Falls the Shadow was originally intended to be the shared story of two men, Simon de Montfort and Llewelyn ap Gruffydd. But I soon discovered that I’d set myself an impossible task, for the scope and breadth of their lives could not be compressed into one volume. My solution was to yield Shadow to Simon, and to devote my next book, The Reckoning, to Llewelyn.
The very least that can be said of Simon de Montfort’s life is that it was eventful, often improbable, so much so that I feel I should attest to a few of the more unlikely occurrences. Simon truly did remind Henry that an addled French King had been confined for his own good, an insult Henry never forgave, for twenty years later he could recount Simon’s words almost verbatim. Some of their heated exchanges in the course of Simon’s Gascony trial come straight from the pages of medieval chroniclers; Simon did indeed dare to warn Henry that, were he not a King, it would have been “an evil hour” for him. Henry actually did accuse Simon of seducing Nell, a charge made before Henry’s entire court. Simon’s contemporaries reported that he wore a hair shirt, a gesture of piety as natural to the medieval mind as it is alien to ours. The wild thunderstorm that broke over Evesham field during the battle was not a novelist’s dramatic indulgence. So violent a storm was it that men invested it with a superstitious significance out of all proportion to an act of nature; one chronicler even compared it to the tempest that raged over Calvary as Jesus Christ was crucified. And Simon’s son Bran did arrive at the battlefield in time to see his father’s head upon a pike.
Although Shadow is my third book, I still find myself torn between two faiths. The novelist’s need for an untrammeled, free-flowing imagination is always at war with the historian’s pure passion for verity. I do try to keep fact-tampering to a minimum, but it occasionally is necessary in order to advance the story line. The Welsh Princes met at Ystrad Fflur Abbey in October of 1238; I changed the date by several weeks to accommodate the birth of Simon and Nell’s son Harry. For the sake of convenience, I referred to Henry’s “Painted Chamber,” although that term did not come into use until some years later. And I chose to call Henry’s half-brother, the Earl of Pembroke, by his family name, William de Lusignan, rather than by the name by which he is generally known to history—de Valence—that of his birthplace. As in my novel Here Be Dragons, I used Welsh spellings and place-names wherever possible, although I chose the slightly Anglicized “Llewelyn” over the pure Welsh of “Llywelyn,” and I used the medieval v for phonetic reasons, as in Davydd and Ednyved.
It is not easy to resurrect a time so far removed from ours. Wales, in particular, remains uncharted terrain, for medieval sources were often incomplete, ambiguous, occasionally in conflict. In dramatizing Davydd ap Llewelyn’s capture of his half-brother, Gruffydd, I have followed the chronology of the English monk Matthew Paris, rather than that of the Welsh chroniclers, for the reasons so persuasively set forth by Gwyn A. Williams in “The Succession to Gwynedd, 1238–47.”
History has not been kind to Henry. The consensus is that he was one of England’s most incompetent kings. He did leave a legacy, though, that many a more capable monarch might well envy—Westminster Abbey. And however wretched a sovereign, he was a loving father. His devotion to his deaf-mute daughter, Katherine, was atypical for his age, utterly at odds with the bias personified by Matthew Paris, who dismissed Katherine as “pretty but useless.”
This was the first of my books in which I had to deal with the ugly underside of medieval society—the anti-Semitism that was so pervasive, so poisonous a part of daily life. I sought to explain how and why people were infected, making no excuses, but attempting to root this evil in the context of the thirteenth century.
Lastly, I would like to say a few words about Simon de Montfort. A French-born English hero, lordly champion of the commons, an honorable adventurer, he continues to be as controversial and enigmatic and paradoxical a figure in our time as he was in his own. Men have been arguing about the man, his motivations, and his legacy for the past seven hundred years. To an admiring Winston Churchill, “de Montfort had lighted a fire never to be quenched in English history.” But the historian Sir F. M. Powicke, while grudgingly according Simon a certain “murky greatness,” also saw him as a “dark force.” Victorian historians in particular tended to overestimate Simon’s contribution to constitutional government, lauding him as “the father of the English parliament,” ascribing to him sentiments and aspirations no medieval man could have harbored. Simon’s admirers and his critics do find some common meeting ground, all agreeing that Simon was able, arrogant, courageous, hot-tempered, and charismatic. Opinions then begin to diverge widely. A saint he most surely was not. For myself, I saw in him glimmerings of a Shakespearean tragic hero, one doomed by his own flaws. History’s judgment upon Simon de Montfort has been fluid, fluctuating over the centuries in accordance with prevailing political winds, for each age interprets the past in the light of its own biases. But the verdict that lingers in the imagination is that of Simon’s contemporaries, the medieval villagers who flocked to his grave, the steadfast Londoners, the poor and the powerless who believed in him, who did not forget him.
S.K.P.
November 1987
Also by Sharon Kay Penman
The Sunne in Splendour
Here Be Dragons
The Reckoning
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people, without whose support Shadow might still be that, a shadowy idea, a might-have-been book. First and foremost, my parents, William and Terry Penman. My American editor, Marian Wood of Henry Holt and Company. My American agent, Molly Friedrich of the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency. My British editor, Susan Watt of Michael Joseph Ltd. My British agent, Mic Cheetham of Anthony Sheil Associates, Ltd. Valerie LaMont and Joan Stora, who were brave enough to read a manuscript piecemeal. Cris Reay, my own “fail-safe system” for verifying historical facts, no matter how obscure. Geoffrey Arnott, Britain’s best battlefield guide. Dr. Edwin McKnight, who generously acted as my “medical consultant” for Llewelyn Fawr’s cerebrovascular accident. Linda Miller, for all the artistic inspiration. Dave O’Shea, whose evocative photographs of North Wales have gotten me through more bouts of writer’s block than I care to count. And lastly, I would like to thank the staffs of the National Library of Wales, the British Library, the University College of North Wales Library, the research libraries of Evesham, Shrewsbury, and Bordeaux, the University of Pennsylvania Library, and a special expression of appreciation to the staff of the Caernarfon Archives for helping me to pinpoint the site of the battle fought near Bwlch Mawr in 1255.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
FALLS THE SHADOW. Copyright © 1988 by Sharon Kay Penman. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
“The Hollow Men,” from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright © 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Maps by Anita Karl and James Kemp
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Penman, Sharon Kay.
Falls the shadow / Sharon Kay Penman.—1st St. Martin’s Griffin ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-312-38246-9
1. Great Britain—History—Henry III, 1216–1272—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.E474 F35 2008
813′.54—dc22
2008023607
First published in the United States by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, Inc., by Ballantine Books, a division of The Random House Publishing Group
Falls the Shadow Page 81