Profanities for a More Polite Society
It is impossible to tell a good story without dialogue, and believable dialogue requires a liberal dose of exclamations and interjections. Everyone from a pious priest to a salty sailor uses them to some degree—even your dear old grandmother. Stub your toe, mash your finger, or get cut off in traffic and there is a good chance you are going to shout something. The more colorful the exclamation, the more objectionable it will be considered in polite company. It was not until I became a father that I began to recognize the degree to ...
Inspiration for Saint Wystan's Church
For The Second Great Mortality, the parish church at Colleville needed to be small and unimportant. I wanted it to bear the name of a local saint, so I chose the relatively little-known Wigstan and opted for the older spelling of Wystan. While doing research for another historical fiction project a couple years ago, I stumbled across an article about caretakers of a small Welsh village's church discovered stunning 15th-century wall paintings under 20 layers of limewash. Saint Cadoc's in Llancarfan, Vale of Glamorgan ...
Inspiration for Priory at Stony Heath
The priory at Stony Heath was largely inspired by the remains of Timoleague Friary, a thirteenth-century Fransiscan monastery located in Timoleague, County Cork, Ireland. It was founded by the Fransiscans in 1240 on the site of a settlement founded by Saint Molaga in the 6th century. For The Second Great Mortality, I wanted to model the priory after a monastery from the correct period in order to provide a sense of historical accuracy. Although Timoleague was started in 1240, most of its surviving structures were completed by the 1400s. ...
The Z-word in Medieval Literature
Zombies. Zombies have become so engrained into our culture that a few years back the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even capitalized on their popularity to teach emergency preparedness. The word itself is a relatively modern addition to the English language, having been borrowed from Haitian folklore sometime in the nineteenth century, and would have been as foreign to the medieval man as the word zipper. For that reason, the undead are called many things by the characters in the story, but the z-word is never used. ...
Inspiration for Colleville Manor
For Colleville Manor, I drew inspiration from Ightham Mote, a moated and fortified manor house in Kent that was built in the fourteenth century and considerably expanded in the fifteenth. It remains relatively unchanged today. Unlike a majority of other surviving manors, the owners of Ightham never demolished a section of ranges in order to allow the main house to look outward. Ightham has more than 70 rooms inwardly facing and arranged around the central courtyard. The house is fully encompassed by a square moat ...
Keeping Time in the Middle Ages
If you were to ask a modern reader “the hour,” they would likely glance down at their ubiquitous wrist watch and tell you the time down to the minute. We have become accustomed to the fact that the day begins and ends at midnight. In North America and Europe, we even use daylight savings in an attempt to maximize the amount of sunlight during our waking hours. It is a notion that would have been wholly incomprehensible to the average fifteenth-century man. If you were to ask a modern reader “the hour,” they would ...