A capital letter century

The fourteenth century. You’ve gotta love it. The Great Famine, The Black Death, The Peasants’ Revolt – it’s a century of capital-letter happenings. And it also had something we’ve got – climate change. Between 1300 and 1400 mean temperatures fell by one degree centigrade in England. The country went from having numerous vineyards to, effectively, having none.

Like us, fourteenth century people had a feeling that things were going downhill rapidly and that they might be looking at the end of the world as they knew it. Except they thought that the Biblical apocalypse was going to be responsible rather than a catastrophic rise in global temperature…

Through my research I'm getting the sense that a feeling of impending doom was very real and it’s going to be interesting to see whether our twenty-first century feeling of personal helplessness in the face of global forces has any resonances with the fourteenth century’s feeling of helplessness in the face of a God who had apparently tired of the waywardness of humanity.

I’m reading a couple of books at the moment – Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century and The Black Death, An Intimate History by John Hatcher. They’re both very modern history books in the sense that they try to give the general reader a feel for what it was like to actually live then. They’re the kind of smell in the street, dirt beneath your fingernails, terror behind the next sneeze kind of books that I love.

These books appeal to me particularly, as both authors seems to be coming from a very similar standpoint to my own when I write about the past; their books ring with the conviction that human nature doesn’t change. The circumstances may change, the diet, the clothing, the worldview but human nature with its ambition, greed, violence, love, altruism and fear will always be the same until homo sapiens becomes another species altogether.

As Ian Mortimer says in his introduction ‘..most of all, it needs to be said that the very best evidence for what it was like to be alive in the fourteenth century is an awareness of what it is to be alive in any age, and that includes today.’

I think that’s right. What I aspire to in writing historical fiction is to make my reader see that though the people they’re reading about had a very different experience of life and very different expectations of it, they were the sort of people we meet, know and love in our own lives. They are us. In historical costume.

The Hows and Whys of Historical Fiction

I mentioned the other day that I’d had an interesting time thinking about Testament from a technical point of view, so that I could talk about it cogently to the folks up at Waverton.
I believe I mentioned plot, character, theme and language.
So, while I’ve got a few minutes to think about the blog, while it snows outside, I thought I’d jot a few things down.

I thought I’d start with a few thoughts on research.

I do two basic kinds of research for my historical fiction – the general kind where I immerse myself in the period as much as I can so that I get a feel for how the people and places I’m writing about would have looked and sounded, felt and smelled. I need to know what my characters would have thought and believed, the likely prejudices of the age, the things so taken for granted that they’re never spelled out.
At this stage, I’m trying to find out what, at a basic level, it was like to live then.

Then there’s the more focused research – for Testement, this involved teaching myself about medieval architecture and building, medieval learning and the difference between English universities and those on the continent, the state of the English church and the heretical sect known as the Lollards. After trying to find out about everything, you suddenly narrow your focus to a very small field.
This can lead to interesting imbalances – like when I realised that I knew pretty much every tool and technique a journeyman, labourer or master mason might use during the day but I had no idea how they arranged the whole issue of going to the toilet… Fortunately, I didn’t need to know but it bothered me that I hadn’t managed to find out something so basic. (Interestingly, I know that kind of detail for the book I’m writing now, which is based in the nineteenth century. And I know because the contemporary commentators were so outraged at the primitive arrangements in the area I’m writing about. Sources are everything…)

Of course, I’m not doing all this research so I can put every last little detail in my book. Far from it. Paradoxically, you do research so that you can leave most of it out. In the same way that you know your own contemporary world intimately, but never refer to the vast majority of what you know, you need to leave most of what you’ve learned about your historical period in your notes. You still need to know it’s there, because you might want to refer to it tangentially, without going into detail, but for each fleeting reference, you’ll probably have a whole page of notes on how this fits in to the world of century/decade X.
At least, that’s how it is for me.

