Cometh the hour, cometh SORROW...

Switching from historical to speculative fiction, Part One of 'Sorrow', the first of a series of mini-sequels to my fantasy novel, "The Best Weapon", co-written with my good friend Martin Bolton, is due to be released by Musa Publishing at the beginning of September.

The wondrous thing about writing fantasy as opposed to historical fiction is that the writer can just make stuff up, and not have to justify any of it to The Ricardian Society. "Sorrow" was a joy to write in that regard, as Martin and me (Martin and I? A writer really should know his grammar) got stuck into the fabric of the fictional universe we created between us.

Much of The World Apparent, as we called it, was created in London pubs when we both worked at the Tate Gallery, and the cities and oceans and continents first came to life scribbled on the back of beermats or in puddles of stale booze. The pub, as William Shakespeare might have agreed - he is said to have died after a mammoth drinking session with his mate Ben Johnson - has always been the hub of all the best in British creative thinking.

"Sorrow" takes place a few years after events in The Best Weapon. The World Apparent is still an unstable place, wracked by factions and vicious civil wars, and threatening to slide back into barbarism at the drop of a broadsword. Into the maelstrom wanders Sorrow, a mysterious little boy who everyone suddenly wants a piece of...

To give a better idea of the setting and background to all this, I thought the following review of The Best Weapon taken from Amazon might be useful:

 'To me, most of the sword and sorcery fantasies follow the same storyline. The Best Weapon, on the other hand, offers a new twist on the genre with a tale with an original plot. In this world, gods are petty, selfish beings more intent on their own position amongst the others. The Lords of Hell are twin demon brothers, two scheming, conniving beings. When the brothers perceive an approaching threat, their only recourse is to create two brothers out of clay and place them into the wombs of woman at opposite sides of the world where they will grow and mature until the demon brothers can make use of them.

One brother, Naiyar, is born into the Djanki tribe, a fierce, warlike people, bent on conquest. The other brother, Fulk, is born to a woman in the far north where the remnants of the Old Kingdom have taken root. Orphaned at an early age, he is taken in by the Knights Templar, and ancient order dedicated to supporting the rightful king. Or at this time, the infant queen, the king recently dying with no male heir. Through trials and tribulations, events point to the brothers meeting, but what they might do then is unknown.

The rhythm and tempo of the book flows well, despite bouncing back and forth between the two brothers and some assorted characters such as the Archpriest Flambard, the regent of the Old Kingdom. The character voice is appropriate, and the details of this world are well thought-out and logical.

One point I liked was the transformation of the Archpriest from a scheming, but not horrible man, to someone evil after being "touched" by one of the Lords of Hell. With only a few sentences here and there, the fact that this is a transformation out of the Archprinest's control is evident.

I also liked the fact that the various characters had their own individual voices and speech patterns. Too often, each character in a book speaks with one voice, that of the author. But in this book, I could read a quote and recognize the character. The two brothers, in particular, ahd their own identities (I wondered that as the book has two authors, if each one took one of the brothers and penned his dialogue.) Of course, by making them different, they came across differently. I felt that of the two, Naiyar was the more colorful, complete, and complex character.

William Mallet, the Master-at-Arms for the Templars was perhaps my favorite character. Initially seeming to be a callous tyrant, the authors gradually coaxed out a fuller picture of an honorable and brave man. We were never directly told this, but his true character was revealed by his actions.'

PIRATES!! (but no Johnny Depp...)

"Ende oec mede dese lede Crabbe,

Warp oec in sine swabbe,

Dese dede opt water grote scade,

Hine dede niemene genade..."

No, I've not been overdosing on merry pills - these are the words of the Antwerp chronicler, Lodewijk Van Velthem, recording the antics of the notorious Flemish pirate, John Crabbe. Translated into modern English they read something like: "'And in addition to the harm these men wrought, Crabbe also contributed his share. He wrought great damage on the seas, showing mercy to no one. Now he appeared here, now there..."

Van Velthem signed off by saying of Crabbe and his associates that "Such is the evil company of robbers - they do not keep to what they promise; and in the end themselves are deceived."

John Crabbe, however, was immune to any form of deception. In a long and wildly varied career as a pirate and seafaring mercenary, starting in about 1305 and ending with his death in England in 1352, he enjoyed the kind of success that later small-time buccaneers such as Blackbeard and Calico Jack (the inspiration for Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, incidentally) would have killed for. He is also the latest villain to make an appearance in the ninth of my John Swale Chronicles, a splendidly amoral character, if little-known these days, and one I couldn't resist including. 

