A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

HISTORY IS LIKE AN OLD MOVIE WITH A DEGRADED PRINT. Scratches and crackling incomprehensible dialogue mar even the latest scenes, and the further back you go, frames are burned out and sometimes whole reels are missing. Characters walk on and disappear a moment later, their story untold. Narrative jumps challenge even the most careful viewer, and meaning is lost or warped in the whir of seemingly unrelated scenes.

Frustrating as this is for the historian, it provides an exciting opportunity for the novelist. The author can polish up what remains and fill in the gaps where something is missing, draw connections, perhaps, or search for that elusive meaning.

Decades of remarkable academic research have filled in a great deal of our understanding of the eleventh century, but much of that era is still ambiguous or intangible. Heated debate rolls on about the politics and the motivations of the central figures, hardly surprising when the sources are so few and the propaganda so great. One thing we do know is that the men and women of those days were the same as us. The same drives, the same hungers, loves, flaws, ambitions, and failings. We don’t need narrative sources to understand that. We know that men who seek power sometimes do terrible things. We know that there are few heroes, few villains, but lots of people trying to get by as they become swept up in events beyond their control.

Our protagonist in this novel, Hereward, is an intriguing prospect. Few today know of him, although his exploits have attained a mythic power that make him one of the three great heroes of Britain, alongside King Arthur and Robin Hood. He shares many qualities of those other two legends, but Hereward is rooted in a harder reality. The archetypal warrior’s story is told in De Gestis Herewardi Saxonis and touched on in various monastic chronicles, and we are aware, in general terms, of the part he played in the English resistance to William the Conqueror. But even then the “truth”—whatever that might be—is hidden by what appears to be fabulous invention as the writers of the time attempted to cast a mythic sheen on Hereward. How much can be trusted? Certainly, the account in De Gestis is based in part upon an older version, and has been extracted from only a few surviving leaves, all of them mildewed and torn, so a great deal is missing. Timelines are confused, narratives conflicting. Yet it appears that Hereward’s story was part of a popular tradition and that he was regarded, even within years of his death, as a legendary hero.

The missing reels of the film of Hereward’s life are many. Historians have attempted to build a family background for the warrior from fragmentary evidence. Many accounts have veered toward the romantic and were common currency until recent times. But a detailed investigation by Peter Rex in his book Hereward: The Last Englishman demands a reassessment of much that was accepted about the warrior’s life, and it is this more convincing work that I have decided to use as the basis for “my” Hereward. I am also particularly indebted to Elizabeth Van Houts, whose essay “Hereward and Flanders” in Anglo-Saxon England 28 (1999) provided the historical background for some of my account of the hero’s time in exile.

Two other notes: the dates used at the beginnings of several chapters correspond to our modern calendar, for the sake of clarity. And while Hereward calls himself a Mercian, at the time of this story the old Kingdom of Mercia had become a part of England during the political unification of the country in the previous century. Hereward’s claim is purely a matter of cultural identity, based on the area where his father had his major landholding (even though he spent much of his childhood in the Fens). There was still a great deal of rivalry among residents of the old kingdoms, in the manner of the longstanding enmity between people of Lancashire and Yorkshire today.

In the end, Hereward remains only a ghost-image on the screen of history. His life story is fragmented and distorted. But the essence remains: a bloody warrior who used terror as a weapon; a flawed man, but a hero, perhaps, as great as any we have known.