Once Upon a Time...

 

Once upon a time, there was a young Welshman called Llywelyn. His father was a prince, but the prince was unwell and died when his two sons were still young. Their mother remarried and took the boys to live at her new husband’s manor in Shropshire. Although Llywelyn’s step-father was a good man and kind to him, Llywelyn never forgot who his true father was and that he was a prince of Gwynedd. However, his uncles had stolen his inheritance and split it between them. So, aged just fourteen, he set off to north Wales to seek his fortune. By the time he was nineteen, he had been recognised as the rightful heir to his uncle, Gruffydd, and he was close to defeating his other uncle, Rhodri. While he was in Gwynedd, he met a beautiful young woman called Tangwstyl Goch with flaming red hair. They fell in love and he took her to live with him in his palace of Aber on the Menai strait, and there she bore him a son, Gruffydd, but she died in childbirth, leaving Llywelyn grieving. Needing to give his child a mother, he married Joan, the daughter of King John. And they lived happily ever after.

Statue of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth
at Conway

That’s the official story, anyway. The truth is a little different. 

And it's the story as much of three men as it is a Welsh prince and an English princess.

Sometimes, History goes wrong. Sometimes, matters that one would think couldn’t ever be forgotten are and, sometimes, in their place, a fiction is inserted to make sense of something that has long passed out of memory. That is what has happened here.

If you haven’t read the excellent novel by Sharon Penman about Llywelyn Fawr—Llywelyn the Great—Here Be Dragons, you should. There are many other excellent novels and non-fiction about Llywelyn which say the same thing; grab one of those. It’ll make what I’m about to say more powerful and, maybe, more shocking.

I think we all fell in love with Llywelyn as painted by Ms Penman, but I am going to shatter some illusions now—all these books that talk about Tangwstyl are wrong.

It’s actually quite hard to conclude other than Ms Penman did, and countless other writers and historians beguiled by Llywelyn, if you have a cursory look around the internet, and God, forbid, Wikipedia, to come to any other conclusion that Llywelyn had a mistress called Tangwstyl who was Gruffydd’s mother. She’s everywhere.

The problem is, Tangswtyl Goch was a bloke. The only contemporary or near contemporary—if you think 130 years is near contemporary—mention of anyone called Tangwstyl in relation to Llywelyn, was a man. He’s described in a survey of Denbighshire from 1336; a parcel of land called Llannefydd was mortgaged to Llywelyn by ‘his friend called Tangwsyl Goch’ ‘amice sue nomine Tanguestel Goch’, amice being a male form of the Latin for ‘friend’. The Tangwstyl myth first appears somewhere between the 1560s and the 1840s, and JE Lloyd isn’t clear when either, in his 1910 book History of Wales.

This leaves a gap. If there was no romantic mistress Tangwstyl Goch, then we have a child without a mother—Gruffydd, the moody, perpetually angry son of Llywelyn.

So, how do we tell what’s going on, and how do we know which version is real? That’s a question I have asked myself, but the clues were there to be found, just, it seems, no one wanted to look, until recently when a historian called Paul Martin Remfry did just that.

There’s a reference in JE Lloyd’s History to a letter of Innocent III discussing a marriage between Llywelyn and a sister of Ranulf of Chester. If Lloyd was aware of that, he should have been aware of the rest of the contents of that letter. That’s where the detail on the mother of Gruffydd is found.

The Innocent III letter is one of three concerning the same group of people, namely, a prince of north Wales, a girl and her father. The most relevant and informative is the third of the three. It is dated 16^th February 1205 at St Peters, aka the Vatican. The others are from 1199 and 1203. In this 1205 letter, we learn about the daughter, Rhunallt, of King Reginald of the Isles, i.e. the Isle of Man, and it explains she had been first betrothed to Llywelyn in around 1192 or before, when she was about ten. Nothing much had happened, she remained on the Isle of Man, he remained in Gwynedd. Then, he decided, instead, to pursue a sister of the earl of Chester. This sister is unnamed, and the letter says they were married. While Llywelyn was otherwise occupied with his Chester bride, his uncle, Rhodri, decided he also wanted to marry Rhunallt, and accomplished this in June 1192, without Llywelyn’s knowledge. Rhodri died in 1194, leaving Rhunallt widowed, aged around twelve. Llywelyn was, by this time, single again, and he again approached King Reginald for Rhunallt’s hand in marriage, notwithstanding she had been his aunt. She was around thirteen. By 1199, Llywelyn was worried the marriage wasn’t legitimate because of her previous involvement with Rhodri and the issue of age in 1192, and he approached the pope to get a pronouncement that it was legitimate. It was granted, though the pope was not entirely convinced she was either over-age when Llywelyn and Rhodri both tried to contract marriage with her (nine was the lowest the pope would allow without special dispensation) and he was also unsure that Rhodri had not shared her bed and had thus consummated the marriage and, by so doing, made her as close as blood to Llywelyn and thus not a legitimate bride. In this letter, the pope states Llywelyn believed the clerics who had previously said the marriage was sound didn’t know ecclesiastical law, and got it wrong. So, satisfied the marriage was illegitimate for all these reasons, he dissolved it.

Several matters are brought up by this dissolution. First and foremost, Llywelyn’s son Gruffydd went overnight from being his father’s heir to being nothing. His anger and animosity towards his half-brother Davydd, son of Llywelyn’s second (third?!) wife Johanna, makes perfect sense whereas it had seemed just rather petulant as a son of a mistress. Llywelyn shattered the accepted Welsh norm that sons inherited regardless of the status of the relationship between the parents, as long as the father recognised the son and the son was fit to inherit (note Adda, Llewelyn’s younger brother who was deemed otherwise and remained far from politics, and happily so). Llywelyn’s position was tricky. Under Welsh law, he had to split Gwynedd into two on the birth of Davydd because Gruffydd had absolutely been acknowledged. But he understood the catastrophic consequences of splitting Gwynedd into two with the English king now focussed almost entirely inwards and without the distraction that the continental empire had offered his predecessor, Richard. Llywelyn couldn’t maintain Gruffydd as his heir as the eldest son and slight the grandson of King John. So, the only way to make Davydd his heir was to disinherit Gruffydd by switching to the Anglo-Norman tradition of the succession of the eldest legitimate son regardless of fitness to inherit.

In 1226, Llywelyn, with Henry III, his brother by marriage, sought papal dispensation to legitimise Johanna, making Davydd’s position stronger. Anger that Llywelyn didn’t do that same for his own son, seemed like sour grapes from Gruffydd, if he were merely the son of a mistress, but in context of his mother being his father’s twice-papal-approved wife, his animosity towards Llywelyn and Davydd is wholly understandable and expected.