Born some time in the late 13th century in Muiden, a small town on the Flemish coast near the mouth of the Zwin, Crabbe had an inauspicious start to life. His surname was a fairly common one in Bruges and other places in Flanders - for instance, there was a Clais Crabbe recorded as living in 1347, and Crabbe's nephew, 'son of Peter Crabbe' (recorded as 'Crabbekin', possibly to avoid confusion) served as a pirate aboard his famous uncle's ships. 

John Crabbe's name first appears in connection with piracy with a robbery committed near the port of La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay, in 1305. Here he and his crew forcefully seized a a ship called the 'Waardebourc'  belonging to one John de la Waerde, a merchant of Dordrecht. The pirates made a thorough job of it, snatching 160 tuns of wine and all the goods on board, torching the ship and holding the crew to ransom. De la Waerde appealled for justice and recompense to just about everyone, including Philip the Fair, King of France, but even with the help of the Count of Flanders it proved impossible to bring the slippery Crabbe to justice.

Nothing more is heard of the pirate for a few years, but in 1310 he struck again. This time he bagged an even richer prize, a ship belonging to Alice the Countess Marshal carrying a fortune in gold, jewels, expensive cloth, silver, and other items valued at 2000 pounds sterling. The ship was sailing peacefully in the Strait of Dover between Dover and Whitsand when Crabbe's ship, the De La Mue, descended on it. This time the King of England requested that the hapless Count of Flanders bring his wayward subjects to justice, and once again Crabbe slipped the clutches of the law. 

It turned out he had made good his escape to Aberdeen in Scotland, where he cleverly re-invented himself as a merchant and a soldier-for-hire, assisting the Scots in their endless wars against England. In his absence he was convicted of robbery, and condemned to a particularly nasty death - breaking on the wheel - if he ever returned to Flanders. But return to Flanders he did, many times, to sell goods from plundered English vessels in Flemish ports, and no Flemish official had the nerve to lay a hand on him. This is unsurprising, for by 1315 Crabbe had won fame and reputation as a tireless and ruthless freebooter, and not a man to cross.

Crabbe made himself indispensable to the Scots, advising them on the defence of Berwick-upon-Tweed when the English attempted to recapture the place in 1318-19. The Scottish chronicler John Barbour was moved to praise Crabbe in verse, saying that "John Crabbe, a Fleming was he, a man of great subtlety..." The pirate took advantage of such plaudits to wring favours from the Scottish government, and by the time he appears in my tale - 1332 - he was a respected burgher of Berwick, and in receipt of handsome payments for supplying the town with arms and stolen goods. 

He is, however, about to be pitched into a new war between Scotland and her old foe England that even John Crabbe, with all his experience and resourcefulness, might be hard put to survive...

 

 

"A most marvellous thing happened that day..."

...or so said the Lanercost chronicler, describing the events of the 10th-11th August 1331. The chronicler's definition of 'marvellous' might not be everyone's, as he was enthusing over the great piles of dead soldiers that lay on the field of Dupplin Moor - "the pile of dead rising up from the ground was more than a spear's length in height", drooled the chronicler, clearly experiencing a tight little thrill of ecstasy at the thought. Well, a medieval monk in an isolated monastery had to get his kicks where he could.

Sir John Swale, the much put-upon knight of Cumberland and 'hero' of my series of historical tales - courtesy of Musa Publishing - is about to experience the slaughterhouse that was the Battle of Dupplin Moor in the forthcoming instalments of his Chronicles, "The Mercy of God" and the appropriately-titled "Dupplin Moor". Driven by his endless quest for revenge on the Scottish knight who murdered most of his family, and to rescue his sister from slavery, he joins the army of the Disinherited led by Edward Balliol, would-be King of Scotland. At Dupplin Moor Balliol's vastly outnumbered army finds itself squaring up to over three times their number of Scots, led by Scotland's regent, the Earl of Mar.

The reasons behind Balliol's invasion are complex. Son of John Balliol, the man remembered by history as 'Toom Tabard' or the 'Empty Coat' for his short and hapless reign as King of Scotland, Edward spent much of his early life in exile in France, dreaming of returning to Scotland to claim his inheritance. Evidently a proud and arrogant man, he refused to marry while in exile, for no French noblewoman (as he thought) was worthy to marry a future King of Scots.

His chance came in 1329, when Robert I of Scotland - Robert the Bruce of spider-bothering fame - died of leprosy and left his kingdom to his infant son, David II. David's right to rule was challenged by "The Disinherited", a group of Scottish and English nobles who had lost their lands in Scotland as a result of opposing the Bruce. After two years of scheming, Henry Beaumont, the chief of the Disinherited, sailed to France to meet with Balliol and plan for his much-delayed return to power and glory. With the young and ambitious King of England, Edward III, urging them on and offering covert military support, Balliol and his cronies started preparing for war...the results, as John Swale is about to discover, were unpleasantly gory.

