by Alison Adare
“You will have to learn to mind your language,” Tom said.
“Saint Peter’s pin I’ll mind my language,” Janet said. “Saint James’ jewels. Saint Catherine’s —”
He stopped her mouth with another kiss. “At least now I know a way to keep you quiet,” he said as he drew back.
Janet grinned at him. “Rewarding me is hardly a discouragement,” she said. “Saint Eustace’s eggs.”
Tom wound his fingers through her hair. “I can see you at the altar. Donnic will say, do you take this man, and you’ll say —”
He was smiling, as beautiful as the sunlight that touched the stubble on his cheeks and lit his eyes with flecks of gold, that warmed his skin and fired his hair into a halo, that made him look to be the lord of Bryn Aur in fact as well as name.
Janet reached up to touch his face, tracing the slope of his cheek. “I’ll say yes,” she said. “I’ll say yes, yes, yes, Christ’s cod, I do.”
Notes on Time and Place
Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted close parallels between Camray and Wales (Cymru), from the (sometimes misheard by foreign ears) names of its people to its location west of a powerful, conquering neighbor, separated by border Marches. They might also have put together the references to a severe winter and wet summer, an insane, helpless King, an ambitious Protector, and the country’s recent defeat in a generations-long war ‘across the water’ to identify the time of the story as 1454 — the year Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, was named Protector of the Realm after Henry VI’s catastrophic mental breakdown the year before.
However, not all the historical or geographical details in the book are accurate. Britain did not suffer from many outbreaks of ergotism, an illness caused by eating grain infected by the ergot fungus, and there’s no record of one occurring in Wales in the 1450s. Successive outbreaks of first convulsive, and then gangrenous ergotism would be unlikely. The living conditions at Brinday provide unrealistic amounts of privacy for the inhabitants, given the time. There is little evidence for any survival of pre-Christian beliefs to this period, except as adapted and Christianized holidays and superstitions. Though illustrations of Welshmen in following centuries show them wearing long tunics and trousers, there is little evidence for when, exactly, clothing styles changed from the 13th century description of the men of Wales wearing long robes and going bare-legged.
And, although there is considerable evidence for women disguising themselves as men to enlist in the army in early modern Europe (one Englishman joked in 1762 that there were so many women in the army, they should have their own regiments) Janet’s decision and deception predates the first historical accounts by quite some time. The prosecution of Margaret Cotton for wearing men’s clothing in London in 1454 shows, however, as do the many stories of cross-dressing female saints, that a woman putting on a man’s clothing by preference or for practical reasons was not an alien concept at the time, and not always condemned.
While I have endeavored to stay close to what little is known about the English military of the period, I have made some changes. There were English infantry equipped with polearms in the expeditionary forces sent to France in the period, although not many (the bulk of the forces were archers and ‘men-at-arms’). They would have been called ‘billmen’, not ‘pikemen’ in the period, after their weapons, a modified version of the agricultural implements called billhooks or bills. For the sake of easy comprehensibility, however, I have used ‘pike’ and ‘pikemen’.
For those interested in the real history on which I have floated this raft of fancy, I recommend:
Dan Jones, The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (England, Faber and Faber, 2014)
John Davies A History of Wales (England, Penguin UK, 2007)
Valerie R. Hotchkiss Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe (London, Routledge, 2012)
Barbara Rosen Witchcraft in England, 1558-1618 (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1991)
Terence Wise Medieval European Armies (Oxford, Osprey Publishing 1975)
Helen Parish Superstition and Magic in Early Modern Europe: A Reader (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)
About The Author
Alison Adare writes non-fiction for money and fiction for fun. She lives in front of the computer most of the time and is owned by two cats.
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/NewTwists
Webpage:
http://www.alisonadare.com/