You see, I think the reader of historical fiction enters into a relationship of trust with the writer - he trusts that you know the period and will continue to trust you until or unless you make an obvious mistake. It’s not a matter of proving how much you know by the barrowloads of colourful period detail you put in; you prove your grasp on how your plot and your characters inhabit the period by the telling details you choose to include.

So, I’ve always taken the view that I will put no more detail into the historical strands of my fiction than I include in the contemporary scenes. If I don’t routinely describe what my twenty-first people are wearing (and I don’t), then I won’t give you a garment-by-garment description of what my fourteenth century people – or, in the work in progress, my nineteenth century characters – are wearing either. People in my contemporary worlds are rarely seen eating so I’m not going to give you much in the way of what my historical characters had for breakfast unless it’s strictly relevant.

Interestingly, though, research can often take you in unexpected directions. As part of the background research for Testament, I read a book on the economic climate of the late fourteenth century. It sounded as dull as ditchwater from the title (I’m sorry, I’m too lazy to go and unearth it so that I can tell you the proper title and author, I’ll try and do that for the next post) but it turned out to be a gem. The author had ploughed through endless manorial and court accounts – who paid what to whom and what for – and, because money makes the world go round, it was fascinating.
It told me, for instance, that an order was given, one summer, for all journeymen, whatever their trade, to down tools when the weather was fair, and help to bring in the harvest. Previous years’ harvests had been diabolical and there was a serious risk of mass starvation so the powers that be (and I had no idea how much the machinery of the state interfered in every aspect of daily life in the fourteenth century) decided that the harvest was the thing and everyone would have to do their bit to make sure it was successfully brought in.
Well, once I knew this, I had to include it, it was just too fascinating to ignore. And, fortunately for me, it provided a useful way of moving the plot on and providing conflict. Because, if the weather’s been dreadful and the harvesters have been waiting for a few nice days to get the grain in to the barns, the master mason has been waiting for exactly the same weather to progress his building. Send his journeymen out to bring in corn when there’s building to be done? I don’t think so…

More next time on getting the language right in historical fiction.
Don’t go away…

Write about what you know - why?

I’m trying to get ahead of the game at the moment and sort out a few talks which I’m giving in the next couple of weeks. Since one is at the opening of a new Library, part of the talk is going to be about the research aspect of writing historical (ok, split time) novels.

And, though I was a bit worried, turns out there’s quite a lot to say, both about the precise research necessary for Testament (masonry, carpentry, building techniques, everyday life (that’s a ‘how long is a piece of string?’ one) medieval universities, the medieval church and its relation to medieval universities, Lollardy… OK, I’m going to stop now before I give the impression that the book is some kind of erudite tome) and about the research process itself.

When I did the bulk of the research for Testament the internet was not the massive, enormous, humungous, information-loaded thing it is now. It was little, it was weedy, it had very little stuff on it. It was twelve years ago. So, I relied on books. Remember them? Sorry… got carried away there on the whole cyber-thing. Of course the people who read this blog remember books, that’s why you’re here…
It’s been a stressful day…

Where was I? Oh yes, doing research out of books. Because I didn’t really have much of a feel for the kind of books I needed to read (I’m not a historian – I did English at university) I just got hold of a couple of medieval social history books, some very general guides (such as you can pick up from English Heritage or National Trust properties) on masonry and carpentry and followed footnotes and bibliographies to more detailed and relevant texts. Thank goodness for inter-library loan. Without that, Testament would have to have waited a few years.

But what was really interesting to me, when I was actually doing the research, was how it drove the story. Things which I had as part of the original plot line proved not to be possible, given the historical constraints of the time; things I found out during my research suggested new plotlines to develop. It was the total antithesis of ‘write about what you know’.

And, to be honest, how boring would that be, anyway? If I wrote about what I know you’d get novels about growing up on a dairy farm in Wales in the 1970s, being an Oxford undergraduate in the early 1980s or being a speech and language therapist. Not exactly the territory Testament covers.