The Peace of Elias

M'good friend and co-writer - as well as talented illustrator - Martin Bolton has written a rather wonderful short story, 'The Peace of Elias', now available from Amazon. I recommend everyone checks it out!

 

http://www.amazon.com/The-Peace-of-Elias-ebook/dp/B008A6B14U/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340373111&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Peace+of+Elias

 

Elias is a poverty-stricken farmer living on a ridge over-looking the town of Arc-Stone in far Western Temeria with his only surviving relative, his giant mute son, Zia. Living on the fringes of society, their dilapidated farmstead sits high on the ridge next a dark, tangled forest, reputed to be haunted and shunned by the people of Arc-Stone. Elias and Zia are regarded by the townsfolk with a mixture of fear and pity.

When they stumble across the unconscious form of Cyrus, an arrogant young noble, he accuses them of robbery and plots their deaths. But Cyrus underestimates the power of the bond between Elias and his son, and Elias finds out what Zia has been doing in the forest...

The Pretender

After a short break to catch its breath, the John Swale Chronicles are set to ride again - and walk, and stagger, and probably collapse, riddled with arrows, a couple of times - in the next instalment, 'The Pretender', to be released by the lovely folks at Musa Publishing on the 6th of July.

Here the scene switches to Scotland, where Robert de Bruce has recently died, leaving the throne to his son, David, and the regents Donal of Mar and the Earl of Moray. The future looks bleak for the Scots - their new King is just a boy of seven, Moray is dying, and the ever-covetous English are casting their covetous eyes north, where the pickings have just got easier now Bruce is gone.

However, the young Edward III is wary of sticking his toes in the boiling pan of Scottish politics, and needs a convenient stooge to do the fighting for him while he settles affairs in England: enter Edward Balliol, the 'pretender' of the title. He is the son of old John Balliol, otherwise known as 'Toom Tabard' or the Empty Coat, once King of Scotland and now very definitely dead. Having spent much of his life in exile in France, Balliol junior is desperately keen to get his hands on the Scottish crown, and eagerly snatches at King Edward's covert offer of military support.

While these high and mighty events roll and tumble, John Swale's sister, Margaret, faces the prospect of losing her husband and her son to the looming war with England. Her son, a belligerent and fiercely patriotic youth, ignores her pleas to remain at home, and rides away with his father to the coronation of King David, leaving Margaret bereft and alone...

Take a look at this guy. It's a climactic scene in *That Movie*, and old beardy here in the unflattering metal hat is about to order his archers to shoot at his own men in order to win a battle. Check out those true-blue eyes. Brrr. And the prosthetic nose.

Pretty nasty, huh? That's the least of his crimes. Elsewhere in *That Movie* he institutes the mass rape of newlywed women in Scotland, hangs unarmed Scottish noblemen, beats the tar out of his own son and – in a scene that appears to be played for laughs - throws a homosexual out of a window.

That's Edward Longshanks for you, the 'most ruthless man to ever sit on the English throne' according to the strange leper/hobbit-type creature that is Robert de Bruce's father in *That Movie*. He's a mean, nasty, cruel, inhuman piece of work, played to perfection by the late Patrick McGoohan. And what's more, he's got one of those posh BBC English accents, which is always a clear sign of evil.

Turning to a 1960s textbook my father gave me - 'The Living World of History', no less - we have a rather different description of the same man: 'King Edward I, who reigned from 1272 to 1307, was a rare character. Tall and erect and sinewy, his length of leg gained him the nickname of "Longshanks." He was a proud and truly royal prince, a fearless and peerless knight, and altogether a man's man."

So there - separated by just a few decades, we have one portrayal of Edward as a peerlessly erect - *blush* - prince, and then the sneering slimeball of Mel's opus. Divergence of opinion on Edward is nothing new. Victorian historians tended to lionise him, such as Bishop William Stubbs, who called him The English Justinian. We don't hark much to the Victorians these days, what with them being horrid imperialists who got sexually aroused by table legs and all - yah, no, it's totally true, I saw it on a documentary somewhere - but the generally positive view of Edward's reign and achievements is still maintained by modern academics such as Michael Prestwich.

Elsewhere opinions on Edward are pretty negative, and undoubtedly influenced by *That Movie*. I've noticed in recent weeks some extreme comments made about him on internet and Facebook forums (surely the founts of all knowledge), including wild claims that he was in the habit of torturing and murdering his prisoners, and a sort of medieval Hitler who committed mass genocide on a more or less daily basis. The poor guy can’t catch a break anywhere, and one recent author of self-proclaimed ‘historical integrity’ claims that Edward wasn’t even his father’s son, but the bastard offspring of an affair between Simon de Montfort and Eleanor of Provence. Portraying English medieval queens as wanton adulteresses who had affairs and then foisted their backstairs spawn on the throne is a nasty tendency in recent historical fiction, and really needs to stop.

