September recipe: Sausage and apple ragout

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Acorns bouncing off my head as I cycle to the post office. An adolescent squirrel burying nuts in the lawn. Spiders in the bath (every season has its downside).

Rosy apples on the tree, late tomatoes, plump onions, and a couple of late courgettes (zucchini for readers in the USA) that have been hiding under the leaves until now and have attained Zeppelin-like proportions. Here’s how to turn them into an autumn ragout.

Sausage and apple ragout (serves 2)

2 good quality pork sausages
2 oz (approx 50 g) dried chick peas (or you can use tinned ones, in which case you’ll need about double the weight)
1 onion
1 clove garlic
8 oz (approx 250 g) courgettes (zucchini)
8 oz (approx 250 g) apples
8 oz (approx 250 g) tomatoes (or you can use tinned ones)
1 teaspoon (1 x 5 ml spoon) sugar
1 Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) fresh , or 1 teaspoon (1 x 5 ml spoon) dried, sage
2 Tablespoons (2 x 15 ml spoon) red wine or cider (optional)

Soak the dried chick peas in plenty of cold water overnight or for 4-6 hours. If you forget, cover them in boiling water and soak for 1 hour.
Rinse two or three times, and boil for about 1 – 1.5 hour until the chick peas are cooked. Or just use tinned chick peas, which can be used straight from the tin.
Peel and chop the onion.
Cut the courgette (zucchini) into chunks if large, or thick slices if small.
Peel and core the apple and cut into chunks.
Peel the garlic clove.
Wash and chop the tomatoes if using fresh tomatoes (you can peel them if you want, but I never bother).
Heat approx 1 Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) cooking oil in a large saucepan. Fry the sausages over a medium heat until browned all over. Remove the sausages.
Add the onion, courgette (zucchini) and apples to the pan and fry gently until starting to brown. Crush the garlic and mix in.
Add the chopped tomatoes and wine or cider if using, and stir well.
Stir in the cooked chick peas.
Add the sugar and chopped sage. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Replace the sausages.
Simmer on a low heat for approx 30 minutes. Or put in a casserole and bake in a moderate oven (about 170 C) for about 45 – 60 minutes. Stir from time t time and add a little water if it starts to boil dry.
Serve with potatoes, rice or fresh bread, and a green salad if liked.

You can make a double quantity and freeze it as an instant ready-meal.
You can vary the vegetables and herbs according to taste and availability. Carrots, sweet peppers and aubergine go well in this dish, and marjoram, oregano and thyme all work well instead of sage, as do dried mixed herbs. You can also vary the dried beans; red kidney beans and haricot beans can be substituted for the chick peas. Diced potatoes can be added to make the ragout a complete one-pot meal, though if you do this you’ll need to add extra liquid.

For a vegetarian dish, miss out the sausage and double the quantity of beans.

Origins of Northumbria: Dating Aethelferth’s annexation of Deira

The English (‘Anglo-Saxon’) kingdom of Northumbria was constructed in the first half of the seventh century AD from two smaller kingdoms, Deira (roughly the area of modern Yorkshire) and Bernicia (roughly modern Northumberland and County Durham, plus some of Lothian and the Scottish Borders region). The name ‘Northumbria’ is first recorded by Bede, and as Bede has to explain more than once that it means ‘the people living north of the River Humber’, it seems clear that the name was a fairly new coinage at the time and may have been Bede’s invention. Each of the two constituent kingdoms had its own royal dynasty, and the struggles between them are the stuff of sagas.

My attention was drawn to one character in this saga, Eadwine of Deira (585 – 633 AD), who is the central character in my novel Paths of Exile. One aspect that attracted me to start telling his story is that he had endured a long period of exile and not only survived it but returned to build a great kingdom. Now, the first thing I needed to start building Eadwine’s story is the dates of his exile. We can deduce from the length of his reign given in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People that his exile ended some time in 617 AD, when he was about 32. But when did it begin?

