Queen Emma

Readers of historical novels are often curious about the research that goes on behind the scenes. After listening to an exerpt from my novel about Emma of Normandy, Shadow on the Crown, a friend asked if I’d researched everything at the beginning or if I was researching as I went along.

The answer to that is, “Both.”

In 2001 I began to read history in preparation for the novel that I thought I might one day write. Over the following four years I studied 11^th century Europe in general, read up on England and Normandy in particular, and devoured academic biographies of my major characters. I wanted to learn all that I could about their family histories and the world in which they lived. This was before I even began to think about how the story might take shape.

In 2005 I made some notes about where to begin the book that I had titled Richard’s Daughter, and today, as I re-read that journal entry, I realize how much I had already absorbed about the world that I hoped to bring to life. But I spent two more years researching before I wrote that first sentence, and by then I’d given the book its second title: Royal Hostage.

A few of my books

Since then the research has never stopped. In 2007, with the first half of a rough draft completed, I took a two-week summer course at Downing College, Cambridge, entitled Kings and Vikings: Power, Poetry and Politics in Anglo Saxon England. We were assigned eleven books to read for that class, although now my research titles number well over a hundred.

Cooking hearth at West Stow Village

But I was doing more than reading books and listening to lectures at Cambridge. There were also  trips to the British Museum, to the Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo, and to the village of West Stow. Many of the objects I saw on those visits found their way into the pages of my novel.

Even before I took the bus from London up to Cambridge I had been in Europe for several weeks, exploring Normandy and the area in southern England that the Anglo-Saxons called Wessex. Because I had determined that in the course of the novel Queen Emma would journey from Winchester to Exeter I had spent weeks at home working out every abbey where she might stop along the way. Of course, I wanted to make that journey for myself, so over the course of two very long days on the road, my husband and I drove the route that I imagined would take Emma several weeks. The abbeys that she would have known were gone, but at every stop there was some remnant of the Anglo-Saxon past that still remained – Shaftesbury Abbey’s herb garden, for example, or the tiny Anglo-Saxon church above Milton Abbas. Sometimes it was just a carved cross or a statue that dated back to the 11^thcentury, but there was always something.

English warrior at Hastings. I LOVE this guy!

There were other site visits to make as well – a trip to Normandy to see the abbeys along the Seine, the medieval town of Rouen, and the ruins of the 10^th/11^th  century ducal palace in the fishing village of Fecamp. A few years later I was back in England, this time to attend the re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings in the south before driving to the far north where, among other things, my husband and I peered at the scarred skeleton of a nineteen-year-old English warrior at the Jorvik Viking Museum.

And always, as I worked my way through the writing of each draft, there were books to read, journals to consult and details that had to be tracked down – everything from how to brew ale to how to care for the sick. (I was able to find the ale instructions on the internet, and the Anglo-Saxon medical reference, Bald’s Leechbook, I snagged through the Berkeley Library.) By the time I wrote the fifth draft of the book, the title had morphed into Shadow on the Crown.

I spend a lot of time looking at maps of 11th century England

Now, although the book is finished, the research continues because I am working feverishly on the sequel. (All right, not this very minute!) Last week I was studying the Anglo-Saxon attitude towards swaddling babies one day, and reading several chapters of Burial in Later Anglo-Saxon England the next, and guess what. It’s been more fun than I could have possibly imagined when I began.

Shadow on the Crown will be released in the U.S. by Viking in February, 2013, and in the U.K. by HarperCollins in June.

I wrote a post in April about English Great Halls, and this week I’ve decided to consider the larger question of English royal palaces in the early medieval period, prior to 1066. It is much more difficult than you might think.

When you see or hear the word “palace” probably something like this immediately pops into your mind.

But this little charmer was built by Ludwig of Bavaria in the 19^th century, so forget it. We’re not going there today. We’re considering English royal palaces of the 11^th century. Not castles, mind you, which were built for defense, but palaces that were intended specifically as royal residences. They looked more like….well, you know, we really don’t know what they looked like. All we can do is guess.

One of the foremost archeologists in Britain, Martin Biddle, has this to say about the subject:

“In what kind of palace did King Edgar live, who ‘showed by his impressive coronation ceremony at Bath in 973 that he grasped the political value of external magnificence?’ What were the halls and chambers of wood or stone which Asser attributed to Alfred? If the great series of royal churches in Winchester is anything to judge by, the old English royal palace which completed that complex will have been of Carolingian scale and magnificence, and everything in the art and architectural history of Alfred’s time suggests the possibility that actual continental models, Aachen itself perhaps, may have influenced it. But we know nothing concrete.”¹

The palace at Winchester has been described as splendid, made of stone with glazed windows, an elaborate residence.  The Anglo Saxons loved display and decoration, so the hall would have featured carved decoration on wood, inside and out. And Professor Biddle has given us a hint that it may have looked something like Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen. Well, there’s nothing left of Charlemagne’s  palace now except for the royal chapel. But archaeologists think it may have looked something like this:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Ah. Speculation upon hypothesis. Well, let’s run with it because what other choice do we have?

What we see in the Aachen drawing is not one building, but a complex of buildings, connected by covered walkways. This makes a great deal of sense to me, and I especially like the idea of those covered walkways, given the British climate.