Johanna, Lady of Wales

On a brief note, the name of King John’s illegitimate daughter – she’s always referred to in the history books as Joan, but the Latin in the documents that refer to her use Iohanna which is much closer in spelling to the medieval spelling for John – Jehan. There was a spelling Jehanne but the Latin is quite specific. 

[It sits alongside Lowelino, Henr and David – I’m rather enjoying the scribe’s struggle with the Welsh name of Llywelyn.]

Secondly, what happened between 1199 and 1205 for Llywelyn to change his mind so dramatically? 1203 begins with Llywelyn being so certain he wanted his marriage legitimised, he asked the pope again, after the favourable response of 1199, and was again granted his wish, with the pope saying that he doubted it was legitimate, but he allowed it as it settled a previous dispute between Gwynedd and the Isle of Man. Remember, he’s asking for the marriage to continue. The papal response is date 19^th April 1203, and a letter to Innocent was sent at the very, very least, a month before that, likely many more. It took one month to get to Rome, at least, and we have no idea how long the pope deliberated or how long it took for him to question those clerics mentioned, ones based in England and Wales. It may have been as long as six months before.

The letter sent by Llywelyn takes a month to reach Rome. The pope sent several to England—another month, probably two assuming he didn’t react straight away (the marital concerns of one prince of a small territory on a small island in the north of Europe wasn’t going to be very high on his agenda); replies have to be sent, probably fairly quickly because it is the pope asking, so we’re up to four months realistically. Another to think and write a response—the pope is a busy man—a final month to reach Wales. So, Llywelyn was acting to shore up his marriage around October 1202.

 However, there was a possibility that the marriage to Johanna had been discussed between Llywelyn and John as early as 1203, probably before the response was received from Innocent – King John began to bring dowers lands from women in his family—lands that were not his patrimony and so disposable—under his control, lands in Ellesmere, close to Gwynedd, which then formed part of Johanna’s dowery when she married Llywelyn in April 1205.

It is unlikely Llywelyn and John had discussed the potential of an English princess for Llywelyn before he sent to Innocent in the second half of 1202, the question he is asking doesn’t reflect that—he isn’t trying to extract himself from the marriage but to put it further beyond doubt. It is possible, by spring 1203, he had reported back to John that, despite the papal approval, there were cracks in his marriage that could break it open, leaving him free to marry Johanna. Llywelyn got his response probably around mid-May, and John’s actions in Ellesmere are dated in the letters patent as 27^th May 1203, time enough for an urgent communication between Llywelyn and John, even allowing for John to be in Rouen, around eight day’s rapid ride away.

King John

By early 1205, Llywelyn had set in motion the dissolution of his marriage to Rhunallt. Allowing for time for letters to be sent to and from Rome, he must have begun his deliberations and then acted on them in the second half of 1204, 1204 being the year King John lost Normandy, and turned his attentions to his actual kingdom, now the family ducal lands were gone. He returned to England at the end of 1203 and didn’t leave again until June 1206. A combination of discussions between Llywelyn and John and John’s presence in England seems to have sparked off the annulment.

Llywelyn’s marriage was annulled in the document dated 16^th February 1205. Llywelyn would have found out around a month later, let’s say end of March to allow for slower travel due to winter weather over the Alps, lengthening the journey time from a month to around six weeks. He married Johanna in mid-April 1205. It appears to be rather rushed; unseemly haste, maybe. Plans had to have been settled before February 1205—there wasn’t time after—and it’s likely it was done by the autumn of 1204. Llywelyn had to have been pretty certain the marriage was doomed, once he himself cast doubt on it in a letter to the pope, and there had to be a compelling reason to throw away a nine-year marriage and the healthy son and heir resulting from it. He had to be well aware of the perils of begetting an heir, being so close to Ranulf of Chester who had no issue whatsoever from two marriages with women proven to have borne children. Llywelyn can’t have written to the pope to obtain the annulment without already being assured of the hand of Johanna.

All of this rather tarnishes his romantic image. Not only was he apparently trying to transact a marriage with an under-age girl, he broke it off when someone else came along, only to go back to her when that ended. He then cast her off for a second time when yet another, better, prospect was handed to him, and that marriage appears to have been agreed while he was very much still married to Rhunallt.

That is one view, and it may be that Llywelyn was the architect of his own fate. But it is possible he was less so. How much choice did Llywelyn have in the matters of his marriages? Surrounded by people with interests in whom he married, was Johanna foisted on him? We can never know, but it is possible.

Rhunallt gave birth to Gruffydd in 1198, which ties in with Llywelyn trying to shore up the marriage a few months later, possibly under pressure from clerics who were questioning its legality and, therefore, that of his heir. It is possible he truly didn’t want to lose Rhunallt. He returned to her once they were both free again in 1194. It could be seen he went to great lengths to try to save his relationship twice, in 1199 and 1203. The age difference was only nine years, and attitudes to younger girls were not the same as they are now—note that no one questioned the right of Rhodri to consummate his marriage with the young Rhunallt, only the fact of it.

Maybe, the marriage to the sister of Ranulf of Chester had been orchestrated by Ranulf, a large, powerful neighbour, applying pressure, linking the two territories together and hadn’t been Llywelyn’s particular choice. Ranulf was heirless after a ten-year marriage; maybe he had designs on Llywelyn, who he reputedly liked. We can know Llywelyn had cared for the marriage to Rhunallt, if not necessarily Rhunallt herself, from the 1199 papal intervention, and the discussion with the pope of 1203 must be seen to be him underlining the right of the marriage to shut up his detractors. The presence of John in England through 1204 may have pressured Llywelyn. He only ever came as close to Wales as Bridgenorth, Shropshire, but he was in almost constant motion and could pop up almost anywhere.

Ranulf de Blondeville, earl of Chester

What is striking is that two of the men closest to Llywelyn—politically, and socially—had both perfected the art of disposing of an unwanted wife. In 1199, both John and Ranulf had their own ten-year marriages annulled:  John’s marriage to Isabella of Gloucester was annulled, leaving him free to marry the twelve-year-old Isbella of Angoulême a year later; Ranulf’s marriage to Constance of Brittany, widow of Geoffrey of Brittany and sister-in-law to John, was annulled by Constance, leaving Ranulf free in October 1200 to marry Clementia, widow of Alain de Vitre, Siegneur de Dinan, and former mistress of King John. These two influential men knew it was not just possible to extricate one’s self from a marriage, they also knew exactly how to do so. That these two men did influence him can be seen in his marrying the daughter of one and being such a close friend of the other—the Chronicle of the Abbey of St Werburg in Chester records that Llywelyn came to Chester in 1220 to see Ranulf the day he returned from crusade. Ranulf’s heir, his sister’s son, John the Scot, son of the earl of Huntingdon, married one of Llywelyn’s daughters. And, of course, the marriage between Llywelyn and Ranulf’s sister in 1192.