We know from Bede that Eadwine’s deadly enemy was Aethelferth the King of Bernicia, and that Eadwine was a fugitive during Aethelferth’s reign. It seems likely, therefore, that Eadwine’s exile began when Aethelferth annexed Deira and combined it with his own kingdom of Bernicia to make the larger unit that Bede and later ages called Northumbria. So when did Aethelferth annex Deira?

Evidence

Bede

Bede gives no direct date, but mentions several snippets that may have bearing on the case:

1. Aethelferth won a major battle against the Irish kingdom of Dal Riada (modern Argyll in western Scotland) in 603 AD. Bede says this was in the eleventh year of his reign, which lasted 24 years in total (Book I Ch. 34). We know Aethelferth died in 617 AD, so his reign began in 593 AD and 603 AD was its eleventh year.
2. Aethelferth was married to Acha, sister of Eadwine. Their son Oswald was aged 38 when he died on 5 August 642 AD (Bede, Book III Ch. 9). He must therefore have been born between August 603 and August 604, and so his parents Aethelferth and Acha must have been married by at latest early October 603.
3. Aelle, Eadwine’s father, was king in Deira when not-yet-Pope Gregory the Great saw some Deiran slave boys for sale in a Roman market and made his famous pun, “not Angles but angels”. This happened before Gregory was appointed Pope in around 590 AD, but after he returned to Rome from Constantinople in around 585/586 AD.

Historia Brittonum

Chapter 63: “Eadfered Flesaurs reigned twelve years in Bernicia, and twelve others in Deira”
Eadfered is an alternative spelling of Aethelferth or Ethelfrid, and Flesaurs is a Brittonic nickname meaning something like ‘The Artful’ or ‘The Twister’. The total of 24 years for the total reign length agrees with Bede.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

"A.D. 588. This year died King Ella; and Ethelric reigned after
him five years."
"A.D. 593. This year Ethelfrith succeeded to the kingdom of the Northumbrians. He was the son of Ethelric; Ethelric of Ida."

Reginald of Durham (12th century):

“Aethelferth not only drove from his kingdom Aella king of the Deirans whose daughter he had married, but after inflicting a series of defeats on him and expelling him from several refuges he deprived him of his life and kingdom together.”

Quoted in John Marsden, Northanhymbre Saga.


Interpretation

Historia Brittonum is specific and precise; Aethelferth ruled for a total of 24 years, and was king of Deira for 12 of them. Bede confirms the 24-year total and as we can deduce from his dates that Aethelferth’s reign ended in 617 AD, we can further deduce that Aethelferth’s reign began in 593 AD and thus that he annexed Deira some time in 605 AD.

This is a year or two after his victory over Dal Riada, and a year or two after his marriage to Acha. Perhaps significantly, it is also after the birth of Oswald, who had Deiran royal blood and thus a claim to the Deiran kingdom through his mother Acha. Maybe Aethelferth was on a roll after his victory over Dal Riada, and had decided to turn his attention southwards after securing his position in the north. The date also fits with Reginald of Durham’s assertion that Aethelferth annexed Deira after his marriage to Acha.

The date even fits with Pope Gregory’s encounter with the slave boys, as this occurred between 585 and 590 AD and Aelle would have been king in Deira until 605 AD.

So we have three different sources, one eighth-century English (Bede), one ninth-century Brittonic (Historia Brittonum) and one medieval English (Reginald of Durham) that don’t contradict each other and that are all consistent with a date of 605 AD for Aethelferth’s military annexation of Deira and the beginning of Eadwine’s exile. Eadwine would have been a young adult at the time, aged about 20. He would have been old enough to be a significant threat to Aethelferth, especially if he was already showing signs of his later prowess as a warrior, and this would explain why Aethelferth hunted him all over Britain for the next dozen years. So this is the date I went with in Paths of Exile, which is set in the autumn and winter of 605 and 606 AD. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s date of 588 AD for Aelle’s death conflicts with this interpretation, but I think the balance (three sources against one) favours the date of 605 AD. I also think the conflict can be at least partly reconciled – more about this in a later post.

