Why I Write About England

England. The mere name conjures up images of castles, long rolling plains of green, ancient stone structures, knights, kings, pageantry of a different age, stone walls and thatched cottages. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tolkien. Magical in every sense of the word.

And growing up in a household of rabid Anglophiles certainly set me on an inevitable course toward all things English. Especially its history. I know more monarchs of England than American presidents.

And let’s face it. It’s a loooong history.

When I set out to write my medieval mysteries, I was following in grand footsteps. Ellis Peters gave us the first in a long line of them, with her Brother Cadfael series.

My medieval detective would not be a monk or a nun, however. I wanted more action, more personal danger for my protagonist, more issues and angst with his character. So I made him a knight, but a disgraced one, someone who lost his title, his wealth, his place in the world, and in so doing, gave him the impetus to embark on his new profession, that of the “Tracker,” a finder of lost objects and of the occasional murder. Crispin Guest was my creation, with a quest to satisfy his ingrained personal honor while eking out a living on the mean streets of fourteenth century London, encountering religious relics and murder.

But why the fourteenth century?

So many choices when it comes to the Middle Ages. After all, it’s a period that spans a thousand years. But the latter part of the fourteenth century is home to Geoffrey Chaucer, writer of The Canterbury Tales, another of my childhood and adulthood favorites. It is a book full of the real people of this period, and if I were to write about this time, this reign of Richard II with all its intrigue, I was certainly going to include Chaucer in a few of the books, make him an old friend of Crispin’s, rework the Canterbury Tales into my own tale, only with murder (which is the fourth book, TROUBLED BONES). So then I could really delve into England of the Middle Ages, London specifically, and learn the sights, sounds, smells, mores, laws, clothing, food of the time.

I’m big on hands-on research. I’ve cooked the food, brewed the ale, made and worn the clothing, learned to fight with the weaponry, and even got myself up in armor and on a warhorse to know what it’s like to joust (which features prominently in the fifth book, BLOOD LANCE). There’s a lot of world-building involved when you write about a different time period. People think they know a period either from history class of long ago, novels, movies, or—God help us—the History Channel. But I’m here to tell you that there’s a huge difference between what’s in a movie (or on the History Channel) than is the actual truth of history.  The trick, of course, is to blend one’s fiction into the true fabric of what really occurred, keeping it seamless and smooth…and interesting.

The England of the fourteenth century is quite different and at the same time, accessible today. The towns were smaller (London was the second biggest city in all of Europe, Paris being the first), but even so, there was a lot of distance between towns and villages, with no easy highways and rest stops in between. Communication was poor. Most people could not read or write. Diversity of culture, language, religion, or mores were not encouraged. The modern notion of privacy was just that; modern. It didn’t exist then, when servants slept in the same room as you and your spouse, both getting up to, well…what couples got up to without too much of a blink. They did think differently from us, from their faith, to their thoughts on self and community, to their notions of right and wrong. And yet, in reading about what they thought and in the many documents created and kept about their jurisprudence, we find many places where we can still relate. Even our senses of humor—though theirs was somewhat bawdier—are similar.

The landscape might have looked different and the language—Middle English—might have been hard to understand, but England was still essentially England. And in this time period, we have the seeds of Englishness where for the first time, the rich and noble speak English instead of French, of fierce nationalism and a sense of burgeoning Englishness that will fully blossom under  Henry VIII.

And one more mundane reason why I write about England of the past before climate change was the weather. It is usually hot where I live. Unrelenting hotness broken only by less hotness until a brief Fall and Winter. So I keep myself cool by writing about a time and place that is in its Little Ice Age; where is rains…a lot! So I can cool myself off.

But in the end, I think that John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and one of the supporting characters in my books, says it best in Shakespeare’s Richard II:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,–

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.