The Norman castle in Maynooth1 was built by Maurice FitzGerald, the son of the heroine of my Conquest trilogy, the Welsh noblewoman Nest ferch Rhys. Nest was the daughter of the last independent king in Wales. 2

Maurice was one of the first Normans to arrive in the 1169 conquest of Ireland.

Nest had at least ten children by five different men. Maurice’s half-brother, Robert FitzStephen, the son of Nest’s second marriage to Stephen de Marais, was also a significant part of the Norman vanguard in Ireland, as were Nest’s various grandsons, including Meilr FitzHenry, Raymond the Gros, Miles FitzDavid, Philip de Barri and Milo de Cogan. The genealogy below shows the whole host of Nest’s descendants who arrived in Ireland in 1169 (marked in bold). The main primary source on the invasion, The Conquest of Ireland, completed in 1189, was written by another of Nest’s grandsons, Gerald of Wales.3 Maurice FitzGerald came to Ireland with six grown sons, who fought alongside him and were the progenitors of two of Ireland’s most famous noble houses, the earls of Kildare and Desmond and the dukes and duchesses of Leinster.

Nest’s descendants in Ireland became known as the Geraldines and were ‘the most durable of the conquistadors who established themselves in Ireland in the late 12^th century’ (Crooks & Duffy, 2017).4 Gerald of Wales coined the term ‘the Geraldines’ and used it both for the descendants of Gerald FitzWalter (Nest’s first husband) and for all the descendants of Nest by her various partners. Despite the name, the Geraldines was a kinship group linked by common descent from a Welsh woman, from Nest (and not exclusively from the Norman Gerald).5

Maurice FitzGerald and Robert FitzStephen and all the other Geraldines were among the first wave of Norman invaders in 1169 because they were under increasing pressure in Wales from their Welsh cousin, Rhys ap Gruffudd (known as the Lord Rhys), the son of Nest’s brother. The Norman conquest in Wales had been slow rather than fast, as in England, due to the terrain and the Welsh resistance. After King Henry I’s death in 1135, the Welsh were resurgent. Nest’s brother, Gruffudd ap Rhys was one of the leaders of a Welsh army that was victorious against the Normans at Crug Mawr, near Cardigan. Lord Rhys was dominant in southwest Wales from 1155. The Geraldines were also losing more of their autonomy in Wales as King Henry II tightened his control of every nook and crany of his kingdom. Maurice and the other Geraldines no doubt hoped they could establish a firmer base in Ireland. They managed to weather King Henry II’s arrival in 1171 when he put an end to the aristocratic free-for-all of the early stages of the conquest, and the Geraldines continued to flourish in Ireland for many centuries.

Nest’s Welsh-Norman children and grandchildren brought with them a history of frontier fighting in Wales and a history of castle stewardship that gave them an edge in frontier life in Ireland. Maurice’s father, Gerald, had been the steward of Pembroke Castle. His grandfather was the steward of Windsor Castle. His uncle, Maurice FitzWalter was the steward of Bury St Edmund’s, which was the richest monastery in England. This Norman family, descended from one of the Viking settlers in Normandy, knew how to build a castle, how to manage its estates, and how to defend it. Maynooth Castle was one of several controlling the routes into Dublin, and Maurice FitzGerald and his family used it as their main residence. Excavations at Maynooth in 1996 showed that the first castle consisted of a donjon or tower sitting on top of an artificially raised mound with a timber fence. From the 1170s, it was replaced with a stone castle. Maurice FitzGerald must have brought a team of experienced castle builders with him from Wales.

Before he came to Ireland, Maurice was the steward of Llansteffan Castle in Wales, which was the primary source for the trilogy I wrote. I used to pass the castle in sunrise and sunset on my weekly train commute. It stands on a headland overlooking the estuaries of three rivers that flow into Carmarthen Bay.

I spent most of my earlier career teaching art history. The initial stimulus for my novels is almost always visual rather than textual. That visual catalyst might be an image, an artefact, or a place that is evocative of the early medieval period.

I set about transforming places as sources for fiction by immersing in them, by treading the ground. I made Llansteffan castle, the heart of my trilogy on Nest ferch Rhys. Looking at the spectacular site from the train it held the mystique of a distant object. I wanted to know about it. I wanted to people it with the individuals who had lived and died there. To develop this initial inspiration, I went and spent a few days in Llansteffan – exploring the castle’s ruins, revelling in the fantastic views across the triple estuary, imagining the medieval occupants.

When Nest’s sons and grandsons landed in Ireland, they were termed Normans or even ‘English invaders’, when they were, in fact, Welsh-Normans. Eleanor Searle has written about how existing power structures were not obliterated in conquest but were rather absorbed through intermarriage, and this applied in England, Wales, and Ireland.6 Intermarriage with women carrying royal and noble bloodlines was a strategy to ensure the permanence of conquest. Some historians spin Owain’s abduction of Nest as a romantic escapade caused by her enormous beauty, but it could equally be interpreted as Owain’s intentional disruption of Norman appropriation of a Welsh bloodline.7

The story can never be reduced to simple goodies and baddies. The Irish king of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchada, needing assistance against other Irish kings, made the invitation to the Welsh Normans and Strongbow that resulted in the 1169 invasion.

Ethnic identity can never be singular, static, and unambiguous.8 Nest, like many indigenous women forced or given in marriage to the invaders, had torn loyalties. Nest’s father and brothers were in deadly conflict with the Normans, but her sons and grandsons regarded themselves as Normans. Ethnicity is situational and strategic.

Genealogy is a significant source for me, but rather than focusing on inheritance through the male line, I try to look at genealogy from a female perspective, since my protagonists are women, and that female perspective often puts a very different spin on a story.

Nest ferch Rhys was described as the Helen of Wales because she was mistress to the Norman king, Henry I; was married to Gerald FitzWalter, the Norman steward of Pembroke Castle; then kidnapped by the Welsh prince Owain ap Cadwgan. Through the intervention of the king, she was eventually returned to her husband Gerald. Gerald encountered Prince Owain a few years later and killed him in a skirmish, but Gerald took a death wound himself.

Nest carried the royal bloodline of southwest Wales, so King Henry was unwilling to leave her vulnerable to a Welsh claimant. The king married her off to another Norman, Stephen de Marais, the steward of Cardigan Castle. After Stephen was later killed by Welsh forces, including her brother, Nest had a relationship with Haith, the Flemish Norman sheriff of Pembroke Castle.

Another ‘source’ if you like, for my fiction, was the outrage I felt at the misogynistic references to Nest by some historians. Orpen, for example, writing in 2005, says, ‘In an age and country of loose morals, this lady was perhaps conspicuous for her laxity’ (p. 31).9 Nest suffered the childhood trauma of the loss of her family and birthright – her father and three brothers were killed by Normans; a fourth brother was maimed and a fifth disinherited. She lived through conflict between her Welsh and Norman families, and she bore the children of five different men, where these unions may or may not have been consensual or desired by her. I tried to find a credible version of her experience through fiction.

The Chronicle of the Princes, the Brut y Tywysogyon relates how Nest was abducted from a castle that her husband Gerald had provocatively built on the frontier between the conquered lands of Nest’s father in Deheubarth and the unconquered Welsh kingdom of Powys, ruled by Cadwgan and his son Owain. Owain attacked the castle in the night, and Nest saved her husband by advising him to escape through the garderobe, which let out into the moat. 10

One version of the Brut y Tywysogyon describes Owain as raping Nest. Another version is more circumspect in its language, giving rise to speculations by some historians that Nest was complicit in the abduction. No matter how divided her loyalties were between her Welsh kin and her Norman family, she had been married to Gerald for several years, had five young children with him, and her son by the king was also being raised in their household. I found it highly unlikely that she was a willing participant in the kidnap.