Does this make sense?

Pause in posts

The next post on this blog will be on or around Monday 24 September.

See you all then.

Kingdom of the Ark, by Lorraine Evans. Book review

Edition reviewed: Simon and Schuster, 2000, ISBN 0-684-86064-3

Kingdom of the Ark is a work of narrative non-fiction, putting forward the theory that refugees from Ancient Egypt settled in Britain and/or Ireland in the middle of the Bronze Age, under the leadership of Meritaten, eldest daughter of the ‘Heretic Pharaoh’ Akhenaten.

Medieval legend

A medieval manuscript called the Scotichronicon, or Chronicles of the Scots, written in AD 1435 by a monk named Walter Bower, gives the following legend about the origin of the Scots:

“In ancient times Scota, the daughter of pharaoh, left Egypt with her husband Gaythelos by name and a large following. For they had heard of the disasters which were going to come upon Egypt, and so through the instructions of the gods they fled from certain plagues that were to come. They took to the sea, entrusting themselves to the guidance of the gods. After sailing in this way for many days over the sea with troubled minds, they were finally glad to put their boats in at a certain shore because of bad weather.”

The manuscript goes on to say that the Egyptians settled in what is now Scotland, were later chased out by the local population and moved to Ireland, where they merged with an Irish tribe and became known as the Scotti. They became High Kings of Ireland, and eventually re-invaded and re-conquered Scotland, which gains its name from their founding princess, Scota.

This sort of folk etymology, deriving contemporary names from (legendary?) eponymous founders, was extremely popular in the Middle Ages. For example, Britain is supposed to have been named after Brutus, Gwynedd after a (legendary?) king Cunedda, and the seven provinces of the Picts after the seven sons of Cruithne. Orkneyinga Saga, written in Iceland in about 1200 AD, attributes the name of Norway to a legendary founder called Nor, and Historia Brittonum, written in northern Britain around 830 AD, attributes the names of major European tribes (Franks, Goths, Alamans, Burgundians, Longobards, Saxones, Vandals) to the sons of a descendant of Noah.

Kingdom of the Ark attempts to find evidence to support the story of Scota’s journey from Egypt to Britain or Ireland.

Egyptian history

As Scota is not an Egyptian name, the first task for the author is to identify a plausible candidate princess from surviving Egyptian records. The Walter Bower manuscript gives the name of Scota’s father as Achencres, and a historian called Manetho, writing around 300 BC, gives Achencres as the Greek version of Akhenaten. As readers of the recent novel Nefertiti will know, Akhenaten ruled in Egypt around 1350 BC and instigated a political and religious revolution, moving the capital to a new city at a site known today as Amarna and attempting to change the religion of Egypt to sole worship of the sun-disk or Aten. Six daughters of Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti are known from carvings in the royal palaces excavated at Amarna. The author argues that five of the daughters appear to have died in Egypt, and that the eldest daughter Meritaten disappears from the records at around the time of Akhenaten’s death and met an unknown fate. On the strength of this, she identifies Meritaten as ‘Scota’.

Akhenaten’s reign was not a successful time for Egypt, and the end of his reign appears to have resulted in a period of political chaos. He was followed by three short-lived successors (including Tutankhamun of the famous tomb), and then by a military Pharaoh Horemheb, who came to power about 1320 BC. Horemheb appears to have had a particular dislike of everything associated with Akhenaten, and systematically destroyed buildings and monuments erected in Akhenaten’s reign. Given this upheaval, it is not implausible that a daughter of Akhenaten might have had good reason to become a political refugee and look for a new life outside Egypt, perhaps with a foreign husband. Several chapters in Kingdom of the Ark are devoted to Akhenaten’s chaotic reign and its aftermath, and are among the most detailed and informative in the book (probably reflecting the author’s background as an Egyptologist).

Having suggested that Scota might be an alternative name for Meritaten, the author then looks for evidence that Meritaten/Scota travelled from Egypt to Britain and/or Ireland as recounted in the Walter Bower manuscript. This relies mainly on material from a range of archaeological sources, summarised below.