There is another twist which, again, may point to pressure brought to bear on Llywelyn – Ranulf of Chester’s new wife of 1200, Clementia, just happened to be Johanna’s mother.

Factor in that Ranulf refused to sign Magna Carta in 1215, we can see this is a little triumvirate, spoiled only by John’s aggression towards Llywelyn from 1210 onwards. It is worth noting that Llywelyn did add his name to Magna Carta.

So, we can find the romantic prince in the story told by Innocent III; it all depends on what you believe the motives of those involved were. Llywelyn was either a cad or a man caught in a net cast by a bored and bruised king who enjoyed meddling with the pope and a close neighbour he couldn’t refuse. I personally believe he was strong enough to have dictated his own destiny, and as much as I would like him to be the hero, he was a successful man of his times, and marriage in the noble classes was rarely contracted for romantic reasons. There appears to have been no wholesale censure of him for his actions, suggesting it was nothing unusual nor particularly frowned upon. I do think he may have been influenced by those around him to accept that marriages were not necessarily for life; the presence of King John and Ranulf of Chester can’t be coincidence and the marriage to Johanna made perfect sense.

There is an interesting side point here about King John and his second marriage. We are led to believe the nobles of England and France were up in arms about his taking to wife a twelve-year-old girl. That sentiment is absent in the letters of Innocent concerning Llywelyn, Rhodri and Rhunallt. So, just maybe, it was a case of finding anything that could be used to criticise John, rather than a genuine sense of horror or disgust at his actions concerning Isabella.

There’s one more surprise in store for lovers of the romantic Llywelyn ap Iorwerth – he wasn’t called ‘Great’. There is a single reference from the time of Edward I of a Llywelyn Fawr, in relation to a charter that was being re-confirmed after a fire destroyed the originals. It confirmed a grant to Beddgelert priory of certain lands. However, those lands didn’t belong to Llywelyn ap Iorwerth to grant to anyone, but to a different Llywelyn, one referred to as ‘Magni’ meaning, in his case ‘senior’ as he had a younger brother bizarrely also called Llywelyn. Llywelyn ap Iorwerth was only ever called that, or Llywelyn of Gwynedd, Llywelyn of north Wales, by everyone, including the bards who were the treasurers of the stories which were passed down to those who finally wrote them down in the sixteenth century. I suppose, that we accept the moniker, proves we believe he was a great man to have stood up to King John and maintained an independent Gwynedd until his death on 11th April 1240.