Several of Nest’s young children were kidnapped with her and she eventually persuaded Owain to return the children to Gerald but probably at the expense of her own freedom and compliance. That would likely be the act of most mothers in that situation. Making that supposition, I am drawing on a knowledge of human emotions and relationships to transform sources into fiction, to create credible characters and plots.

The sources give you some facts – which are often unclear, debateable, contradictory, pierced with omissions. You, the novelist, then must interpret these sources, not only deciding what you think actually happened but deciding why it happened – what motivated those historical people who have become your fictional characters into making the choices and actions they did? Elizabeth Chadwick has also written the story of Nest in her novel The King’s Jewel and her version of what can be gleaned from the sources concerning Nest, Gerald and Owain differs from mine, just as various historians have given the tale different spins.

Building a plot with sources and research is just the starting point of a novel. Creating characters who interact, have desires, fears, plans is the heart of fiction writing and what distinguishes it from history writing and even from biography. A biographer and historian might venture into some speculation on motivations, but a novelist absolutely must immerse themselves there. How did Nest become the mistress of king Henry and how did she feel about that given the deaths of her father and brothers at the hands of the Normans? How did she feel about having a brother leading the Welsh resistance and a husband and sons in direct contention with that brother?

The sources give you ‘facts’ to work with but they also give you discrepancies between different sources (e.g., was Nest raped or complicit). The sources give you omissions and fakes. Significant numbers of medieval charters and documents are fakes where the writers were trying to manipulate the increasing use of documentary evidence in their favour. Sources are often biased and unreliable. Gerald of Wales, Nest’s grandson, for example, makes no mention of Nest’s abduction by Owain but he writes at length about Derbforgaill’s abduction, which had parallels with Nest’s kidnap. Derbforgaill was the wife of Tigernan Ua Ruaire and was abducted by Diarmait mac Murchada. Gerald of Wales ignores these parallels and focuses instead on how Nest conveyed nobility on his lineage. The Brut y Tywysogyon, which is the source for the abduction, was probably written under the patronage of Owain’s family and intended to show him as a Welsh hero and to humiliate the Norman Gerald who was cuckolded and had to escape down the privy.

Research can give you information/details/context. It can help you construct a plot and characters, but it can’t give you a story. A story has to come from your conjecture amid the research – from your imagination – your empathising with your characters to the extent that you can imagine their desires and motivations, and you can imagine how they will bounce off each other, how they will interact.

Characters based on historical people are still imagined characters. They are your inventions and your versions. You imagine and create the credibility of this and that character behaving in this and that way. Historical fiction writing is about resurrecting emotions, desires, fears, and motives amid the historical evidence. Why did that happen? How did that happen? Rather than simply: What happened?

Delegates to the conference came from around the world, including UK, Singapore, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia, France, Spain, Germany, and other parts of Europe - 250 of them in all. The first day consisted of excursions to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Marsh’s Library, the Irish Architectural Association, and Georgian parts of the city - all in Dublin. There were also excursions to Castletown House and to Knowth and Newgrange.

Saturday and Sunday’s programme was a series of talks by historians, historical novelists, publishers and agents. Terence Dooley gave a riveting account of the life of Hermione, fifth Duchess of Leinster, a famously beautiful aristocrat, who lived at Carton House in Maynooth and died, aged 31 from tuberculosis in France. Dooley drew on correspondence, estate accounts and other documents. He related a tale of female suppression, adultery, illegitimacy, lunacy, rakes and conmen. He told us how fascinating stories such as these are waiting in public repositories and hidden in family documents in attics. His quotations from the often delightful prose of the letters from Hermione’s sister, her best friend, her son, and her lover made me think about the loss of the art of letter writing.

Aidan K. Morrissey presented on archaeology at the Anglo-Saxon royal complex at Ad Gefrin in northern England. The burial of a male skeleton at the threshold inspired his novel, Exile and Pagans.

Kate Braithwaite talked about sisters in fiction - their rivalry and competition, their allegiance and loyalty. Lenore Hart presented on literary competitions. Her presentation raised debate on AI, writing craft, and publishing. Marie Powell spoke about the importance of on-location research for historical fiction and how to approach it.

Considering authenticity in fiction, Martina Devlin remarked on her tale of The Titanic, ‘I knew I could not move the iceberg but I could make other changes’. In relation to Devlin’s novel on Charlotte Bronte, there was discussion about the literary tourism industry and the display of the ‘relics’ of writers.

The Booker-prize winner and prolific writer John Banville was in conversation with Katherine Mezzacappa. He was both hilarious and profound on the art of fiction writing.

He described Joyce’s Dubliners as his early inspiration. ‘I don’t do any research,’ he declared, ‘I make it up.’ Quoting his wife, he said, ‘A fact is not the truth’. A few of his many other striking comments included, ‘Writing is not self-expression’; ‘I have a mania for phrases’ (with a nod to Flaubert’s mother); ‘I’m a cannibal.’ And on his crime novels: ‘I couldn’t give a damn who the killer was’.

Vaseem Khan gave a delightful talk on myths about Indian history. He talked about cultural appropriation and his work on Turning the Page: A Cultural Diversity Guide for Arts Council England.1 He quoted Bernadine Evaristo’s assertion that it is ridiculous to demand that writers do not write beyond their own culture. ‘All authors should have the right to write what they wish’, he argued, but it is important to understand what you don’t know about something outside your lived experience and to avoid stereotypes.

Justin Hill, Matthew Harffy and Jean Gill talked about ‘Beyond Kings and Queens’ - getting the non-nobles into historical fiction. Justin and Matthew were also the conference podcasters and gave a very funny and thought-provoking after-dinner speech.

Essie Fox gave a fascinating talk in conjunction with her publisher Karen Sullivan from Orenda Books, which was chaired by Ben Bergonzi. She talked about Byron discarding his one page vampire fiction, which John Polidori then developed into his The Vampire. Fox talked about how the Gothic involves a woman isolated, at risk, with danger lurking and how this often reflects the darkness of the times the writer and readers are living in yet acts as some kind of comfort. Fox talked about her (beautifully produced) novel Catherine, which draws on Wuthering Heights: ‘the novel of my heart’. She argued that Wuthering Heights is about obsession, revenge, curses, race, class and is much more than a love story.

The audience of mostly historical novelists were pleased to hear Karen Sullivan contradict common conceptions and assert that historical fiction does sell.

This summary is only a selection of the talks. There were many more.

At the Gala Dinner, the category winners and the overall winner of the HNS 2026 First Chapters Competition were honoured by judges Martina Devlin and Karen Sullivan and by the audience.2

More on the conference on the Facebook page.

And more on my blog at Tracey Warr Writing.

I will post an abridged version of my own conference paper on Vikings and Normans in Ireland in a few days’ time.

The competition was administered by Rebekah Simmers and Tracey Warr.

The Historical Novel Society holds conferences in North America and UK/Europe, and a festival in Australia. They publish a quarterly magazine, Historical Novels Review. See their website for further details.

The conference finished yesterday with a lively debate on the saga between publisher, Paula Campbell from Poolbeg Press, literary agent Kate Nash and saga author, Katherine Mezzacappa (writing under the pen name Katie Hutton).

Their discussion on the saga considered the significant role of Catherine Cookson, its use of realism to depict the struggle of a working-class woman and/or a story across family generations (usually ranging from the 19th century to the 1950s), the tale of the ups and downs of lives, of rags to riches.