Archaeology

A necklace of amber, jet and faience beads was found with a secondary Bronze Age burial of a young man in a Neolithic burial mound at Tara in Ireland, excavated in 1955 and carbon-dated to 1350 BC. The faience beads were similar to those in the tomb of Tutankhamun, which dates to about the same period. (Note: faience is a ceramic, often characterised by a glossy blue glaze resembling precious stones such as turquoise or lapis lazuli). A second, similar, necklace was found in a Bronze Age burial mound in Devon in 1889. As the faience beads are similar to those found in Egypt at the same period, the author suggests that the burials may have been high-ranking Egyptians.

A shipwrecked boat excavated in Ferriby on the Humber Estuary in northern England in 1938-1946 was of a design similar to those used in the ancient Mediterranean and was carbon-dated to 1400-1350 BC. The author suggests that the boat may have been part of Scota’s fleet from Egypt.

Amber from the Baltic Sea is found in Bronze Age contexts in Britain and in Mycenae (Greece), indicating the existence of long-distance trading routes across Europe. The amber’s source can be identified by infrared analysis.

Egyptian artefacts such as faience are found in Mycenaean excavations, and Mycenean-style pottery is found in Akhenaten’s city of Amarna in Egypt, indicating trading and/or diplomatic links between Mycenae and Akhenaten’s Egypt. The author suggests that Akehenaten’s daughter Meritaten could have known about north-western Europe via contacts with Mycenae.

There are mysterious prehistoric towers called motillas in Spain, which consist of a conical tower in an enclosure. One was excavated in 1947 and metalwork dated to the middle Bronze Age was found. The Bower chronicle says that the followers of Scota settled for a while in Spain and built “….a very strong tower, encircled by deep ditches, in the middle of the settlement….”, and the author suggests that the motillas are these towers. Numerous Egyptian artefacts have been found in Spain, dating from the Third Dynasty (well before the time of Akhenaten and the supposed flight of Meritaten), indicating long-established links between Egypt and Spain. (However, as far as I can see the author does not claim that Egyptian artefacts have been found at motilla sites).

Two barrow burials near Stonehenge in Britain were excavated in 1808 and 1818 and contained amber jewellery and gold artefacts that resemble types found in the eastern Mediterranean.

Tin ingots have been found in Cornwall that resemble those found in the eastern Mediterranean. The author suggests that Cornish tin may have been traded, probably by the Phoenicians, into the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age, but notes that it cannot be proved because the Cornish ingots cannot be dated.

Two Bronze Age shipwrecks found in the English Channel, one near Dover and one in Devon, date to about 1200 BC and appear to have been carrying cargoes of bronze artefacts of types found in Continental Europe, indicating that seaborne trade between Britain and Europe occurred in the Bronze Age.

Summary and conclusion

To my mind, the archaeological finds described in the book make a reasonably convincing case for trade links across Europe in the Bronze Age, connecting Ireland, Britain and the Baltic with central Europe, Spain, the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt. If the boats found at Ferriby did indeed come from the eastern Mediterranean, some of this trade may have been direct rather than the passage of goods through a sequence of intermediaries. This doesn’t particularly surprise me; ancient cultures have a habit of turning out to be more mobile, more connected and more sophisticated than we thought. I would have liked to see some attempt to set the finds in context. As presented, they indicate that long-distance trade was possible, but give little idea of whether it was rare or commonplace.

I’m afraid I’m less convinced that these links can be construed as ‘evidence’ of a single person’s journey from Egypt to Ireland and/or Britain, and still less that they constitute proof that a daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh founded the dynasty of the High Kings of Tara and gave her name to Scotland. It could have happened (and it would make a great starting point for a novel), but it seems to me that the artefacts do not demand an explanation involving a refugee Egyptian princess. They can be just as easily, and more simply, explained as the result of regular trading and/or diplomatic links over a considerable period.