 

~~~~~

 

My grateful thanks go to Peter Martin Remfry who presented much of this research. To the authors of the ‘Itinerary of King John’ project; to those who taught me Welsh history at Aberystwyth university – Professor R. R. Davies and Dr John Beverely Smith. And to Sharon Penman, who sent me there in the first place.

 

Horses for courses

Horse detail from Froissart

One of the major inaccuracies I see in historical fiction are the distances that authors assume their protagonists’ horses can travel and the speed they make their journeys. In our age of cars and high-speed trains, it is hard to imagine a time where travel of any kind was not only pretty much limited to the upper classes or itinerant merchants or minstrels, and was a comparatively slow affair.

When travelling before the age of steam and railways, there were two options – walking or by horse. If you were a normal person you walked.  Learning to ride was not something that people just did. It was expensive to learn to ride – where would you get a horse from if you were not wealthy enough to own one? Only the wealthy owned horses – they were as expensive then as they are now. Caring for horses hasn’t changed a great deal, except for vets and I suppose that in that the costs were going to be similar – no vet meant a dead horse and the need to purchase a new one.

To put some perspective on this, a thatcher working around 1380 would have earned around 4 pence a day. To save up to buy a good war horse costing around £80 would take him over 13 years. For a basic labourer who earned around £2 a year, that was 40 years' wages. Even a basic draught horse was beyond their means. A draught horse suitable for pulling a cart, but not a comfortable ride, would cost between 10 and 20 shillings, up to half a year’s wages. And then you have to account for costs incurred looking after it.

A Lipizzaner in training - note the low belly,
large head and short, thick legs.
Note also his height.

There are other considerations when thinking about how your character is going to travel around. Medieval horses were not the same as horses today. There were many different breeds, as there are now, but in general they were smaller than modern horses. A good indication is to look at the Lipizzaners of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna. These horses date back to around 800AD when Berber horses from North Africa were crossed with Spanish horses from Andalusia, and were then bred purposely from the fifteenth century to carry the Hapsburg emperors. This is a fairly accurate idea of what a horse looked like – stockier, barrel-shaped, shorter, around 14 to 15 hands (58 to 62 inches / 147 – 157cm tall at the shoulder).

A common misconception is that all horses are pretty much the same and that because one can do one thing, so can all the rest. That is like saying that because Usain Bolt can run 100 metres 9.58 seconds, so can Chris Hoy. Or Greg Rutherford.  Or Nick Skelton. They are all men, aren’t they?!

Frankel - much taller with a higher belly
tucked into the hips and long,
slender legs. A very small head when
compared with the Lipizzaner above

Horses, like people, are all different. And horses are bred to do certain things. The basic horse, your standard riding school horse, is pretty average, like you and me. It probably has a decent amount of stamina and a fairly balanced temper. It isn’t going to run the Grand National or the Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe. Neither will it be attempting the Puissance wall at the Horse of the Year Show. Frankel was one of the fastest horses ever to run in flat racing. He would never have been expected to jump a round in a show jumping class. Horses bred for stamina are not going to have comparable top speeds to a race horse. And dressage horses are never going to be found taking on the Tevis Cup endurance race. When someone said ‘horses for courses’ they knew a thing or two.

So, when thinking of how your character is going to get from A to B, you need to think of more than just ‘horse’ and getting it up the M1. Who is your character? What resources does he or she have? If they have just one horse, it is going to be an average sort that can do a range of things in an acceptable manner. Needs to run away from danger? Needs to get between various locations fairly quickly? To fulfil these needs, this horse is never going to be the fastest, and neither will it have any exceptional levels of stamina. So think about that when writing your scenes and allow sufficient time for your horse and rider to get where it is going.

Oh, I hear you cry, horses can run up to 40 miles per hour.

Yes, they can. For 3 miles. Then what? Horses need to rest. Horses need to eat. A race horse, like the aforementioned Frankel, can run at around 40 miles per hour. But you have to remember that Frankel did this with a saddle that was barely more than a slip of leather, with a rider on his back who made Tyrion Lannister look like a giant, with shoes made of light-weight aluminium. He had been bred to be light and long-legged, and been trained for speed and only speed over a flat, even surface. Your average medieval knight had a sword, a suit of armour maybe, a large and heavy saddle made of leather and wood. His horse’s shoes would have been made from iron. Have you ever felt the difference between a standard horse shoe and a racing shoe?

Have you ever been on a horse?!

Left - iron horse shoe weighing 483g
Right - racing shoe weighing 88g
Even allowing for the difference in size, the
racing shoe is much, much lighter

So, now for some real-life rides:

Roads (modern) and well-maintained trails that are level and with good weather you can make an average of 40 miles per day with an average horse and an average rider. 40 miles. Ride through marshland and that plummets to 10 miles a day.

Again I hear you say you’ve heard of people riding further. OK, yes, I mentioned the Tevis race, a 100 mile race over hilly, mountainous terrain north of Lake Tahoe. The winning times for this race across its history range from 11 hours 18 mins to 16 hours 23 mins. That is pretty impressive but you have to remember that these are modern horses trained using modern methods with modern medicine for stamina and endurance.

Endurance rides in the UK over a single day tend to average around 12 – 14 miles per hour over distances between 50 and 100 miles and include vet examinations at set points followed by ‘holds’ where rider and horse rest.

General Nelson A. Miles

A famous ride was made by the aging General Nelson A. Miles who was trying to prove he still had the stamina to serve in the army at the age of 64. He rode 90 miles between Fort Sill and Fort Reno in 8 hours on July 14^th 1903. Now, he was proving his stamina, not his horse’s, and he changed horse every 10 miles. He travelled 90 miles in 8 hours – his horse didn’t.

Mongol warriors could cover around 100 miles a day, but they all had 3 or 4 horses so could change frequently and so travel further.

The single longest ride undertaken on the one horse without changes that I can find documented and verified was by a man called Dick King and he rode 600 miles across South Africa on one horse in 10 days. This is the very edge of endurance. But it also has to be noted that the horse had a two day rest during those 10 days because King fell ill. And Somerset, the horse in question, was a highly trained military horse and was not just some average nag that King found. And again there is a point to remember – this is exceptional and certainly not the norm else it would never have been considered memorable.

Richard O'Sullivan as
Dick Turpin

You can see now that the famous ride by Dick Turpin of 200 miles between London and York in 15 hours was actually physically impossible. An article in the New York Times from September 1910 recounting the ride (still firmly in the era of horse-back travel) states the opinion that had Turpin really done this he deserved to be hanged for what he would have done to Black Bess.

In 1202 King John with his army travelled 100 miles in 48 hours between Le Mans and the castle at Mirebeau, where his mother was being held hostage. The speed of this ride caught the garrison off-guard, and these were people for whom travelling on horseback was the everyday normal.  This ride was not.

To summarise – an average healthy horse with an average weight, averagely laden, person on its back over level ground and well-maintained tracks can travel around 40 miles a day. Halve that if heavily laden (a knight in full armour for instance), pulling a cart, poor weather or poor ground and any obstacles such as river crossings. Halve it again for mountainous or marshy terrain and very poor weather. And this brings us to similar speeds for a person walking.

An individual rider can go further than this, as long as he could change horses. However, with no change of horse, 100 miles per day is an absolute maximum if all things are as good as they can be, including riding a horse bred and trained specifically for endurance, but don’t expect it to be able to do it again in a hurry, without a significant rest for the horse. Beyond this takes magic!