Katherine Mezzacappa talked about the popularity of sagas where the arrival of a new, much-awaited saga in a public library could cause ‘handbags at dawn’. Paula, Kate and Katherine considered the literary snobbery about sagas and romance fiction despite its commercial success.

More on the trip tomorrow ….

I learned that the FitzGerald coat of arms features monkeys due to the family legend that John FitzGerald, who became the first earl of Kildare in 1316, was saved from a castle fire as a baby by a pet monkey. 1

The monkey rescued the crying baby and carried him up to the battlements.

Jonathan Swift included a scene in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) where a monkey seizes Gulliver in Brobdingnag and carries him up to a rooftop, feeding him like his own baby. The scene was supposedly influenced by the FitzGerald legend and Swift’s feud with the family.2

I wondered if Edgar Rice Burroughs may have also heard the story and been influenced by it for his Tarzan of the Apes (1912), in which a British aristocrat is raised as a baby in the jungle by apes after the deaths of his parents.

The castle was also illuminating on the topic of garderobes – which feature in my conference presentation on Saturday. The garderobe was both a castle toilet and a form of medieval dry cleaning.

The castle’s helpful illustration shows how the garderobe works – toilet-user at the top, gong farmer at the bottom stirring. Ammonia fumes rose up to get rid of lice and fleas on clothes hung in the garderobe – hence the name.

I’ve travelled from Toulouse to Dublin and then on to Maynooth, an hour south of Dublin. Maynooth has the first Norman castle built in Ireland in the 1169 Norman invasion. It was built by Maurice FitzGerald, the son of the heroine of my Conquest trilogy, Nest ferch Rhys.1

The conference is being held at Maynooth University where two hundred and fifty historians and historical novelists from all over the world are coming together to explore legends, myths, ‘truth’ and fiction.

Highlights of my visit that I am looking forward to include a visit to Maynooth Castle tomorrow. On Friday, I will be leading an excursion with 30 conference delegates to the prehistoric necropolis at Knowth, Newgrange and Dowth, which dates from about 3200 BC. The passage tombs contain the largest collection of megalithic art in Western Europe. At the Winter Solstice, the rising sun sends a beam through a roof-box at Newgrange, along a 62-foot-long passage and into the chamber. The beam widens as the sun rises, lighting the whole chamber. I’m especially looking forward to finding out more about who is buried in the tombs. A sluggish, slow-moving monster named Mata with one hundred and forty legs and four heads was killed at the site, according to a legend unearthed by William Wilde (Oscar Wilde’s father).

I could have done with one hundred and forty legs as I hauled a suitcase full of my books up the hill from the bus stop to my student accommodation room and I was certainly sluggish and slow-moving. I didn’t encounter any monsters, but I did get very kind help in finding my lodgings from a local couple out for an evening stroll.

Saturday’s conference presentations begin with a presentation by Terence Dooley on Hermione, the fifth Duchess of Leinster, who was a descendant of Maurice FitzGerald, and that day’s programme closes with Booker Prize winner, John Banville. On Sunday, the plenary speakers include Gothic novelist, Essie Fox, and award-winning historical crime writer, Vaseem Khan, who is going to talk about writing across cultural boundaries.

More tomorrow …

I’m heading off to Ireland next week to give a paper in HNS 2026 - the conference of the Historical Novel Society. The conference venue changes each time and this year it is in Maynooth, an hour or so from Dublin.

Maynooth is the site of the first Norman castle built during the 1169 Norman invasion. The castle was built by Maurice FitzGerald, the son of Nest ferch Rhys, who is the heroine of my Conquest trilogy of novels.1

For my paper, I am looking at how sixteen of the first wave of Norman invaders were Nest’s sons and grandsons and were Welsh-Normans. These Welsh Normans were keen to take part in the invasion because they were coming under increasing pressure in Wales from their Welsh cousin, Lord Rhys. Maurice FitzGerald had been the castellan of Llansteffan Castle and lost it three times to Welsh forces. Nest’s Norman descendants thought they might create a firmer base in Ireland.

After the death of King Henry I in 1135, the Welsh were resurgent against the Normans. Nest’s brother Gruffudd ap Rhys (and the father of Lord Rhys) was one of the leaders of the successful rebellion against the Norman invaders. My novel includes a scene of Gruffudd playing hnefatafl (pronounced neffa taffle) with another Welsh prince in exile in Dublin. I’ll be talking about how I visited Dublin a few years back and drew on museum objects and ‘treading the ground’ to write the novels.

Indigenous women like Nest, in England, Wales, and Ireland, were married off to Normans to ensure the permanency of conquest and found themselves with divided loyalties within their own families.2

I will discuss the links between the Viking settlements of the east coast of Ireland and the Welsh aristocracy on the west coast of Wales. These links were significant long before the 1169 invasion. (I was also drawing on these sources and historical material for my novel The Viking Hostage.3)

In Ireland, Nest’s Welsh-Norman family became known as the Geraldines and were the progenitors of the Earls of Desmond and Kildare and the Dukes and Duchesses of Leinster.4 Despite the name, the Geraldines, deriving from Nest’s first Norman husband, Gerald FitzWalter, the term embraced a kinship group centred on a woman - on Nest. It included her grandson from her relationship with King Henry I and her sons and grandsons from her second marriage to Stephen de Marais, as well as her sons and grandsons from Gerald FitzWalter.

In my conference paper, I will be talking about the process of transforming sources into fiction, how the allure of a place seen from afar - Llansteffan Castle - and the mystique of museum artefacts were catalysts for writing for me.

At HNS 2026 in Maynooth, I’ll be talking about places, images, artefacts, maps, and textual sources for fiction. The textual sources I’ve drawn on include medieval chronicles, sagas, and poetry. I will discuss how sources might give you details for worldbuilding, might contribute to your plot and details about characters based on historical people, but they can’t give you story. That has to come from pondering and empathising with the motivations, desires and plans of your created characters, on your knowledge and experience of human emotions and psychology.

I will post my conference paper in my next substack and there will be a report on the conference in my newsletter, Just Meandering, in September.

Inside the church, if you squeeze through a gap behind the altar, you find this painted sculpture of Daniel and lions, which dates to the eleventh century.2 Daniel’s arms and hands are raised in the posture of prayer. According to the label in the church, the lions are depicted head down to show they have been defeated by Daniel’s prayers.

The sculpture is so oddly placed because there were originally two adjacent churches and this capital is part of the doorway to Saint-Serge church, now demolished. The survival of the sculpture has a fascinating history.

A priory existed in Varen from the ninth century, founded by Count Géraud of Aurillac (855–918), when the village was part of the medieval county of Rouergue. Around 972, Garsinde, countess of Toulouse, bequeathed a legacy to the priory. Around 1060–1070, the vast proportions of the church of Saint-Pierre were achieved by vaulting an earlier structure and a second church, Saint-Serge, was built alongside it to house the important relic of Saint Sergius’s body. The scale of these structures in such a small community reveals the existence of a pilgrimage centred around the relic of the saint.3

From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, the villagers and their churches endured the Hundred Years War and the War of Religions. In 1758, the church of Saint-Serge collapsed and had to be demolished. Its stones were used in village buildings. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Saint-Pierre was stripped of its paving stones to produce saltpetre, which was needed by the armies fighting against the First Coalition.

Only a few traces of the Romanesque church of Saint-Serge remain, including several capitals that topped the church’s columns. Two capitals were repurposed as fonts near the north entrance. One is covered with a dense network of interlacing patterns and palmettes. This interlacing decoration was inherited from Carolingian art.