Kingdom of the Ark presents an intriguing hypothesis, but in my view has a tendency to over-interpret its evidence. For example, the book claims that the Walter Bower manuscript had preserved accurate details that were only later discovered by archaeology, such as “the exact dimensions” of the towers in Spain and the “terrible plagues” in Akhenaten’s Egypt. Yet the actual wording of the Bower manuscript – taking the translations given in the book – seems to me to be too unspecific to support this claim. Bower’s description of the Spanish settlement is, “….a very strong tower, encircled by deep ditches, in the middle of the settlement….”. This is a general description, not a set of exact dimensions. It could also apply to a medieval castle in the middle of a fortified town, for example – which would presumably have been familiar to Bower. And Bower specifically says that Scota fled “…from plagues that were to come,” whereas the plagues documented at Amarna happened before Meritaten disappeared from the records – i.e., Bower would seem to have got the events the opposite way round. He may have been drawing on a genuine tradition (although it’s worth noting that 1350 BC to 1435 AD is over 2,700 years, which is a very long time to maintain a tradition), but I think it is stretching a point to claim accuracy. There are also occasional oddities in editing, e.g. “These are found on the Continent, predominantly in southern Germany to the west of the River Seine.” The famous River Seine is in France. Is there another one in Germany, or is this an error? Kingdom of the Ark presents its case with a strong narrative drive that carries the reader easily along, but needs to be read with a critical mind.

A colourful narrative full of interesting snippets of history and archaeology, presenting an intriguing (though to my mind not entirely convincing) theory.

Has anyone else read it? Or come across the theory?


Orkneyinga Saga. Translated by Herman Palsson and Paul Edwards. Penguin, 1981, ISBN 0-14-044383-5.

August recipe: Plum Cake

Plums have connotations of abundance and the good life. Little Jack Horner ‘pulled out a plum’, a particularly desirable appointment is ‘a plum job’, and plum puddings are traditional feast-day fare. Usually a plum pudding (as in Christmas pudding) or plum bread (as in Lakeland plum bread) is made with dried plums (prunes) or raisins. Here’s a recipe for a plum cake made with fresh plums. Any variety will do; I usually use Czar cooking plums or Victoria plums.

Plum Cake

4 oz (approx 120 g) wholemeal flour
4 oz (approx 120 g) self-raising flour
1 teaspoon (1 x 5 ml spoon) baking powder
4 oz (approx 120 g) light brown soft sugar
4 oz (approx 120 g) butter or margarine
1 Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) honey
2 eggs*
1 lb fresh ripe plums

* If making a double quantity, 3 eggs is sufficient.

Rub the butter into the flours, baking powder and sugar until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. (I am told one can do this with a food processor).
Beat the eggs, and mix in along with the honey.
Halve and stone the plums.
Reserve 8 half-plums and cut into neat slices.
Chop the remaining plums and mix into the cake mixture.
Put the cake mixture into a greased and lined loaf tin, or a deep cake tin of about 6” (approx 15 cm) diameter, or a shallow baking tin about 7” (approx 18 cm) square.
Level the top and arrange the reserved plum slices in an attractive pattern on top of the cake.
Bake for about 45 minutes (shallow tin) or about 1 – 1.25 hours (loaf tin or deep cake tin), until the cake is golden brown on top and a skewer comes out clean.
Cool on a wire rack before removing from tin.
Keeps about 3 days in an airtight tin, or can be frozen. I usually make this cake in a shallow tin, cut it into 12 squares, keep half of them for immediate use, freeze the rest and then simply thaw out frozen squares as I need them.

The Witch’s Cat

The witch’s cat is as much a part of her traditional paraphernalia as her pointy hat and broomstick. Terry Pratchett’s Nanny Ogg wouldn’t be quite the same character without her formidable tom-cat Greebo:

Under the table, Greebo sat and washed himself. Occasionally he burped. Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.