A riding lesson in an indoor school

A last word of advice – if you are planning on writing about riding horses or if you expect your character to rely on one, get on one. Regurgitating someone else’s experience will never be as good as writing about your own.

Understand the tack, how to hold the reins, how the saddle feels, where the buckles are, how to sit correctly, how not to. Understand how the horse moves, how it feels up there when walking, trotting, cantering and galloping; what hurts, what doesn’t. Do you need a mounting block, or can you manage without? How does riding without stirrups feel against riding with? And ask about spurs and whips. Enquire about side saddles.

If you don’t understand anything I’ve just said, go to your local stables and book a lesson or five. And persuade them to take you on a hack to experience riding in the real world – a far cry from riding round in circles in a manège or school.

Presumed Dead - the Vita Haroldi of Waltham Abbey, Essex

Waltham Holy Cross in its 
heyday with two towers

Recently I visited Waltham Abbey in Essex. The newly refurbished museum was my destination, to listen to a talk by Helen Hollick on Harold Godwinson, King of England. Whilst there I discovered a new manuscript, the Vita Haroldi, on loan from the British Library. It is a thirteenth century narrative that survives solely in one fourteenth century copy. It is entirely pro-Harold and traces his life and achievements from before he became king to his death. That death, however, is not on the battlefield of Hastings, but a hermitage in Chester some years later.

I had never heard of this before and, during a day devoted to Harold, I was intrigued. Being a lover of all things Edward III, I was beguiled to learn that the surviving version of the manuscript dates from the reign of this king. 

Now there's a thought, I said to myself. Why should such a bizarre and extraordinary story be resurrected during the reign of Edward III of all people, and presumably, never visited again? What was going on in Waltham Holy Cross, the medieval name for that abbey, during this particular period that meant a story about the survival of a king who everyone accepted was dead saw the light of day to the extent that an illuminated copy was made?

For me there was an irresistible parallel - the death or survival of Edward II and the death or survival of King Harold II. Dismiss this if you will, but do first accept that there are more pieces of independent evidence to support the survival of Edward II than there are to support the death of Edward II. But this is a topic for another post. For now, all we have to know is that doubt was cast on the accepted story of his death within months. The only person who knows the truth cannot now tell it. Or can he?

The Vita Haroldi. I love the doodle at the bottom of the king

Presumed Dead

The abbey church of Waltham Holy Cross, Essex, the year of our Lord 1342

The day began like any other and Richard de Hertford, abbot of Waltham Holy Cross, wished it otherwise. It had rained during the night, lightly, but enough to water the herbal garden and the vegetable patches, and also enough to drip through the hole in the roof of his chamber and leave his blankets wet and himself damp beneath.

          His clothes chests were placed away from the danger so there was dry attire within, but the bed was too big to move clear of the leak and he had to put up with it. On nights he knew it would rain he would sleep in a bed in the dorter and leave a bucket on his mattress.

          Dressed awkwardly in a clean, dry, but stiff, habit and robe, his aching joints were thankful for the fresh warmth. He made his way through the corridors to the night steps to the abbey church. He had a prie dieu in his chamber but what was the point when he had this magnificent church all to himself? It was before prime and the brothers would not wake for a little while.

          He eased his creaking body down onto the stone steps in front of the high altar.  It was the only sound in the entire echoing building. Not even mice scurried among the corners of this hallowed place. But unlike in his chamber, it was not an oppressive silence. It was welcoming, it was liberating, and it allowed his mind to explore.

          Today all there was to explore was the precarious position the abbey was in financially. The money given to the abbey six years ago to make good certain deficiencies had been spent within a shorter space than they had anticipated and there was nothing left to repair the dorter. There were still repairs needed in the abbey church, and they were his priority. Up here in the presbytery all was well, but the roof leaked near the font in the old part of the church, the parish part that was built by Henry, son of the Conqueror. A window had broken in a late spring storm and that had eaten up the last of their saved funds leaving nothing spare for lesser needs.

          He prayed to the Holy Father for a miracle. He had been abbot for thirty-four years and he cared for this place, the family he had given up, the child he had never had.

          The shuffling of sandaled feet brought him back from his thoughts and he rose slowly to join his brothers in the quire to celebrate the new day.

No matter how often he added the figures, nothing changed. There was not enough to spare to fix the roof. His or the nave’s. Usual running costs, yes, but not enough to afford wood to make repairs. It was depressing. Rents from around one hundred and fifty households seemed plenty, but this was a larger church even than Winchester and it ate money. He absently rubbed the bald tonsure on top of his head, crowned by ever-thinning grey hair. He controlled his body, retaining his manly figure when many others in his position over-indulged and were fat, but he could not control his lack of hair. Any more than he could control the abbey expenses. He had yet to break his fast that day and was beginning to feel peckish which was not helping his mood. He was unlikely to find time to eat until later when he would join his brothers in the frater for the late afternoon meal.

          He was deep in his administrative work when a knock sounded at his door and he barked impatiently. The door opened and the brother stood back to let someone else enter. Richard stood abruptly, a smile spreading, his work and hunger forgotten.

          ‘My lord, what a pleasant surprise. You were not expected.’

          ‘I travelled quietly,’ the visitor said. ‘My retainers are in your guest hall keeping out of the way. They number just ten. I hope it is not an inconvenience.’

          Richard thought briefly on his dire finances but the smile did not fade. ‘Of course not, my lord.’ The king was a frequent visitor but he had not been here for a couple of years.

          The elder man held the younger in an embrace born of genuine fondness before he let go and directed him to a seat. King Edward lowered himself with unconscious grace and settled without fidgeting. Richard shuffled around to his side of the large wooden desk. He pushed the sheets of rolling parchment to one side. He would deal with them later.

          ‘Have you been to pay your respects to Harold?’

          ‘Of course. I always go there as soon as I arrive.’

          ‘He is none of yours, of course,’ Richard began but the king cut him off.

          ‘His heart belonged to England, as does mine. I like to think I have more in common with him than with William the Bastard, for all he is my ancestor.’

          Richard had not stopped smiling. It was sometimes difficult to remember that this personable young man had been king for nearly sixteen years. He was so youthful, so vibrant. And yet the eyes were disconcerting. They reflected a soul that was old. Older than his own he often felt. And then, when the light forsook them, he saw the pain and struggle that lay there, hidden in those purple depths by the affable nature of their owner. Such eyes, in such a face! What a joy to call him ‘friend’.

          ‘What brings you here this time? What can I do for you?’ Richard said.

          ‘I have not visited for some time and I felt in need of spiritual succour.’

          ‘Can you not get that at Westminster, St Paul’s?’

          Edward’s gaze drifted to the window. It was not a particularly good view, through the cloister but mostly of wall and a just a thin line of green grass and a sliver of blue sky. He was not looking at the view in any case.

          ‘I find something here that I cannot find elsewhere.’  He drew back from wherever he had been and bestowed a soft grin on the abbot. ‘You are here.’

          ‘I have rarely received such a compliment. I am flattered.’

          ‘My father trusted you. Sometimes he could be astute. Mostly not, but in you he was correct.’

          ‘We have always welcomed your family.’

          ‘You have,’ the king agreed, ‘and we are most grateful for your kindnesses.’