The decoration of the second repurposed capital is a large, interlaced knot, made of two crossed ribbons within a circle, giving rise to the palmettes. This motif, resembling a belt buckle, also characterises several capitals in Saint-Geraud d’Aurillac and Sainte-Foy de Conques.

The large, flat palmettes with leaflets fanning out and meeting at the corner of the capital first appeared around 1050 on the marble capitals of the altar of the (now lost) Romanesque cathedral at Rodez, which came from a workshop in Narbonne. One of these capitals is now in the Fenaille Museum in Rodez.4 It seems likely that the same stonemasons worked at all of these sites, including Varen.

In an article published in 1970, Jean-Claude Fau discussed the similarities of the surviving Romanesque interlaced style capitals in Varen with sculpture at Conques and Rodez Cathedral and influences from Elne and Catalonia.5 The three capitals remaining in place in the area of ​​the Saint-Serge demolitions in Varen exhibit ‘cubic’ paneling which, in the southwest of France, usually coexists with interlacing ornamentation. The lower part of the capital is an inverted truncated cone, and the upper part is a cube. Two of these capitals are adorned with ‘foliate’ interlacing, that is, interwoven ribbons whose strands blossom into palmettes. And, on the abacus, there is an engraved frame, known as a ‘Carolingian cartouche’. On the left-hand capital, at the springing of the arch connecting the two churches, the interlacing gives way to a kind of embossing made of small, recessed lozenges, a motif sometimes described as ‘honeycombs’.

In his study of the Romanesque capitals at Varen, Fau describes how:

a fine set of four historiated capitals adorn the former Romanesque portal of the apse (which was walled up in the 16th century). On one of the two capitals now located inside the church, two angels with raised arms can be seen, quite similar to those on a capital in the north gallery of Sainte-Foy de Conques. On the other, Daniel, in the attitude of prayer, is flanked by two lions oddly depicted with their heads downwards. Outside, the northern capital shows Samson riding a lion, its jaws being pulled apart, and beside it, a griffin with a bird’s head. The scene on the fourth capital is found in several churches in the Rouergue region; it depicts Saint Michael trampling underfoot the serpent-bodied dragon he has just slain with a single blow of his lance. Not only the iconographic theme and style, but also certain details of the archangel’s costume are very reminiscent of a capital in the sacristy of Conques.

It’s helpful both in writing my novels set in the early Middle Ages in this region and in the biography I am writing about an eleventh-century Occitan countess, to be able to see first-hand some of the structures and art that surrounded the people of this time.

A small sample of the papers: Martin Jurgensen and Line Bonde’s discussed ‘The Lick’, the tongue motif in 12^th-century sculpture; Wilfried Keil used two small fluffy lion toys to assure us that ‘not every man between two lions is Daniel’ in his presentation on Romanesque architecture and sculpture in Pavia and Speyer; Gabriel Imbert convinced us of the authenticity of the golden Christ in Majesty in Toulouse’s Saint-Sernin Basilica; and Michele Luigi Vescovi’s investigated drill holes in sculpture as if he were a detective at a crime scene.

There were excursions to Musee des Augustins,3 Musee Saint-Raymond4 and Saint-Sernin in Toulouse5 and to Saint-Pierre Abbey and Monastery in Moissac6 where highly knowledgeable guides coped with good humour with interventions from their highly knowledgeable listeners (hence the ‘unruly of archaeologists’).

Moissac is one of the oldest monasteries in France, and prospered due to the town’s port on the River Tarn, where wine embarked to go to Bordeaux for export, and thanks to its association with Cluny and the route to Compostela. The monks’ kitchen was demolished in the 19^th century to make way for the railway line, but the marvellous late 11^th-century cloister with its historiated (storied) capitals survived. Visiting Moissac was particularly meaningful for me for two reasons. First, there was the alphabet capital, adjacent to the door to the novices’ school, which was used to teach reading and writing.

Second, there was the fact that Almodis (the heroine of my first novel7 and the subject of a biography I am currently writing) was at Moissac at the end of June 1053 with her husband, Count Pons of Toulouse and the monastery’s abbot, Durand de Bredon, whose image is in the cloister. Almodis initiated the abbey’s connection with Cluny. Her visit to the abbey took place weeks, perhaps days, before her ‘abduction’ in Narbonne by the count of Barcelona, Ramon Berenguer I.

A few weeks ago, on the night of Thursday 12 February 2026, my village and my medieval house in southwest France experienced a major flood – the worst in the 20 years I have lived here. The river Viaur, which I live next to, rose by 6 metres and was flowing over the bridge rather than under it. The flood – La Crue – happened after back-to-back storms and 40 consecutive days of relentless, torrential rain in France. Flooding occurred across the country and my region, with its huge rivers – the Garonne, the Tarn, and the Lot – was among the worst hit. Hundreds of municipalities, including my area, received natural disaster status. The benign summer river transformed into a raging torrent – the Water Wolf – as the swollen, mud-laden river thundered past my balcony with whole trees hurtling down and islands of debris flashing past.

The photo above was not taken at the height of the flood, which occurred at 1am. In my cave (the basement of the house), 1.5 metres of river flowed in. There was a power cut and as darkness fell, the river was still rising. Friends were evacuated by the pompiers (the local fire brigade) by powerboat. My house was cut off by water on both sides. I evacuated, wading through waist-high water with my cats – one in a catbox and the other in a shopping bag. Now, two weeks later and the clean-up and de-stressing is still going on with thick, molten chocolate mud sluiced out of our houses, wooden doors and floors buckled, some things salvaged, many things not.

Distress, exhaustion, humour, kindness all emerged in the crisis. Neighbours worked alongside each other and the pompiers in a spirit of resilience.

All the old houses along my stretch of the river have caves built to withstand the river’s winter visits. In the medieval period, flooding likely happened every year with the rains and thaws of winter and without the modern barrages that control the flow of the river now (if they can). There were many devastating floods in the Middle Ages. Carolingian chronicles in the ninth century report floods, excessive rains, and intense storms.1 The hero of my Conquest trilogy of novels, Haith, is a sheriff in Wales, who has escaped from flooding in Flanders and the devastations of what he refers to as ‘the water wolf’.2

Saltmarshes were exploited and peat was extracted, which contributed to coastal catastrophes. The St Mary Magdalene flood in 1362 was the largest flood in central Europe, affecting vast swathes of Germany and parts of Italy. Bridges were washed away. Thousands of people died. In addition to high-water markers for floods, medieval ‘hunger stones’ were recently found in the Elbe River in the Czech Republic, which marked low-water points when people experienced drought and famine.3

Historian Petra van Dam has written about an amphibious medieval culture, a way of life adapted to the threats and benefits of rivers and coastal areas.4 The flooding river was destructive and terrifying but rivers also brought the benefits of fertile land, irrigation, mills, fish, woodlands and trade. Medieval people dug canals, drained wetlands, built houses on stilts.

The contemporary rivers are harnassed by barrages for electricity, but it would be a mistake to think that the medieval river was untouched by human intervention. The medieval river was full of water mills powering the production of flour, textiles, and metals. The mills drove mill stones, hammers and bellows.5 The medieval river was the main road carrying trade and travellers. Many tanneries producing leather stood on the riverbanks. The river was the sewer and the rubbish tip. And it was the washing place.

The last extreme flood in my area in recent times was the March 1930 flood.6 Note the near-invisibility of the bridge arches below. This is the same bridge that can be seen in the two images above.

I have a delight in watery landscapes. See my future fiction novella Meanda about a watery exoplanet and an amphibian alien species.7 This penchant for living in proximity to the water wolf has bitten me before. I lived in Pembrokeshire, Wales where terrifically high tides dragged a local bus off the road and into the sea (nobody was hurt). I was living in South Devon when massive storms and high tides destroyed the coastal trainline to London and cut us off for months. I lived in Oxford where the Thames rose up every year to surround us, sending us running for wellingtons and sandbags and watching as fields and parks turned into duck-happy lakes.

