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Dame Ellen Langwith in Fact and Fiction
by Toni Mount Dame Ellen Langton has been a character in my series of Seb Foxley medieval murder mysteries since the beginning. In the first novel, she was Seb and Jude’s landlady and mistress to Emily Appleyard, the love interest. Dame Ellen’s character owes everything to a real silk-woman who also ran a tailoring business in later medieval London, Ellen Langwith. I discovered Ellen Langwith when I took part in a project for the Richard III Society, transcribing medieval wills, and her will came my way. She died early on in 1481, though the exact date isn’t known, but her fascinating will gives a wealth of information on the life…
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Loving the Enemy: The Seeds of Revolution
Guest post by Dominic Fielder – originally published March 7, 2019 Jekyll and Hyde has been on the GCSE syllabus now for a few years. As much as I enjoy teaching about it, I find myself painfully aware of the brilliance of Robert Louis Stevenson’s prose and his rich vocabulary. Just occasionally I will try and slip ‘slatternly’ and ‘catholicity’ into everyday conversation but you must choose your moments! As the story reaches the final chapter, we at last read Jekyll’s account and begin to feel some sympathy for the man, a luxury never extended to Edward Hyde. Which made me think about the diet of war films and westerns…
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The Year the Swans Came
Originally posted March 5, 2019 Growing up amongst the ruins of war, four siblings use bridges and cobblestone walkways as a backdrop for their games. Pieter Bader, the eldest, wants to follow in the footsteps of his family, designers of mirrors for royalty since the 17th century, while Maidy, the youngest, dreams of becoming a writer. Her best friend Ruth, who lives next door, dreams of marrying Pieter, only for him to vanish from their lives late one night. Is his disappearance linked to the arrival of the swans, feared as cursed and birds of ill-fortune? What will happen when they return six years later, on the morning of Maidy’s sixteenth…
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Investigating Forged Documents in the Fifteenth Century – A Scrivener’s Tale
By Toni Mount My amateur sleuth, Seb Foxley, being trained as a scribe and having a keen eye, has a knack for spotting forged documents in fifteenth-century London. In The Colour of Evil, Seb is called upon to check out some suspect documents for the Bishop of London. This is a side issue to add to our hero’s burden of things he must do but such things really did go on in medieval times. The monks at Westminster Abbey were notorious for making illicit changes to important documents or even forging new ones on old parchment to benefit themselves. As a novelist, as well as a writer of factual history…
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ARCHIVE: Loving the Enemy – The Seeds of Revolution, by Dominic Fielder
Jekyll and Hyde has been on the GCSE syllabus now for a few years. As much as I enjoy teaching about it, I find myself painfully aware of the brilliance of Robert Louis Stevenson’s prose and his rich vocabulary. Just occasionally I will try and slip ‘slatternly’ and ‘catholicity’ into everyday conversation but you must choose your moments! As the story reaches the final chapter, we at last read Jekyll’s account and begin to feel some sympathy for the man, a luxury never extended to Edward Hyde. Which made me think about the diet of war films and westerns that were my intake from early teenage years on. The enemy…
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ARCHIVE: Mary Anne Yarde – Why I Wrote the Du Lac Chronicles
A generation after Arthur Pendragon ruled, Briton lies fragmented into warring kingdoms and principalities. Eighteen-year-old Alden du Lac ruled the tiny kingdom of Cerniw. Now he half-hangs from a wooden pole, his back lashed into a mass of bloody welts exposed to the cold of a cruel winter night. He’s to be executed come daybreak—should he survive that long. When Alden notices the shadowy figure approaching, he assumes death has come to end his pain. Instead, the daughter of his enemy, Cerdic of Wessex, frees and hides him, her motives unclear. Annis has loved Alden since his ill-fated marriage to her Saxon cousin—a marriage that ended in blood and guilt—and…
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ARCHIVE: Author Barbara Spencer – Why I Wrote Broken
I am known as an author of YA thrillers and children’s books, and it was a complete surprise to find myself writing ‘Broken’ which is for adults. I had just completed the time-slip novel, ‘Time Breaking’. An instant success which took me to many book-signing events at Waterstones, I decided to use the same time-slip format for my next novel but with a male lead rather than a female. Unfortunately, and I plead total ignorance as to why or how it happened, my pen took off and instead of sending my hero back in time, I found myself investigating rivers and monasteries, peat moors, rhynes and clyces. The result was…