          ‘And how is your boy?’

          Edward did not need to know which of his four sons Richard referred to. ‘Ned surpasses my expectations,’ he said. ‘He challenges his tutor at arms every day.’

          ‘Then England will be in good hands with its next Edward.’ A pity, thought Richard, that this particular Edward would be lost to the country before the next could ascend his throne.

 Edward rose unexpectedly, but in a single smooth motion that made Richard yearn to return to his own youth. ‘May I peruse your library? I wish to find something that amuses me and I have exhausted much of London. Something fresh.’

          ‘Of course, my lord, you do not even have to ask. Borrow, if you wish, those that are not chained, and there are many that are still loose and rolled. The books must remain here, I am their guardian, not their owner and they belong at the abbey.’

The bell was due anytime for Vespers when Edward wandered back across the cloister garth, climbed the stone steps, the leather on the soles of his boots sliding a little, and he knocked on the study door.

 Richard had finished his work for the day, tallying the tithes from the farmland they owned nearby and assessing incomes. He had to eke out something to pay for wood to repair the parish nave roof. The longer it went unrepaired the worse it would get, and the more it would cost. Not to mention his chamber and the amount of bed linen ruined by rainwater filtered through the dirty roof. His woollen blankets did not like the excretion. He had had to purchase a new blanket last market day, an unexpected replacement for a mildewed, ruined article and no time to wait for his own looms to create one, and that was damp now from the previous night. The return of the king was a welcome distraction.

          ‘I thought you had completed the works here. And yet there is a bucket by the font. A bucket filled with dirty water. Are times so hard that you baptise the parish children in God’s own bounteous rain?’

          Richard flushed. ‘If it displeases your grace, I shall have it removed before Vespers-’

          ‘What displeases me is that it is required. What happened?’

          Richard shrugged. ‘The forty pounds you kindly granted is gone, it was not sufficient for all that we needed it for.’ He pulled a sheet of parchment to him and dipped a pen in his inkwell. ‘Maybe we should have been more careful and queried the costs more closely-’

          ‘Richard,’ the king stopped him gently.  ‘What can I do?’

          Richard opened his mouth and then closed it again. He hated to beg but what was there left to do? ‘We need wood,’ he heard himself say. ‘We need wood for the roof in the nave. And my own chamber leaks.’

          ‘Wood.’ Edward rubbed his chin, lightly shadowed this late in the day. His hair flopped across his right eye and he shook it back revealing his amethyst eyes, now gleaming. ‘Waltham Forest is nearby, is it not, and it is royal demesne?’ The abbot nodded in agreement. ‘Take two hundred pounds of wood from there, your choice of timber. I’ll have my agent deal with it but you can start felling straight away.’

          It was the miracle that Richard had been looking for. Two hundred pounds of wood. That was more than enough to fix everything, to repair the roofs and strengthen others, and to start building the pigsty he wanted. Tears of relief moistened the old man’s eyes.

          ‘Thank you, my lord, thank you. You are more than generous, I am left speechless.’

          Edward was a father and that shone through the curve of his lips and the warmth that enveloped the older man leaving him feeling far more like a child than a Father. ‘You only had to ask.’

          ‘We should be wealthy, we have rents from land here in Waltham, and the manors around, but the harvests are not good, and we find we struggle-’

          ‘Richard,’ Edward said softly, leaning forward in his chair. ‘Just ask.’ He drew back and relaxed back into his seat. ‘It is done now. Two hundred pounds of timber. That should see you right.’

          ‘More than right, your grace,’ the abbot said humbly.

          The king smiled at the formality.

          ‘Did you find what you were looking for, in the library?’ Richard asked to deflect the king’s attention from his pathetic gratitude.

          The smile grew and Edward drew out a bundle of sheets of vellum from inside his tunic. It was a rather extraordinary sight, to see a king tug a handful of documents from inside his gold embroidered green velvet tunic.

          ‘I found this,’ he replied and laid the sheets on the desk with a flourish.

 Richard pulled them towards him with a gnarled hand. ‘The Vita Haroldi?’ he asked in surprise. ‘What on earth for? You know it is not true.’

 Edward drew the sheets back to him and sifted through them. ‘So, this is not true?’ he asked, his finger tracing a line under some text. ‘”He also, with splendid liberality, endowed them with estates and possessions that they might have sufficient for their necessities.” That is true, is it not?’

  ‘I am not saying it is all incorrect, but Harold did not survive the Battle of Hastings. He is buried just a few steps away.’

  The look bestowed by Edward made Richard cringe.

  ‘His beloved heart is here, I will grant you that. His body is at the church at Bosham on the south coast.’ He laughed at his friend’s discomfiture. ‘It is hardly a secret, but it is a truth that few accept. It matters not, but you must keep in mind that not everything is as it seems.’

          Richard had no idea to what the king could possibly be alluding to, but he was sure it went beyond a random and rather odd document found in the depths of Heaven-knew-where about a long dead king.

          He raised his eyes from the vellum sheets that the king had laid back down on the desk but let them fall. Long dead king. Dead king. Christ. His father.

 There had been rumours. Of course there had been. And then that dreadful episode with Edmund of Woodstock, the Earl of Kent. Nothing the young king could have done to Roger Mortimer, the man who had had the earl executed for treason - for trying to release a dead man from prison - would bring back the king’s uncle. But what if the earl had been correct in his belief that his brother, the old king Edward, had still been alive, just as the scribe of this Vita Haroldi claimed for King Harold?

          It was a struggle to raise his eyes once more to meet those of his king. He had accepted the official version of the old king’s death at Berkeley castle because that was what had been required of him. And now here was the present king, the young man who knew everything and rarely spoke of anything, suggesting that this hundred year old manuscript was some kind of parallel?

          ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ Richard ventured, not sure he actually wanted an answer.

          ‘Nothing.’

          Never was a single word more imbued with meaning than that one. He was saying a great deal - the writer of the Vita Haroldi was saying it all for him.

          ‘I was hoping you could make a copy of this, illuminate it maybe. Keep it here, at Holy Cross, but I would like to see it when it is finished.’

          ‘Do you mind if I ask why?’

          The king said nothing for long enough to make Richard more uncomfortable, but he did, before Vespers, sigh heavily and shrug. ‘There are too many things that cannot be said, even by me. But this can say what it chooses.’ He ran his hand over the spidery black ink, stroking it with emotion akin to melancholy. ‘I want to know why this was written, what made the scribe go beyond what was known, what was accepted. And from my own experience I cannot dismiss this as easily as everyone else. Oh, I know it is not true, of course I do. I have seen the site of his true grave, in Bosham, and I pay homage to his heart and his body as often as I can. But there is a part of me that wonders, that wants this to be true.’ He ran his fingers over the words of Latin on the page. ‘It would make it all easier to accept, if someone else understood, as I must.’

          ‘My lord?’ Richard was concerned and he reached for Edward.

          ‘Fear not for me, I am well. A little dispirited, but well.’

          Richard patted the smooth hand as it lay on the manuscript. ‘I will see it is done.’ He hesitated and then added, ‘And I will not disseminate what we have said beyond these walls.’

          ‘I thank you,’ Edward said, ‘but I never thought I needed to ask.’

               

The woodcutters had gone, their tools slung over their shoulders, heading to the forest to begin selecting trees for felling. Richard lingered long after they had turned along the road and were beyond sight.