I’m looking forward to getting back to the glee of the summer river here in France.

NOTES

Emma of Normandy was the daughter of Duke Richard of Normandy and Duchess Gunnor. She was born around 984. Aged 18, she married King Aethelred of England in 1002. Viking raids against England in the late 10th century were often supported from Normandy, since the Normans had themselves recently been Vikings and Emma’s marriage was intended to improve Anglo-Norman relationships.

In 1013, Swein Forkbeard invaded England and Emma, Aethelred and their family had to briefly take refuge in Normandy.

Swein died in 1014 and the family returned to England but then Cnut invaded England in 1015. After Aethelred died in 1016, Emma married Cnut. Harthacnut, Emma and Cnut’s son became king of England in 1040. When Harthacnut died in 1042, Emma and Aethelred’s son, Edward the Confessor, became king.

Emma was the richest woman in England and queen for around 37 years. She advised her sons, as she had advised her husbands and was at the centre of English politics throughout her life. Emma gave the Norman dukes a hereditary claim to the English throne, which led to the Norman Conquest in 1066.

Emma of Normandy died on 6 March 1052 and her body was interred in a mortuary chest in the Old Minster in Winchester, alongside other mortuary chests with inscriptions stating that they contained the remains of at least six Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Danish kings, including Emma’s son King Harthacnut and two Anglo-Saxon bishops.

The Old Minster was built in 648 by King Cenwalh of Wessex. In 901, Alfred the Great started building the New Minster on the same site and he and his family were buried there.

In 1079, William the Conqueror’s bishop Walkelin started building a huge Norman Cathedral on the site. When it was consecrated in 1093, the caskets holding the remains of the Anglo-Saxon kings and queen were moved from the Old and New Minsters and previous buildings were demolished. In 1107, the central tower of the new cathedral fell and had to be rebuilt. The bones of King Alfred and his family were moved to Hyde Abbey and were later lost.

Richard of Normandy, the second son of William the Conqueror and Queen Matilda who died young in a hunting accident was interred in the mortuary caskets in the cathedral, as was his brother, King William II (Rufus). These painted wooden mortuary chests were displayed either side of the high altar for hundreds of years.

In the 17th century, Cromwell’s parliamentary forces scattered the contents of the six mortuary chests containing the bones of the Anglo-Saxon royals, including Queen Emma. These bones were later reinterred but were jumbled up.

In 2019, the six mortuary chests with over 1,300 jumbled bones underwent investigation. The bones had been well preserved in the coffins. The researchers used paleoimaging, radiocarbon dating, and DNA sampling, which were considered alongside the historical record.

The researchers identified Emma’s bones as those of the only mature woman, along with those of 22 other individuals, including two boys of royal blood, aged between 10 and 15 who lived 1050–1200 (BBC News, 2019). The facial reconstruction of one of the boys (who are not the Princes in the Tower) and some of the bones are on display in the Kings and Scribes: Birth of a Nation exhibition at Winchester Cathedral (n.d.).

The discovery and identification of King Richard III’s skeleton in Leicester in 2013 is another recent story of historical, archaeological, and scientific collaboration (University of Leicester, n.d.; Wikipedia, 2025).

Emma of Normandy’s long reign as queen of England continues into the afterlife with this fascinating historical and scientific enquiry into her burial.

More on medieval paleoimaging coming up in future posts….

A version of this post was originally posted on the Facebook group France’s Splendid Centuries.

SOURCES

BBC News. (2019, 16 May). Queen’s bones found in Winchester Cathedral royal chests. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-48281733

BBC News. (2019, 18 May). The riddle of Winchester Cathedral’s royal skeletons. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-48300450

University of Leicester. (no date). Richard III: Discovery and identification. https://le.ac.uk/richard-iii/

Wikipedia. (2025, 6 October). Exhumation and reburial of Richard III of England. https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Exhumation_and_reburial_of...

Winchester Cathedral. (no date). Kings & Scribes. https://www.winchester-cathedral.org.uk/welcome/exhibitions/

Twins appear in Greek and Roman mythology (Castor and Pollux, Hercules and Iphicles, Romulus and Remus), in the Bible (Jacob and Esau, who are portrayed as arguing in the womb), and in many medieval romances, such as Marie de France’s Lai Le Fresne, written in the twelfth century.

Early medieval understanding of the body drew on earlier Greek and Roman medicine. Translations of Greek and Arabic texts into Latin first appeared in the sixth and seventh centuries. In the ninth century, a few monasteries emerged as centres of translation of classical medical and philosophical treatises, and by the tenth century the cathedral schools of Rheims, Chartres, Poitiers and Amiens had started to teach these texts. By the mid-eleventh century Salerno and Montecassino were emerging as centres for learning based on Greek and Roman sources.

Hippocrates (460–370 BC) suggested that multiple births related to the structure of the womb, with seven cells – three cells for girls, three for boys and one for hermaphrodites. Aristotle (384–322 BC) saw twin births as outside the natural order and classified them as monstrous. Twins were often situated in the realm of pathology and mutation. Soranus wrote Gynaecology in the second century AD. He recommended warmed oil with mallow, fenugreek and linseed oil as genital relaxants during childbirth. Galen (129–216 AD) theorised that the number of mammalian births related to the number of teats. He surmised that the human womb had two cells to match two breasts to suckle twins. Around 400 AD, Marcellus advocated a mixture of herbs and magic in medicine, and his ideas were the basis for the tenth-century AngloSaxon Leechbook of Bald (Park, 1982). One explanation for twins put forward in the various theories was that a woman was impregnated more than once in a cycle, by one man or by two different men.

By the Middle Ages, superfecundation had connotations that were moralistic as well as anatomical. Belief in dual paternity and adultery relating to twin births were widespread. A fourteenth-century poem describes a woman being impregnated in all seven cells of her womb, ‘If hot of kind be the woman’. Albertus Magnus’s (c. 1200–1280) De animalibus drew on the classical tradition and on the tenth-century Persian philosopher and medic Avicenna. Albertus asserted that female movement during, and enjoyment of, sex brought about the division of matter that resulted in twins. John of Jandun (1285-1328) followed up with the suggestion that women should not move during sex for fear of producing monsters (Thijssen, 1987, p. 246). In the thirteenth century, Cecco d’Ascoli also argued that twins were the outcome of female lust (Zuccolin, 2025). Superfecundity was seen as a sign of lasciviousness.

An enormous number of twins feature in ballads and folk tales, court poetry and prose and the attitude towards multiple births was mostly pejorative. Erik Kooper (1994) has analysed twenty medieval stories of twins and shown that twin births were frequently portrayed as disastrous for the mother and the babies. Marie de France’s Lai Le Fresne opens with the wife of a knight giving birth to twins. The wife of another knight slanders her, saying that to have two children at one time, the woman must have slept with two men. The accuser then gives birth to twins herself and plans to kill one of the children to hide her shame, but a handmaiden offers to hide the baby instead.

In 1659, Peter Heylyn claimed that Eve had twins at every birth. Lady Margaret, countess of Holland, was supposed to have borne 365 children at the same time in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. A ninth- or tenth-century manuscript includes a diagram with a more moderate eleven foetuses queuing up to be born (Rowland & Jennings, 1980, p. 169). A certain courtier, Mr Hebert, boasted of his capacity to engender multiple births. His wife bore quadruplets, and he claimed the number of babies would have been higher if his foot had not slipped during the act of conception (Rowland and Jennings, 1980, p. 169). Shakespeare was the father of twins, and twins feature in The Comedy of Errors (1594) and Twelfth Night (1601–1602).