John Burke, in his book “Life in the Castle in Medieval England” observes that from Alfred’s time on, the central building of the royal palace would have been the Great Hall where business was conducted and communal feasts held. The hall may have had chambers recessed into its walls and partitioned off for privacy. If the hall had two stories, there would have been a gallery on the second floor where the king could stand above it all and keep a gimlet eye on the activities below. We know, for instance, that such a gallery existed in the Old Minster at Winchester where the king attended Mass in a second story royal box.²

The Great Hall was merely the central building, though. In the Old English poem Beowulf King Hrothgar retires from the great hall to go to his bed. Beowulf himself, a visitor to the palace, was lodged somewhere outside the hall. One imagines separate quarters where guests could sleep, connected to the hall, perhaps, by those covered pathways. And speaking of bedchambers, the royals would have used them for more than just sleeping. The chamber would have been far more complex than today’s bedrooms and more highly populated. The queen’s bedchamber, for example, would have been a place of refuge for the women if things got too rowdy in the hall.³ It’s my belief that the queen might very likely have had her own building in the complex divided into rooms earmarked for different purposes.

There would have been other buildings in the magnificent, urban palace complexes of London, Canterbury and Winchester: kitchens, stables, and a chapel, certainly; possibly weaving sheds, a forge, and an armory as well. At Winchester there was a mill. The rural palaces, like those at Headington, Cookham and Calne, would have had all these things and would have been the focal points of large estates that included entire villages. There were hunting lodges too, where the king and his retinue could enjoy a little recreation and where, apparently, regulations regarding arms were somewhat relaxed. King Edmund the Elder was killed in an altercation with a robber at his hunting lodge at Pucklechurch in 946.

One vexing question that remains is whether the palaces were made of wood or of stone. We can’t say for certain, but it’s likely that both stone and timber were utilized. The hunting lodge at Corfe appears to have been made of stone, and if stone was used for a hunting lodge, surely it would have been appropriate for the more magnificent, urban palaces.

Today, though, nothing remains of the palaces of the early English kings – not even ruins. Granted, there is an image of Edward the Confessor’s palace in the Bayeux Tapestry, but that is probably drawn, not from a familiarity with the actual building, but from “a repertoire of architecture elements typical of contemporary manuscript art.”⁴

So now these courts are empty,
and the rich vaults of the vermillion roofs
shed their tiles. The ruins toppled to the ground,
broken into rubble, where once many a man
glad-minded, gold-bright, bedecked in splendor,
proud, full of wine, shone in his war-gear,
gazed on treasure, on silver, on sparkling gems,
on wealth, on possessions, on the precious stone,
on this bright capital of a broad kingdom.

From the Old English poem, The Ruin, 8th Century

¹ Welch, Martin,  Discovering Anglo-Saxon England, Pennsylvania University Press, 1993.
²  Burke, John,  Life in the Castle in Medieval England, Barnes Noble, 1992.
³  Webb, Diana,  Privacy and Solitude: The Medieval Discovery of Personal Space, Hambledon Continuum, 2007.
⁴  Lewis, Michael J., The Real World of the Bayeux Tapestry, The History Press, 2008.

Nearly 600 sessions over four days on All Things Medieval.

My first task: decide which sessions to attend. Not easy. There were one hundred fifty sessions each day divided into three time blocks, which meant that three times a day I had to choose one session from the fifty being offered at that hour.

I was tempted by enchanting titles like “The Medievalism of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels” and “The Hobbit on Its Seventy-Fifth Anniversary.” But I didn’t give in! I stayed focused and went instead to “Pre-Dante Visions of the Afterlife” and “Queenship, Reputation and Gendered Power.” I took copious notes!

Once I worked out my daily schedule there was the little matter of getting from one session to the next in the time allotted. The campus of Western Michigan University is beautiful, laid out along two hills with a valley in between. The conference utilizes 6 buildings, three on each hill. It’s rare to have back-to-back sessions in the same building or even on the same hill, so there’s plenty of walking in between sessions, which helps to offset the effects of the soft ice cream in the cafeteria that is so popular at lunch and dinner. The weather was lovely and so the walks between sessions were pleasant. I even had a little time to commune with some of the natives.

In the late afternoons the exhibitors, the universities and the organizations represented at the conference held receptions – half a dozen at once. More decisions to make. One day I made my way to the Manuscript Library Reception far across campus because I had yet to see the university library which turned out to be quite beautiful and well worth the hike.

And I had to make time, in between sessions, receptions, lunches and dinners, for the Exhibit Hall. Yes, one can find some fun displays here, but mostly there are books. New books, old books, used books, expensive books and some (not many) that can be had for a song. I bought two new imprints on Norse Mythology and although it looks amazing, I resisted ordering the brand new “Encylopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles” weighing in at $275.

This was my third year at the Congress, and I was still working hard at meeting people. I spoke with men and women from France, Norway, Ireland, England, Germany, Canada, and from all over the U.S. One lunchtime I picked up a couple of Vikings. I knew they were Vikings because of their long hair tied back at the neck and their full beards (although, honestly, most male Medievalists at Kalamazoo – even dressed in suits and ties – have facial hair of some kind or other). But these guys each had the word VIKING scrawled across their name tags. Dead giveaway. They were Viking Age Specialists, one in metal, the other in glass, and over lunch I gleaned some terrific, detailed information about glass beads and Viking Age archaeology. After lunch we attended a session on Practical Insights into the Medieval Long Sword. Of course.

Kazoo Books, bless them, sponsored a lunchtime discussion for authors and readers of medieval historical fiction – a first at Kalamazoo – and I had the opportunity to join Candace Robb (aka Emma Campion), Grace Tiffany and other writers in talking about our books and, among other things, how we go about researching them. Academics, of course, would want to know about THAT! It was a wonderful hour-long session and one that I hope will be repeated in 2013.

So, from “Revenants, Ghosts, and Trolls” to “The Archaeology of the British Isles and Denmark,” not to mention a very helpful bit of one-on-one coaching on how to go about writing a realistic battle scene, this was a successful and satisfying 2012 Medieval Congress.

For more about the Congress, check out Medievalists.net