I’m reading, admiring and liking (my gold standard) David Isaak’s Shock and Awe at the moment – I think it’ll be my weekend review – and unless he’s led a very chequered life as an FBI agent, a member of a slightly dodgy American militia and a mercenary (or ‘merk’ as the book would have it) then I don’t think he’s writing about what he know, either. Certainly his jacket-biog would suggest otherwise.

So where did this injunction to write about what you know come from? Surely the whole point of being a fiction writer is that you use your imagination? I don’t know what it was like to live in the fourteenth century – if anybody came back from the fourteenth century and read Testament they’d probably die laughing, always assuming that somebody had taught them how to read modern English beforehand, obviously. But it doesn’t have to convince anybody from the fourteenth century, it only has to convince twenty-first century readers and, if I’ve done my research well, that’s what it will do. But to tell me whether I’ve succeeded, I’m afraid you’re going to have to read the book!

Research and Google

Hooray for Tim Berners-Lee because his invention - the internet - must be the best research tool ever for writers. Today, for instance, I was writing away, describing an ancient, sagging roof when I suddenly realised that I didn’t know whether it was sagging on to its beams or its rafters. Quick trip to Google-land and I knew more than I ever needed to about the difference.
It’s rafters, by the way.

I did the bulk of the research for Testament nine or ten years ago and you wouldn’t believe how much less information was on the net in those days. When I wanted to find out about medieval proofs of age, or the exact beliefs of the Lollards, I had to go and find a book which would tell me. And finding the relevant kind of books took AGES. Now, although every search will bring up a ton (probably actually would be a ton in reality if you printed it all out) of useless references, if you’re canny about the search terms you put in you can usually find some relevant stuff pretty quickly. And Google-hounds like me get ever so savvy about looking at a site or a page and working out within a couple of seconds whether it’s going to be any use or not. You can also quick-search the page you’ve come to for all your relevant search-terms using Ctrl-F and, if half of them aren’t there, bye-bye page.

As my current novel is set in the area I grew up in, I’ve discovered a lot of history I didn’t know when I lived there. My home town, Newcastle Emlyn, has a fantastic website as does the local history society, Hanes Emlyn. So I have not had to go to Aberystwyth University or any other University of Wales library, to trawl through their archives looking for information about, for instance, the Newcastle Emlyn workhouse. Everything I need is on the Hanes Emlyn site, including the name of the Master in the relevant period and census material for each decade of the workhouse’s eighty-odd-year history. Amazing!

Old maps, sadly, seem not to lend themselves to being scanned and put up on the internet and, during the writing of certain bits of this book, I have spent ludicrous tracts of time comparing place-names which occur in early nineteenth-century records with contemporary names and trying to work out whether they are referring to the same place. Sometimes, the places referred to seem to have vanished without trace; or place-names have changed their spelling, from an Anglicised version back to a more authentic Welsh rendition. At other times names have been used which don’t seem to relate to anything. The workhouse in question appears in a 1920s photograph, for instance, as Voelallt Castle which it never was!

I must confess, it was much easier writing a historical novel which was set in a city which has never existed. Salster, the city I invented for Testament, is situated roughly geographically where Canterbury is but bears little resemblance to historical Canterbury. (Though there are some similarities, I’ll be interested if those who read the book and know Canterbury well spot the references!)

I deliberately chose to write about a fictitious city so as not to give myself too hard a time with research. I knew I’d have enough to do finding out about the professions, religions, eating habits, dress etc etc of my characters’ world without having to place them somewhere which really existed. There are a lot of people out there who love it when authors get things wrong and delight in writing to them and saying ‘there wasn’t a White Horse lane in Oxford in 1352’ or ‘the church you mention in chapter 32 wasn’t built until half a century later’. I can do without that sort of hassle.

So why set the current book in a real time and place? Because I’ve always been fascinated by the Rebecca Riots – a sudden outbreak of nocturnal activity in my home area in the 1840s which mostly concentrated on destroying tollgates but which had some pretty interesting off-shoots. But that’s a post for another time…