 Two hundred pounds of timber. It was the saving of the abbey, a gift from a generous king. A gift, or payment? Payment for copying a bizarre manuscript, payment to assuage his guilt over a father who had not perished, who had lived on, leaving Edward himself feeling too similar to his usurping ancestor William of Normandy. There was no similarity to the dour, vicious duke who had taken a throne that he had no right to. What Edward envisaged for France was quite, quite different. He had God and Right on his side, as well as blood. He was the rightful heir and the whole of France knew it. That was why they were so afraid of him.

          Well, two hundred pounds to soothe a conscience was little enough for a king, but it meant a great deal to Holy Cross. The abbey may live on to see another hundred years, and maybe that manuscript would be unearthed by another king, and maybe he would wonder at its survival at all, and in particular its survival from an era when another king had gone missing, presumed dead.

© copyright 2016

And the fake headlines at 10 o’clock…

Due to the sheer weight of fake news headlines and stories that were floating around about the recent US election, there have been a lot of articles written on this subject in the last few days.

These articles ranged from listing websites to avoid and outraged demands to shut all fake news websites down because they are dangerous.

Of course, spreading false rumour is never a good thing. False stories can make people alter the way they think and that will lead to an alteration in the way they act, and if that leads to them voting for someone they wouldn’t have done otherwise, then these fake stories start to become something other than innocent.

Such was the wide-spread nature of these stories due to them being shared more than the genuine news, posterity may well lead to them being read and believed because they overwhelm the truth.

Where does the fake story stop being a bit of a laugh and start to be propaganda, a force for ill and not for fun, a deliberate attempt to mislead and smear someone’s good name?

We’ve seen the devastation wrought when a false account causes an official body to act, just ask Cliff Richard and Sir Leon Brittan’s widow.

Whenever someone casts malicious doubt on the reputation of an individual, it is wrong. When you read stories that are just not true, that are intended to be taken as gospel, it is wrong. We have more access to news than any generation before us, everything is instant, but in that respect it is also far more transient and the falsehoods will be forgotten when something else comes along, but they’ll always be there, a short search and click away.

Imagine, however, that such falsehoods do last, that your reputation has been besmirched, not just for a few days, or a few years, but a few hundred years. How would that feel?

Richard III - the
face of a monster?

I read something else this week - The Daughter of Time  by Josephine Tey. For those who do not know it, it is a novel about a detective flat on his back in hospital in great need of diversion, and is given a selection of portraits to amuse him, one of which intrigues him, for its goodness, and its sadness. He firmly decides that if he were to appear in a court room, his natural place would be on the bench, rather than the dock, and being a detective, he feels he can read faces. So he is pretty shocked to be told that the face belongs to a criminal, a nephew-murdering monster, called Richard Plantagenet - better known as Richard III.

Alan Grant, no, not the one from Jurassic Park, spends the next few weeks of his hospital confinement researching the story of Richard III, approaching the material in the only way he knows how – as a detective. He looks rather at the material that was not intended to be history, not the chronicles, but the administrative records that are far less likely to be influenced by opinion in its need to record fact, such as wardrobes records, proceedings of parliament and the like.

I don’t know that everything that is contained in this volume is 100% true. I suspect no one now does. But what CAN be proven is rather compelling. To cut a long story short, the Tudors, so long revered by everyone, re-wrote history to make a man who was determined to settle peace, an excellent administrator, a great warrior, a diplomat, a fair-minded, NICE, man who cared for his family, into a cardboard-cut-out monster who murdered his nephews. And we’ve all bought it.

OK, specifics. I can’t continue without qualifying this. Let’s start with The Act of Attainder, supplied here by Matt Lewis with my gratitude, sets out the case by Henry VII against Richard, to cause him to be reviled and deposed as ever a rightful king:

Henry VII from the V&A,
he looks haunted to me

‘Every king, prince and liege lord is bound, in proportion to the loftiness of his estate and pre-eminence, to advance and make available impartial justice [p. vi-276][col. a] in promoting and rewarding virtue and oppressing and punishing vice. Therefore, our sovereign lord, calling to his blessed remembrance this high and great charge enjoined on his royal majesty and estate, not oblivious or unmindful of the unnatural, wicked and great perjuries, treasons, homicides and murders, in shedding infants' blood, with many other wrongs, odious offences and abominations against God and man, and in particular against our said sovereign lord, committed and done by Richard, late duke of Gloucester, calling and naming himself, by usurpation, King Richard III.’ 

The Act mentions ‘shedding infants’ blood’ but does not mention anything specific. If you KNEW that someone who you wanted the world to believe was the worst person ever born had murdered CHILDREN, you’d mention it, right? You’d do more than ‘mention’ it, you’d shout it from the rooftops because it would be the smoking gun, the conflagration that caused the smoke. It would be your entire raison d’etre. And yet you don’t mention it. You waffle, you add in a throw-away line, probably aware of a rumour, but you don’t back it up.

Why?

Because the two ‘infants’ in question are alive and carrying on as they always have. Because Edward V and his brother were still continuing their lessons in the Tower happily enough.  They are not dead. And why is this not explicitly said? Well, when is the last time you saw a headline that stated, ‘Elizabeth II is still alive’ following a period when she’s been hidden away in Scotland or Norfolk? You haven’t. We assume that the status quo exists until otherwise informed.

Elizabeth Woodville, her
beauty ensnared a king, and
ruined a kingdom

More specifics. Elizabeth Woodville, the woman who, according to Titulus Regius - the document that declared in Parliament that the princes were illegitimate - had bigamously married Edward IV, fled to sanctuary in Westminster on the death of her husband. And then left it again, and made friends with Richard, accepted the allowance he chose to pay her, allowed her daughters to take their place at court. Had she felt vulnerable, she could have gone to France, Flanders as her husband had done in 1470. But no. She stayed in England, the England of Richard.

The same Richard who she, it is claimed, KNEW had murdered her sons. What kind of woman would befriend the man who killed her children and not flee with as many of those that were left as she could lay her hands on? Unless she knew they were safe and Richard meant her and her family no harm. Makes more sense, doesn’t it?

She remained at large until February 1487 when she was sent to a nunnery. By Henry VII. Under Richard she was free, under Henry she was not.

The repealing of the Titulus Regius by Henry was to legitimise his wife, Elizabeth of York. It was not read, and every known copy was destroyed. No one was to know the contents. Odd. If you want to refute something you argue against it long and hard. Or not.

Because in legitimising Elizabeth, Henry also, by default, legitimised Prince Edward, making him King Edward V of England, and his brother Richard his rightful heir.

So, who had most to fear from the boys? Richard? Parliament granted him the crown. He didn’t need to kill the boys, they were already neutralised. Or Henry, who by making his wife legitimate had also created a powerful rival for the crown? And if the boys were dead, murdered by Richard, where was the harm in reading the Titulus Regius and then arguing against every point of it? Except of course that also put your wife ahead of you as rightful heir.

Richard, visiting the British
Museum, pretending
not to notice the crowds

When Richard took the throne there were nine potential heirs to it, including his deceased elder brother George’s son who was barred from the throne by the attainder of his father. When Richard died there were still nine heirs. Henry systematically removed them, including Richard’s illegitimate son John, and those that he didn’t get around to, Henry VIII, his son, dealt with. The death of two little boys was abhorrent tragedy; the wholesale wiping out of a dynasty to apparently achieve the very same ends was shrewd politics…

The content in Tey might be put forward in too black and white a form, doesn’t allow for the nuances, maybe she didn’t know of the nuances we now place on the evidence, the novel was written in the 1950s, but the basics are pretty reliable. You can’t escape that there was no specific accusation against Richard before Henry came to the throne, even from the boys’ mother. You can’t escape that Henry had no claim to the throne, and Richard’s was always better, murdered nephews or not.