Plenty of material there for the woman I am writing about!

Sources

Gilbert, R. (n.d.). Rosalie’s Medieval Woman. https://rosaliegilbert.com/births.html

Green, M. (1985). The transmission of ancient theories of female physiology and disease through the Early Middle Ages. Ph.D. Princeton University.

Kooper, E. (1994). Multiple births and multiple disasters: Twins in medieval literature. In Busby, K., & Lacy, N. J. (eds.) Conjunctures: Medieval studies in honor of Douglas Kelly, Brill, pp. 253-269. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004657403_021

Park, K. (1992). Medicine and society in medieval Europe, 500-1500. In Wear, A. (ed.) Medicine in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 59–90. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511599682.003

Rowland, B., & Jennings, M. (1980). Medieval multiple births. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 81(2), 169–173.

Rowland, B., & Jennings, M. (1984). Unheavenly twins. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 85(1), 108–114.

Thijssen, J. M. (1987). Twins as monsters: Albertus Magnus’s theory of the generation of twins and its philosophical context. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 61(2), 237–246.

Viney, W. (2013). The significance of twins in medieval and early modern Europe. The Wonder of Twins. https://thewonderoftwins.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/the-significance-of-twins-in-medieval-and-early-modern-europe/

Zuccolin, G. (2025). Twins and nobility in the Middle Ages: Dante and Cecco d’Ascoli on embryology, astrology, and the nobility of the offspring. [Online Lecture] Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance, Pisa, 24 June. https://csmbr.fondazionecomel.org/events/online-lectures/twins-and-nobility-in-the-middle-ages/. Available to watch online:

Emma was returned three years later, after the intercession of Richard II, duke of Normandy. Richard was known as ‘the Good’ or 'the Irritable’ – an interesting paradox. Richard was of Viking descent and widely suspected of being in cahoots with the marauders.

Emma’s husband, Viscount Guy I of Limoges, had to pay an enormous ransom in silver. He appropriated most of the silver needed from the abbey in Limoges, much to their dismay.

What happened to Emma during the three years of her captivity I wondered? My novel The Viking Hostage is the outcome of that question.

Emma was the only child of Adémar, viscount of Ségur-le-Château and his wife Melisende and, therefore, the heiress of Ségur. Ségur-le-Château was a picturesque village and fortification on the banks of the river Auvézère. Sometime between 970 and 986 Emma became the wife of Guy, who succeeded as viscount of Limoges in 988.

The Vikings who kidnapped Emma could have been Norwegian or Danish. They could have held her hostage in any number of places including Dublin, the Isle of Mann, the Orkneys, Norway and Denmark. In my novel, I speculated that they were Norwegian vikings and held her on an island off the southwest coast of Wales. Vikings occupied many of the Welsh islands. Holding Emma not too far from France would have facilitated the exchange when the ransom could be paid.

I had imagined Emma as a redhead and was interested in the reports of a Viking Red Maiden involved in the raids on the Pembrokeshire coast near the Viking-occupied islands.

Several Viking hoards of silver have been found in southwest Wales. In 1991 a Viking sword guard was found in a shipwreck at Small Reefs in the Irish sea, between Dublin and Pembrokeshire. As a noblewoman up for ransom, Emma was a valuable commodity and would probably not have been set to the most gruelling slave work. She may have been involved in the production of textiles, including sails for the Viking ships, during her captivity.

Emma is documented in charters issued in Limoges that may have dated from 988 and certainly dated from 1001 until 1025. The kidnap probably happened, then, before 988, when she was a young woman. In my novel, I speculate that she was betrothed to Guy at the time of her kidnap rather than already married to him. After her return, she lived the usual life of a viscountess in Limoges. Her husband, Guy, died in 1025 and her son, Adémar became the new viscount.

Adémar of Chabannes (c. 988–1034) was a monk at the Abbey of Saint Martial in Limoges and distantly related to the counts of La Marche. Along with his chronicle writing, he was also a composer and a notorious forger (not regarding the chronicle but regarding his claim that Saint Martial was one of the original apostles). Adémar appears briefly in my novel.

This post first appeared on France’s Splendid Centuries. Follow that page for more posts on French history.

SOURCES

Cawley, C. (2019). Medieval lands: A prosopography of medieval European noble and royal families. https://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/

de Chabannes, A. (2003). Chronique, edited and translated by Chauvin, Y. & Pon, G. Turnhout. Written in the 11th century.

Redknap, M. (2000). Vikings in Wales: An archeological quest. National Museums & Galleries of Wales.

Segur-Le-Château https://www.segurlechateau.org/en/

‘Who could bear the sight of the splendour of their terrifying arms? Their lances flashed like sparkling stars; their helmets and mailcoats like the glimmering light of a spring dawn. The clashing of their arms was more terrible than the sound of thunder. They charge with great force like lions.’1

I had the great good fortune to speak with Andrew Parton about his medieval reenactment and to look at his armoury and library. It was a tremendous help in giving me a feel for the armour and weaponry my fighters might have used and what the two characters’ experience of fighting in chain mail with a kite shield might have been like. Andrew was generous with his time and knowledge, picking out the most relevant ring mail tunic, gambeson, swords, axes, and kite shields in his armoury to show me.

My combatants might have worn armour similar to the style of the Normans depicted in the Bayeux tapestry.

The Bayeux Tapestry shows the chain mail hauberks, the conical helmets with nasal guards, the long strapped stirrups enabling the horsemen to almost stand in the saddle and the cantled saddles, which gave the knight a secure platform to fight from.

Many Norman brides from Sicily and from northern France married into Occitan and Catalan noble families in this period and might well have brought knowledge of Norman military technologies with them in their retinues. In my novel, three Occitan or Catalan wives (based on real women) are of Norman origin: Emma of Mortain, married to Count Guilheim IV of Toulouse; Mafalda of Sicily, married to Count Raimon of Saint Gilles; and Mahalta of Apulia, married to Count Ramon Berenguer II of Barcelona. In my fiction, one of these ladies brought a Sicilian Norman bodyguard with her (see Edge and Paddock, 19882).

Andrew’s partner Rachel makes medieval clothes and has a medieval cooking rig for reenactment events. Andrew also told me about the reenactment companies, The Occitan Dragons3 and The Destriers4 (specialising in mounted reenactment). Although both companies are focused on slightly later periods than my own, I still gained useful insight from looking at their work. And I drew on the YouTube channel of Dequitem5 and films, such as The Kingdom of Heaven (albeit 100 years later) to help me create the fight scene in my novel.

Again, mega thanks to Andrew and Rachel. It was a wonderfully enlightening visit. Thanks too, to my friend Kevin Hawes, for the introduction.

My title is a quotation from Bertran de Born’s poem, ‘I love the joyful time of Easter’.

More sources.6

Fear of poisoning was rampant in this period. Between 500 and 1500, 342 cases of poisoning are recorded in surviving documents and there would have been many more. Orderic Vitalis records 17 cases of poisoning in his chronicle covering the 11th and 12th centuries.

One of the most fascinating aspects of poison in the Middle Ages is the means used to guard against it. Languiers were created by goldsmiths as table decorations with a vital function.

Languiers were tree-shaped, fashioned from gold or coral, with ‘serpents’ tongues’ suspended on them. The serpents’ tongues were actually fossilised sharks’ teeth. They could be removed from the tree and dipped in food or drink. If there was poison present the tongue was expected to sweat and change colour. The confusion between serpents’ tongues and sharks’ teeth probably relates to the biblical story that Saint Paul was bitten by a serpent in Malta and the teeth/tongues mainly came from Malta. In the Middle Ages, exotic animals were often confused with mythical beasts from the bestiaries and were related to moral tales.

