes from the poem in this book are from F. Whitehead’s 1942 Blackwell edition; translations are my own.
The target audience of chansons de geste was aristocratic and male (i.e. the people who could afford to pay writers and performers), so the stories were full of scenes featuring the brotherhood of heroic knights, descriptions of luxury armour and gory combat details, which the knightly listeners would have appreciated. It might seem odd to us now that depictions of men wading through entrails or walking round with their brains dribbling out their ears classed as entertainment, but that just demonstrates how different our society is from the world of the thirteenth-century nobleman.
Life for the peasant community at this time was very different to that of their overlords, with little time for leisure. Although some opportunities may have arisen for young men to leave their birthplaces and seek advancement elsewhere (particularly if they lived in a place such as Conisbrough where the earl’s household offered opportunities), most people worked on the land in a never-ending annual cycle of drudgery. Margins were small, and many were ‘harvest-dependent’, a euphemistic term which basically means ‘liable to die after one or two bad harvests’. Most families would owe service in their lord’s fields each week, the number of days of which would increase near harvest time; depending on family situation and local custom this might have been the householder himself, or he may have been able to send an able-bodied substitute.
Contrary to popular belief, midsummer was actually the leanest time of the year for food. The grain from last year’s harvest would be almost gone, being eked out by the careful housewife, and the new year’s crop wouldn’t be available for a number of weeks. Cows did not produce milk all year so the supply of dairy food would be drying up; chickens had ceased laying, and livestock would not be slaughtered until the early winter.
The mortality rate for all classes and ages was much higher than it is today. People died of diseases and infections which would be curable now, as well as being subject to a frighteningly high possibility of accident or injury. The perinatal period was particularly dangerous: women had roughly a one in eight chance of dying in labour or shortly afterwards, and something like one in six newborns did not survive. Women were generally shriven of their sins as a precaution before they started labour, and a newborn could be baptised straight after birth in the home, as waiting even the usual day before a church baptism might be too long. Unbaptised infants were denied burial in consecrated ground and it was believed that they could not enter heaven as, although personally innocent, they still had the stain of original sin on them. They would spend eternity in limbo: they were not subject to the physical torments of hell but were forever denied the eternal bliss of heaven.
Those lovely people who read early drafts of this book raised a number of queries about some things which puzzled or surprised them, so to conclude this note I would like to offer clarification on some points which relate to daily life in the early thirteenth century.
Sugar was a hugely expensive luxury item which had to be imported from the Middle East. It arrived in the form of cones or loaves and was generally brown, not having been subjected to the modern refining processes which produce white sugar. It would have been available only to the rich and would certainly have been reserved for special dishes, and kept under lock and key. Honey was the main sweetener in general use, although even this would have been a rare treat for many villagers.
Mealtimes varied according to class and occupation. The main meal in the castle was dinner, which was served in the hall late in the morning and ran to numerous courses for the nobility; there would also have been a less elaborate evening meal. Dinner was deliberately a public affair where the lord could show his generosity to his household, and the household in turn had the honour of eating in the same room as him. Our earl still takes his evening meal in public as well, but some fashionable nobles were starting to retire to a more private chamber, or solar, for theirs. Villagers were more likely to take some bread with them to their work in the fields and then to eat a hot meal of vegetable pottage, probably with more bread, at home in the evening at the end of the day’s labours. Breakfast was not a formal meal, being generally considered fit only for infants and the old or infirm, but those who could afford it may have had a little something.
Some readers were surprised to see Joanna riding astride her horse when she went hawking. Side saddles were not seen in England until over a hundred years after the events depicted here; the first documented example, a chair-like affair with a footrest, is credited to Anne of Bohemia (1366–1394), wife of Richard II. Before this, if women were sitting pillion behind men and/or they were travelling at an amble and being led, they could sit sideways on the horse, and there are depictions of this happening in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. However, this allows no control of the mount, so in any situation where a woman had to control her horse by herself she would have needed to ride astride.
Something a little more esoteric which confused a few readers was the mediaeval perception of time. We are used to our structured, scheduled days of twenty-four hours split with precision into minutes and seconds; to those in the early thirteenth century this would have been an alien concept. In a world with no clocks or watches they had no way of dividing time so precisely, so a day consisted of twelve hours which ran from sunrise to sunset, meaning that hours could indeed be longer or shorter depending on the time of year. Sext (‘the sixth hour’) was at noon; the day was further subdivided by terce (‘the third hour’) mid-morning, and nones (‘the ninth hour’) mid-afternoon. For any division smaller than that people would need to use other measures, for example ‘the time it takes to walk a mile’ or ‘the time it takes to say three paternosters’. Something you certainly wouldn’t hear, if you arrived in Conisbrough in June 1217, is anyone saying, ‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes’!
And finally, I have been asked why Edwin and his fellow villagers weren’t out practising their archery on Sunday morning, as this is something often depicted in mediaeval-themed books or films. Bows and arrows were certainly in general use (although bows were not as large as the classic ‘longbow’, taller than a man, which developed later) and some of the villagers might have been out practising for recreational purposes, but the law making it compulsory for all men to equip themselves with a bow and arrows was not passed until 1252, and Sunday practice didn’t become compulsory until 1363. As Edwin isn’t terribly keen on anything involving weapons, I’ve let him off. For now.