--Witches Abroad

The logic of the association is clear enough. Cats can move silently, they often hunt by night, and a well-camouflaged tabby or black cat can give the impression of having materialised out of nowhere, all characteristics that fit easily with the supernatural. Superstitions about cats abound to this day, which would fit with them having once been closely associated with magic and the supernatural. The association with deities is very old; in Ancient Egypt, several goddesses were associated with cats and depicted as cats or with cat heads (see the Pitt Rivers Museum website for examples). But how far back does the association between cats and witches go?

Medieval Europe

In The Secret Middle Ages, Malcolm Jones cites a record from 1324 of an Irish witch, Alice Kyteler, whose demonic familiar could take on the form of a cat. Shape-shifting, in which the witch herself turns into a cat, is mentioned by Gervase of Tilbury in 1211, “women have been seen and wounded in the shape of cats”, and by the late fifteenth century illustrations of witches frequently show them with cats (p. 40). So the association was firmly established by the Middle Ages.

Norse mythology

In Norse mythology, the goddess Freyja rode in a carriage drawn by cats, according to the Icelandic writer and historian Snorri Sturluson. Snorri was writing in the thirteenth century when the Norse pagan religious beliefs were dying out, and is usually credited with wishing to record the old traditions before they were lost for ever (for which modern scholars of the Norse world owe him a considerable debt of gratitude). I say “dying out”, rather than “had died out”, because Snorri wrote that Freyja alone of the gods still lived, which could mean that aspects of her cult were still practised in his own day. Among many other attributes, Freyja was the goddess of magic, witchcraft and divination (seidr) (Ellis Davidson 1964, p. 120). She could also change her shape, though she turned into a bird rather than a cat, and she could temporarily disguise her human lover Ottar as an animal (in his case, a boar) (Crossley-Holland, 1980, Hyndla’s Poem).

Eirik’s Saga, written in Iceland in the early 13th century, describes a volva (a seeress, prophetess, sorceress or witch), a human practitioner of seidr magic, who came to a farm in Greenland and foretold the future of everyone present (Eirik’s Saga, ch.4). The volva wore a hood lined with white cat’s fur, and gloves made of catskin with the white fur inside.

In the story of Thor’s journey to Utgard, the giant and magician Utgard-Loki challenges Thor to lift a great grey cat from the floor of the hall. Thor, mightiest of the gods, tries with all his might to pick up the cat, but can only raise one of its feet a few inches from the floor. It is later revealed that the cat is in fact the World Serpent disguised by a magic spell (Crossley-Holland 1980). It may not be stretching a point too far to treat this story as another association of a cat with a practitioner of magic (though I won’t insist on it).

So Norse tradition associates cats with Freyja, the goddess of seidr magic, with female human practitioners of magic, and possibly with a giant magician. The extant written sources date from the thirteenth century, contemporary with the other records from medieval Europe mentioned above, but there seems no reason not to accept that they may derive from earlier traditions.

References

Crossley-Holland, Kevin. The Norse Myths. Penguin, 1980, ISBN 0-14-006056-1.
Eirik’s Saga, translated by Magnus Magnusson and Herman Palsson. Penguin Classics, 1965, ISBN 0-14-044154-9.
Ellis Davidson, HR. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. Penguin, 1964, ISBN 0-14-020670-1.
Jones, M. The Secret Middle Ages. Sutton, 2002, ISBN 0-7509-2685-6.



Having traced an association between cats and witches back to Norse mythology, I felt it wasn’t stretching a point too far to apply it to seventh-century ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England. Here’s a snippet:

Ashhere shivered. He was frightened of witchcraft, and frightened of the green-eyed, black-haired witch, who looked at him as if she thought someone had already turned him into a toad. She had said, as far as he could understand, that she had to open Eadwine’s wound to remove the evil that was killing him, and Ashhere had believed her. But he had not expected it to be so harrowing an experience. Had she gone? He crept tentatively to Eadwine’s side. No sign of the witch, but in the exact place where he had last seen her, kneeling beside Eadwine’s shoulder, a cat sat upright with its tail curled neatly around its toes. A very trim, very supercilious, very elegant pure black cat. With green eyes.