Unicorn horn (actually narwhal or rhino horn) was also believed to be efficacious as a test for poisons. Food, drink, letters, gloves, saddles were all recorded as being poisoned. Rival doctors or rival artists might poison each other. Unhappy wives might poison their husbands. The powerful might poison their opponents. A ‘serpent’s tongue’ or a ‘unicorn horn’ could also be worn in an amulet. Consuming quantities of onions, garlics, treacle or a mysterious substance called theriaque might work as a remedy.

The oldest record of a languier is in the inventory of Odo, count of Nevers, in 1266. In 1295, Pope Boniface had fifteen languiers. They appear in many inventories in the 14^th and 15^th centuries. However, there are only three surviving now, in museums in Vienna and Dresden.

Trobairitz Sleuth Book 2: Salt’s Wound is out later this year. The first book in the series is Love’s Knife.

Sources

Collard, F. (2008). The crime of poison in the Middle Ages, trans. D. Nelson-Campbell. Greenwood Publishing.

Levenson, J. A., ed. (1991). Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration. National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, pp. 129–130.

Stein, C. (2021). Medieval naturalia: Identification, iconography, and iconology of natural objects in the late Middle Ages. Medievalista Online, 29, 211-241. https://doi.org/10.4000/medievalista.3902

A key artefact in the novel I’m writing now is a portable altar. My characters are travelling in the Pyrenees and the Iberian kingdoms of Aragon and Leon-Castile at the end of the 11th century. An abbot is part of their party and he is carrying an altar so that the group of travellers can celebrate Mass on the road. The one pictured below is in the British Museum, dates to around 1200 and is from Germany. The central stone is a red shelly limestone. The relics of forty saints (must be very small body parts!) are held in the cavity beneath the stone. The stone is placed within an engraved copper-gilt surround, which is attached to a wooden core with silver pins. The two carvings at top and bottom are made from walrus ivory and the two reliefs to left and right are painted vellum beneath convex crystal covers.

How portable is it, I wonder? How much might such a thing weigh? I am thinking about the mule lugging it along mountain paths, and the servant unpacking and packing it, carrying it in and out, or perhaps sleeping with the luggage in the stable, at each stopping place.

The pilgrim path to Santiago de Compostela, superstition and prejudice are central themes in the story.

See my earlier post on other artefacts I have used for previous novels:

Philippa and her cousin Bertrand of Saint Gilles and the group of travellers have diverted to Escalo in Pallars Sobira, where their great-aunt Countess Lucia de La Marche has recently died and is due to be buried in the chapel of Sant Pere del Burgal.3 Also joining them for the funeral procession are Berenguer Ramon II, count of Barcelona, another of Lucia’s great-nephews.

Berenguer Ramon was widely suspected of having murdered his twin brother, Count Ramon Berenguer II, a decade before.

Murder seems to have run in the family. In 1071, Almodis de La Marche, countess of Barcelona (sister of Lucia de La Marche and Philippa of Toulouse’s grandmother), was murdered by her stepson Pere Ramon.4 Pere Ramon went into exile in Muslim-held southern Spain. He was sent a charter of repentence for the murder by the pope in 1073. Perhaps this was intended to clear the way for his return to claim his inheritance as count of Barcelona but he died shortly before his father’s death in 1076, when Almodis’ 23-year-old twin sons inherited Barcelona.

There is no record of how Almodis was killed, but poison seems a likely cause. Poisons such as belladonna and arsenic were easily obtained. Pere Ramon’s probable motive was anxiety that his step-mother, who was a forceful female lord, would displace him in the lineage of Barcelona, to make way for her own sons. However, the murder had the effect of disinheriting and displacing him anyway. Perhaps he thought he would get away with it. Perhaps the pope’s pardon was expected. And perhaps Pere Ramon’s own death, making way for the twins to inherit, was itself suspicious. This is just speculation.

In 1082, the twin counts, Ramon Berenguer II, who was known as ‘Towhead’ because of his thick, blond hair, and Berenguer Ramon II, were in dispute over the division of their territories. In December, Ramon Berenguer was killed while hunting in a forest near Girona. His favourite falcon followed his bier all the way back to Girona and died on the coffin as the procession entered the cathedral.

Some accounts claim that the bird identified Berenguer Ramon as the murderer before it died.

Ramon Berenguer’s widow Countess Mahalta of Sicily had a young daughter (named Almodis, after her murdered grandmother) and a month-old baby son. The bereaved family were strongly protected by the Seneschal of Catalonia, Guillem Ramon and other Catalan nobles. (Are you keeping your Ramons straight? The genealogy below may help.)

Around 1086, the widowed Mahalta remarried with Amaury I, viscount of Narbonne. Her son, now four years old, was left in the guardianship of his uncle Berenguer Ramon, the suspected murderer (but presumably with the Senschal and the suspicious nobles keeping a close eye on his safety).

In the winter of 1096, Berenguer Ramon was found guilty of fratricide after a trial by combat held at the court of King Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon. Berenguer Ramon II died the following year in Jerusalem and his nephew became Ramon Berenguer III, count of Barcelona.

Alongside my latest novel, I am also working on a biography of the three La Marche sisters.

Sources

Aurell, M. (1995) Les Noces du Comte: Mariage et Pouvoir en Catalogne (785–1213). Paris: Sorbonne.

Bonnassie, P. (1975–1976) La Catalogne du milieu du Xe a la fin du XIe siècle. Toulouse: University of Toulouse. 2 vols.

Cawley, C. (2006–2022) Medieval Lands Project. Available at: http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/index.htm

Kosto, A. J. (2001) Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sureda i Jubany, M. (2005) Girona Cathedral Guide. Madrid: Aldeasa.

Everyone is looking a little surprised at a multiple birth in this image (above) from the 15^th-century Talbot Shrewsbury Book. The image is linked to the septuplet swan-children story. The book was presented to Margaret of Anjou on her betrothal to King Henry VI.

The 12^th-century De ornatu mulierum advised women on how to beautify their skin, hair, face, lips, teeth and genitals and the 12^th-century Trotula was advice on women’s health from the female physician Trota. The Tractatus de herbis (c. 1300) included remedies for gynaecological issues and health. In medieval England, approximately 1 in 20 aristocratic women died in childbirth.

In a letter, the 12th-century abbess, Hildegard of Bingen charmingly defended her decision to allow her nuns to wear loose hair, white silk dresses, and gold crowns.

The 13^th-century Welsh lawcode in the Book of Iorwerth allowed a woman to leave her husband within seven years of marriage if he had leprosy, his breath stank, or he was unable to have sex.

Gwerful Mechain wrote erotic poetry in Welsh in the  15^th century, including ‘Poem to a Vagina’.

Lidwina of Schiedam (1370-1433) became the patron saint of chronic pain and iceskating after an iceskating accident that left her in lifelong pain.

In 1403, Joan du Lee wrote a petition to King Henry IV asking him to give her a letter of protection, allowing her to practise medicine without disturbance from people who regarded her with contempt.

Licoricia of Winchester was a highly successful Jewish moneylender, becoming one of the chief financiers of King Hernry III. She and her maid were murdered in 1277 probably from an antisemitic motive but her murderers, although identified, were never brought to justice.

Christine de Pizan imagined women bricklaying in her Book of the City of Ladies (1410-1414) (above).