So, why does every history book state unequivocally that Richard killed his nephews and that Henry VII was just and good and was taking the crown that was his by right? How did we reach a situation where the entire accepted history is bunkum and we rely almost solely on the writings of an Elizabethan playwright for the gospel truth? Should we therefore take as fact that all spies act like James Bond? That there really is a small country in the Alps called Roma Nova? And have you actually tried to enter into a parallel world by pushing a trolley through the wall to reach platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross?

If we read and believe the Tudor version of Richard, are we not also continuing to endorse the place of fake news in the world, encouraging it even? Why is the story of Richard killing his nephews less outrageous than the Pope endorsing Trump?

Fake news stories use drama, hyperbole and outrage to attract readers, clicks on Facebook.

And if you saw a headline stating ‘Twisted celebrity slaughters innocents in quest for power’ you’d read it.

I am very grateful for the help of Matt Lewis, author of several books about Richard III and more recently Henry III. Find out more about him here.

Books of Power

I happened upon a blog post this week via Twitter, which I find to be an Aladdin's Cave of tidbits and gems that you would otherwise never know existed had someone else not re-tweeted them. And this post really got me thinking. You can find it here and do please have a look.

Library at Trinity, Dublin.
This is how I envisage the Library of Babel.
Borges' version has hexagonal galleries.

If you don't have time now, that's fine but do come back. The writer of this post, Chris Rose, chooses five books that have had the most influence on him.

For a reader that is an enticing thought - which, of all the books I have ever read, have had the most influence on me?

When I started to think about this, I wanted to qualify that phrase 'influence on me'. In what way? Influenced me to write? To read more? To research? Or just one that remains with me, a favourite?

If I were to choose my favourite books, they would probably include some of the same in this list, but there would be differences. I admit that at least one of the books on my own personal 'influence' list would not necessarily make it to my desert island with me. And there are those that I would have with me on the golden sands under the white heat of the sun that I wouldn't say influenced me.

So, what did I pick to be on my list? I have to warn you that you won't find any classics here, and probably only one of these would ever make it onto a list of required reading. But what influences us need not be high brow, literary and intellectual, but can be more humble and have no motive other than to entertain.

And so, here goes, and in no particular order:

The Wild Hunt by Elizabeth Chadwick

This novel more than any other showed me that it was possible for a medieval romance to be more than ripped bodices and hysteria. The melodrama in most historical romances that I had read up to finding this novel was overwhelming, and they were filled with over-the-top characters who could not decide if they wanted to be strong and in charge or happy to swoon in front of the handsome man. The characters in this novel behaved rationally and were somehow more serene and yet still vital and engaging. This first published novel by Chadwick was an eye-opener.

Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

This volume of short stories I read in Spanish and actually I never did get round to reading it in English. I have two volumes of his, but most of the stories I like are in this one.

'The Library of Babel' discusses the existence of an eternal and infinite library in which there is one volume each of every possible combination of letters, so it will include the works of Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and yet it will have a volume that is entirely devoid of print. And another with just one letter, and another with just one letter, but on a different page.

'Pierre Menard, the Author of the Quixote' is rather bizarre but I think it should be required reading. The story is a critique on two books - 'Don Quixote' by Cervantes and 'Don Quixote' by Pierre Menard, a modern writer who set out to write Don Quixote and wrote an identical book to that of Cervantes. But the critic reads the two volumes differently. He likes Cervantes' version, it is true to his time and he believes what he writes. However, the Menard version, a word-for-word reconstruction, is full of affectation and anachronism and yet its ambiguity renders it richer than Cervantes' version. 

The story's intention is to explain that you have to take into account the motive and mindset of the writer to understand and appreciate the writing. It explains why 'Carry On' films are still so funny and yet so very un-PC, and why the newest version, 'Carry On Columbus', didn't work although we still laugh uproariously at 'Carry On Up The Khyber' and 'Carry On Doctor'. 'Columbus' was inescapably a product of its time, and time had moved on.

The Fifth Quarter by Kim Chesher

I salute you if you have heard of this. I really do! I found this in my school library and I was addicted. I photocopied a version I asked the local library to find me some years later so I could keep it as it was many years out of print, and then I managed to obtain a copy through Amazon Marketplace. So I am now legal!

This book was written for teens but don't let that put you off, it is well written and sensitively written. There is only one glaring error, but I am happy to overlook it. I won't tell you what, find a copy and read it for yourself. It introduced me to smugglers on Romney Marsh and the 'what if' of history. Now we know what happened to the Dauphin during the French Revolution, remains have been found and DNA used to identify them. He was likely murdered, certainly he died. But when this novel was written that wasn't known, and it was quite possible to imagine that he turned up on Romney Marsh. The title of the novel comes from the belief that there were four quarters of the Earth, and then Romney Marsh, the fifth quarter.

Brother Cadfael's Penance by Ellis Peters

All the Brother Cadfael books are brilliant. So to choose just one should be tricky. But it isn't. This particular volume is a little different from the others. Cadfael leaves the enclave of Shrewsbury, where most of the other books take place, to seek out his son who has fallen into the hands of an enemy, Philip FitzRobert, one who had been his friend. It isn't the story as such, although it is an absolute delight and is a sequel to my other favourite, The 'Virgin In The Ice', but it is the stunning narrative, the descriptive passages, particularly how she portrays this enemy of Cadfael's son Olivier. They are mostly single sentences that are so carefully structured that they illuminate his character more perfectly than another author could do with a whole page. Whenever I am at a loss I turn to this novel and I always find inspiration. If I could write like anyone who has ever put pen to paper, it would be Ellis Peters.

And finally....

Here Be Dragons by Sharon Penman

This was not the first of her novels that I read, that honour goes to 'The Sunne in Splendour', the longest novel I have ever read and the only one I have ever fetched from the library in hardback whilst owning the softback because of the sheer size of it had to be seen to be believed.

No, this was not vast in size, but it was vast in its effect on me. For this one single book was the sole reason for my choice of university.

This is the story of Llywelyn Fawr, a Welsh Prince who is one of those wonderful characters who lived a life less ordinary. For me, Penman's portrayal will always be the real Llywelyn. Even after having studied him under the two most eminent Welsh history professors of their (and my) time. I knew nothing of the history of Wales before this and studying at the only Welsh History department in the UK merely filled in the gaps, so thorough was Penman's research and writing. Strangely enough 'The Reckoning', the novel she wrote about Llywelyn the Last, Llywelyn Fawr's grandson, didn't have such a lasting impression, although the man himself did.

As I said earlier, these may not necessarily count as my favourite books (Cadfael has been read too many times to be counted, as has The Fifth Quarter) but however much I like 'Pride and Prejudice' or the character of Anne Elliott in 'Persuasion', they haven't changed me. I suppose my soul is richer for having read them, but they didn't alter my trajectory or change my understanding of the world as these books have.

Now I've told you mine, tell me about yours. What books set you on a different path? Which writer changed your life?