Ashhere clutched for the amulet that wasn’t there. The cat twitched its tail and glared at him with unblinking contempt. Ashhere glared back. The cat won.

--Paths of Exile

The Greatest Knight, by Elizabeth Chadwick. Book review

Edition reviewed, Time Warner, 2006, ISBN 0-7515-3660-1

Set in England and France in 1167-1194, The Greatest Knight tells the story of William Marshal and his involvement with the Plantagenet King Henry II, his queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and their brood of wayward sons. Most of the major characters are historical figures, while William’s mistress Clara is a fictional character created from an un-named woman briefly mentioned in the sources.

A younger son with few prospects of inheritance and little money, William earns a living by serving as a household knight. His prowess on the jousting field earns him fame and prizes, but the great turn in his fortune occurs when he saves Eleanor of Aquitaine from capture by enemy knights. Queen Eleanor herself ransoms William and rewards him with a place in the royal household as tutor to the princes Henry and Richard. William is now at the centre of the maelstrom surrounding the House of Plantagenet, as Henry II, Eleanor and their growing sons fight amongst themselves. Royal favour makes William rich beyond his dreams, but one false step in the fickle world of the court and he could lose it all for ever.

William Marshal is the central character and the reader sees much of the story through William’s eyes. He is a thoroughly sympathetic character, level-headed, down-to-earth and with a gift for getting on with people, who somehow manages to look out for his own interests and yet still stay a decent man. Other important characters are rounded individuals with their own personalities. Henry II’s eldest son Henry, known as The Young King after being crowned King of England in his father’s lifetime, is a spoilt brat when we first meet him riding William’s war-horse without permission and manages not to grow up at all throughout his career. William’s elder brother John seems to be unlucky in all things, growing more embittered as his failures contrast with William’s success, until he and William eventually end up on opposite sides of a civil war. John’s unhappy love life, and the troubled marriage of the Young King to the lonely Marguerite, form a counterpoint to William’s much more satisfactory romantic relationships, first with his (fictional) mistress Clara and later with his wife Isabelle de Clare. Isabelle was a great heiress and many years younger than William, and their marriage as portrayed in the novel rests on the twin foundations of expediency (Isabelle needed to marry to escape her restricted status as a ward of the Crown, William needed her lands) and mutual affection. Isabelle brings William not only financial security in the shape of her landed estates, but emotional security too. On several occasions William, who has led a peripatetic life around royal courts and the tourney circuit, refers to Isabelle as his “safe harbour”.

Loyalty forms a major theme in the story. A medieval knight swore fidelity to a lord, and also owed loyalty to his king – so what was he to do when his lord quarrelled with the king? If he joined the king he had broken his oath, but if he stayed with his lord he had rebelled against the king. William has to confront this dilemma several times, and struggles to emerge with both his life and honour intact.

The novel is rich in historical details such as the food, clothes, buildings and weapons of the time. Much of the story concentrates on the personal and political battles of the court, with some battlefield action scenes such as the attack in the first chapter and William’s rearguard action to defend Eleanor’s escape. A welcome feature is the occasional note of humour, with comic vignettes such as the incident in which William gets his head stuck in a jousting helm and has to have it (the helm, fortunately, not the head) removed by the local blacksmith.

As the novel covers nearly three decades, the story sometimes leaps ahead by months or years at a time, so you need to pay attention to the dates in the chapter headings. A useful Author’s Note explains the main sources for the novel, and notes where controversies remain and where fiction has filled in gaps in the history. Before reading this novel I knew two things about William Marshal. The first was the celebrated story of his father handing him over to King Stephen as a child hostage, promptly breaking the terms of the deal and then defying Stephen to hang young William by declaring, “I have the hammers and anvils to forge more and better sons!”. The second, I’m afraid to say, was the scurrilous ballad The Confessions of Queen Eleanor, which is most unlikely to have any basis in fact. So it was very helpful to have a note of the history behind the novel and suggestions for further reading.

Convincing and colourful portrayal of William Marshal, one of the unsung champions of the Middle Ages.