The touching 13^th-century mortuary roll for Lucy, Prioress of Castle Hedingham in Essex, contains testimonials from her own abbey and then from 122 other religious houses that the roll travelled to for their additions.

The Seligenthal Gradual (a music book for use in Mass), shown above, was made by nuns at a Cistercian abbey in Landshut, Germany. It had little silk curtains to protect the painted letters, elaborate hasps and leather thong bookmarkers.

There were many artefacts of great beauty and craft and fascinating texts and stories told. The lives of these women were effectively brought to life through the display of their books, letters, wills, and charters and through the audio-visual elements of the exhibition.

Medieval Women in Their Own Words continues at The British Library, London until 2 March 2025. https://www.bl.uk/whats-on/medieval-women/

I’ve received some wonderfully worded reviews over the years for my historical fiction. One of my favourites was for my first novel, Almodis the Peaceweaver:

‘Dear Tracey Warr, I would like to complain: I started reading your novel in the bath and hours later realised that I’d read a third of the novel, was still in the bath, and I was freezing cold.’

I’m running a competition now for the most creative review. Show me what you’ve got!

If you have read my new novel, Love’s Knife, or any of my historical fiction books – see 

https://meandabooks.com

 – post your review on Amazon, Goodreads, or both between 26 October and 31 December 2024. 

After you have posted, send the link for your review and your email address to info@meandabooks.com. 

The five most eloquent reviews (in my opinion) will win my thanks! and a special extra scene, a short story about Beatriz the trobairitz, the protagonist of my murder mystery series. The results will be announced in the January issue of my quarterly newsletter, Just Meandering. (If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter, you can do so here.) 

Here are a selection of some of the other most eloquent reviews I’ve received in the past:

Almodis the Peaceweaver

‘Almodis is feisty. She takes any situation by the scruff of the neck and shakes the best out of it that she can. Warr brings her off the page … I read the book over a couple of days when I really should have been doing something else.’ The Book Bag

The Viking Hostage

‘Human chess played with lives and land … Three instantly likeable women fight the system from within.’ The Book Bag

Daughter of the Last King

‘As the drawbridge came down and I ventured in, I was not disappointed. In fact I remember nothing of what happened in my every day life until I came out at the end. The level of detail and care and attention which has gone into this novel is spellbinding but it never gets in the way of the plot. A brilliantly woven tapestry of historical intrigue where I felt as if I’d been part of the novel, and part of Nest’s life and I missed her for a while afterwards.’ The Booktrail

‘I could not put this book down from the moment I started it. I practically inhaled the content.’ Poppy Coburn

‘Tracey Warr’s Conquest trilogy spins a most excellent yarn. Although the main character is the hostaged Welsh princess Nest, this is definitely not mediaeval chick lit. The aristocrats are land-grabbing gangsters who plot, kill, maim and poison their way to the thrones. Although her writing has been supported by the the Welsh Arts Council, it’s not all noble Welsh kings being terrorised by the dastardly Normans. The Welsh don’t come off lightly in the plotting, raping and maiming stakes. Read and enjoy, but don’t forget Tracey Warr’s other historical novels. I particularly recommend The Viking Hostage, one of her best.’ Rob La Frenais, Barnes and Noble

‘This is a beautifully written story, set against impressively researched history and narrated at a thriller pace. This is history brought to life with real characters, real events and a great story. I couldn’t put it down and greatly anticipate the second volume.’ Gina Connolly, Goodreads

‘How did I miss this trilogy first time around? It’s hardly my standard fare such as Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred but to me it was a breath of fresh air. Thought the presentation of the Norman era was splendid. While our heroine and other ladies have a tough old time of it, that was how it was and that is how it is handled. Great.’ S. Morris, Amazon

‘I loved Daughter of the Last King. First off, I loved the cover. This made me want to read the book. I read a lot of historical fiction, and this is about events and an era I have almost zero knowledge of so this appealed to me as well. I had a great time reading this book. The book is narrated by Nest. I felt connected to her, and you really get to know her across the course of the book as she tries to make the best with the circumstances she is forced into. She reminds me a lot of Sansa Stark and what she has to endure in Game of Thrones when her father is killed, and she’s forced to stay with Cersei Lannister. She’s a great character, feisty and brave but she knows her place and how not to aggravate the hand that feeds her. I loved the historical detail as well. The book is rich and vivid in detail. I was engrossed.’ Pamela

‘Highly recommend. Fabulous story woven into Princess Nest’s true life. I have read only some information on the 1100s but this book brought it alive for me. So much ordinary information that readers would love to know. All believable. I found it an exciting read and highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a good novel and loads of history.’ Suzi Hawkins, Amazon

‘Historical fiction at its very best. I loved reading this book because it wasn’t just a series of historical events – it was rich in sensory detail, full of emotion and there was plenty of multi-layered conflict. A roller-coaster ride through sadness, happiness, envy and trepidation. Warr has made an alluring female character from a historical name.’ Harriet Springbett, Goodreads

‘A richly detailed, historical story of life, love, and power in the 11th Century Anglo-Norman kingdom. Not a historical romance but a harsh, realistic, factually-based historical story that will grip you from start to finish. I became hooked by the workings of power, the betrayals and lies, and the treatment of women in the King’s court, and the author really lets you step back into the past to a much harsher time. With plenty of danger, subterfuge, and shocking revelations, Daughter of the Last King is an outstanding piece of historical fiction.’ Books of All Kinds

‘This is a wonderfully written historical novel, full of details that bring to life the people and the England and Wales of the time. From the descriptions of the wild Welsh coast, to the splendid court of Henry I, Tracey Warr makes you feel you are there alongside Nest, experiencing all of the sights and sounds of the medieval world. Highly recommended.’ Christine Rolls, Goodreads

I’m looking forward to reading your new reviews!

Writers often hear about ‘the inciting incident’ – the situation at the beginning of most novels that sets the protagonist off on a quest and/or puts them in jeopardy. Finding that incident is certainly part of the starting process. My first five novels were all sparked by a kidnap of a medieval woman. In my latest book, the inciting incident is a murder. But I think the starting goes back further than that incident.

What are the other elements that incite writing - right at the beginning? I have found that starting (getting inspiration), for me, coalesces around an object, a place, and a face.

An Object

This object (a kind of totem in the writing), for me, is often an object that I see in a museum. Totems that have worked for my previous novels have been the Witham Pin, which I used in Love’s Knife, and the Dunstable Swan Jewel, which I used in Almodis the Peaceweaver.2

I don’t have the object yet for the new novel and am searching for it.

A Place

A place is often right up there at the beginning too. My Conquest series on the turbulent life of Nest ferch Rhys during the Norman conquest of Wales, began with the view of the castle of Llansteffan on a headland above a triple river estuary, on my weekly journey from Oxford to Pembrokeshire in Wales.

Now, for my new novel, Salt’s Wound, I’m intrigued by the mountain abbey of Santa Maria de Gerri del Sal in the Pyrenees, with its sail-shaped, triple-layered bell tower. (Ah ha! triple seems to be a thing - triple pin, triple estuary, triple bell tower.) Santa Maria de Gerri had its own salt basins.

A Face

A face for a character is often one of the starting points too. I might see the face in a painting or in the life around me. I saw a face that I took as the model for my Welsh heroine, Nest ferch Rhys,3 as I was travelling on a train from Oxford to Pembrokeshire. (That train seems to have been an important incubator.)

I used Whistler’s portrait of a street urchin, Alice Butt, as inspiration for the heroine, Beatriz de Farrera, in my Trobairitz Sleuth series.

Trying to figure out where is the murder scene, who is the victim, who is the murder and what is the motive at the moment. Searching for the incitements and waiting for them to coalesce.