Edward could certainly be cruel. Matthew Paris records an unpleasant story, possibly untrue, of the youthful Edward and his Lusignan buddies setting upon and mutilating a defenceless peasant for a laugh. He at times behaved with great savagery in Scotland and Wales, including the infamous massacre at Berwick, the incarceration of Bruce's female relatives in hanging cages, and his refusal to allow the garrison at Stirling to surrender until he had tried out his new toy, the gigantic siege engine 'War-Wolf', on the defences. More horrors could be added to that list. Medieval warfare was unimaginably brutal, and Edward's enemies were equally ruthless. 

Contemporaries accorded Edward a great deal more respect than they did his predecessor and successor. Hard he may have been, but the 'first knight of Christendom' united England after the catastrophes of his father's reign, earned a heroic reputation on Crusade, made monumental legal reforms, and strengthened the power of the English crown. More than that, he was lucky (he once narrowly avoided being crushed by a collapsing ceiling while playing chess), had the gift of inspiring loyalty in his barons (most of the time) and was supremely successful in war. 'England rejoice, thy prince is peerless,' was the verdict of the Lanercost chronicler after the Battle of Falkirk, which was the kind of press Henry III and Edward II could only dream about. Bar a serious crisis in the late 1290s, Edward was extremely popular with his English subjects. One of the most popular acts of his reign – obscene to modern eyes – was his expulsion of the Jews in 1290. As Sharon Penman said on her blog recently, Anti-Semitism was a virus that all medieval Christians inhaled at birth, and the English were no exception.  

In person, Edward must have been mesmerizing. At six feet two inches, he was taller than most of his contemporaries, with arms too long for his body, a drooping eyelid inherited from his father (not Simon de Montfort) and a lisp. His rages were terrifying, and one prelate was said to have dropped dead from sheer fright after Edward erupted at him. He did indeed assault his son, the future Edward II, on at least one occasion, tearing clumps of hair from the prince’s head and kicking him out of the room after Young Ned had unwisely asked for lands to be bestowed on his best friend, Piers Gaveston.

There was a softer side to this towering bully, and some evidence of a sense of humour. He broke down and wept when informed that his (real) father had died, and fell to pieces when he lost his beloved first wife, Eleanor of Castile. “My harp is turned to mourning”, he wrote as her funeral cortége travelled south to London, and the final staging-post of her journey, Charing Cross, is testament to his love for her: ‘Charing’ is a corruption of ‘Cher Reine’ or ‘Dear Queen’. A record of a bet Edward had with the royal laundress Matilda of Waltham, in which he challenged her to a horse-race (and lost), suggests he was capable of cracking a smile, as does the letter he wrote in the 1300s concerning Nicholas de Segrave: that knight, Edward recommended, was to be given plenty of parkland to roam in, for ‘we well know his talent for running away’. The joke creaks, but it’s something.

And then there are the slaughtered innocents of Berwick. Ultimately, Edward was a hard man in a hard time, and in many ways an alien and repellent figure to our eyes. But very few medieval kings could possibly be described as pleasant people by modern standards, and it wasn’t their job to be nice. As cruel and as able as his despised grandfather, King John, but a great deal luckier and more successful, Edward I could perhaps be judged as W.L Warren judged John: a man with ‘the abilities of a great ruler, but the inclinations of a petty tyrant’.

 

Defaming the dead...

...don't do it, is the message of this blog post. A number of fellow writers and bloggers have recently - and quite rightly - taken up cudgels against the defamation of long-dead people for the sake of 'exciting' alternative takes on history, usually in novels. Recent blog posts on Kathryn Warner's rather wonderful site about Edward II are well worth reading:

http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/dont-defame-dead-1.html

And the equally wonderful Sarah Butterfield...

http://sarahshistoryblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/the-queen-as-whore/

This sort of thing has been going on a long time, and is an easy habit to fall into - readers of my novel might notice that I don't hestitate to stick the boot into certain historical personages, but I like to think there is at least some justification for it. But some things are beyond the pale, particularly the very nasty trend towards depicting medieval queens and noblewomen as whores: these kind of slurs are essential, otherwise most 'alternative' theories concerning the parentage of certain kings are dead in the water.

So - any of you aspiring historical authors out there, have a sense of empathy and responsibility, and pause for thought before depicting William Marshal in print as a cackling paedophile (or whatever). Failing that, simply change all the names and locations and tout your package of wanton lies and half-truths as a fantasy novel. Sorted!