Monday, May 14, 2012

Hild publishing deal

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Bamburgh, painted by Norman MacKillop, used by permission
I'm delighted to anounce that Hild will be published next year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It's tentatively scheduled for autumn 2013: a big fat fall read, a perfect match for applewood fires and a snifter of Armagnac...

The announcement is up at Publishers Weekly ("...steeped in the beauty and brutality of a different age...").

It's difficult to capture the mood of a 200,000-word novel in a single paragraph. But here's the short description I sent to my agent in January:
Seventh century Britain is in transition. Small kingdoms are dissolving and merging. Edwin of Northumbria plots to become overking of the Angles using every tool at his disposal: blood, bribery, and belief. Into this world of war and wyrd is born Hild, king's niece: a child with a glittering mind, powerful curiosity, and will of adamant. Edwin is cunning and ruthless, but Hild is matchless. She carves herself a place as his advisor, a young woman at the heart of the violence, subtlety, and mysticism of the early medieval age. But kings don't trust anyone, even nieces. And at this level, the stakes are life and death.
There's a lot to be done before publication. But that's work for the future. For now, I am happy. Hild is the best thing I've ever written. I can't wait to put it in your hands. Cheers!

Beer + Joy = Satisfaction

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Where Hild walked

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I visited the UK in February and took the opportunity to fossick about in places Hild would have known.

Whitby Abbey, of course, has been familiar to me for years. Sadly, when I was there this time, it was shut (no doubt as a result of this). No way in. Even the cliff was fenced off. I held my phone up over the wall:


And retired, grumpily, to the pub...


...which, as it was off-season, wasn't serving any food. But, hey, the beer was tasty, and it was right opposite the harbour:


And that was it for Whitby. I hope to get back to the UK soon to try again.

On this visit, I spent most of my time in the part of Yorkshire known in Hild's time as Elmet. This is where I grew up. Most of the places I visited, therefore, were old haunts. One, though, was new to me: Aberford. In the novel, Hild visits Aberford two or or three times. This is one of the places she camped.


A few years later, many Great Events occur here--more specifically, at/in Cock Beck, which, as Hild observes in the novel, is like a fish weir for armies: funnel them into the gap between the beck and Becca Banks and pick them off at your leisure. It was mostly private land, though, so I couldn't get down into it. I took this photo from the bridge over the beck (and edited out the rubbish in the water and the Private: Keep Out! notices nailed to the trees):


I've decided that Edwin built his Elmet vill on the site of what had once been the hall of Ceredig, king of Elmet. The books opens in the heart of Ceredig's territory, in Loidis, what is present-day Leeds. But Leeds is a big place. I had to narrow it down. I chose a site on the north bank of the River Aire, where Kirkstall Abbey now lies in ruins. Why? Because I know that patch of the river, I remember how it sounds and smells--and I remember it in childhood terms. I remember with the bone-deep familiarity I needed to conjure Hild's first memories.

Here's what the Abbey looks like now:


But I spent most of my time with my back to the ruins, looking south at the river, as Hild might have done:


Hild would have climbed every single one of these trees and fished for perch at their roots.


Again, I had to edit out twenty-first- (and twentieth-, and nineteenth-) century artifacts. If I missed a few rugby goalposts, or contrails, or tourist signs, just imagine them away. (I've got so practiced at that that I hardly even see them anymore.)

As you'll have guessed by now, water is a huge part of this book, and I've saved my favourite for last: Meanwood Beck which cuts through Meanwood Park.


I spent hours here on summer days as a child: fishing for tadpoles in the beck, splitting my face open flying off an swing (by going all the way over the top bar), carrying my little sister home after she slashed her foot on broken glass (in the beck--right at this little weir, in fact), dabbling my fingers in the water, dreaming of the mill workers, tannery workers, monks...

In the book, this is Menewood. Hild falls in love with it. For a while.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

York in Hild's time, part 2

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A couple of weeks ago I posted my thoughts on York in Hild's time, along with some nifty (or pitiful, depending on your Photoshop skills) maps showing where I thought Edwin might have built his wic.

I've since read "Before Eoforwic: New Light on York in the 6th-7th Centuries,"* by Cecily A Spall and Nicola J Toop (Medieval Archaeology, 52, 2008):
This paper offers two new sightings...an early-Anglo-Saxon settlement (6-7th century) from just outside the city, and an extension to the Anglo-Saxon settlement (7th-9th century) already known at Fishergate. Both these settlement occupy the same gravel terrace and are only 2km apart.
I've marked them on the map below, along with the site of the previously discovered eighth-century helmet, Coppergate.

York with features relating to development of the Anglo-Saxon wic (after Spall and Toop). Click to enlarge.

Spall and Toop suggest that:
Heslington Hill appears to represent a small rural farming community that had settled on the closest upland to the Roman city by at least AD 550 and remained there into the 7th century...
However:
The best evidence for subsequent Anglo-Saxon occupation (7th-9th century) has emerged outside the fortress, on the eastern bank of the River Ouse at Fishergate. Excavations undertaken by York Archaeological Trust in the 1980s...encountered remains of a settlement of late-7th to 9th-century date: boundary ditches, postholes, stakeholes and pits... The interpretation is of a pre-determined organised settlement, with rectilinear, post-built structures, property divisions and a possible road with evidence for municipal maintenance.
Fishergate is on the east bank of both Ouse and Foss--and so just outside the area I'd marked out for Edwin's wic:


In Hild (my novel), I assume that Edwin used the Roman fort as one of the stops in his peripatetic perambulations from one royal vill to another. I assume that the hinterlands of the city supplied food for him and his entourage; that occasionally he left the fort lightly garrisoned when he was not in residence; that the city only began to be more populated on a year-round basis once Edwin had been baptised, and Paulinus urged him to consider the symbolism of investing a Roman edifice with Christian ritual and buildings.

I've imagined the wic coming into being after a visit to Gipswic, Eorpwald's East Anglian trading settlement (as part of a royal progress with double purpose: enhance his status as overking--Eorpwald's lord--and hand over his niece, Hereswith, in marriage to Æthelric, a prince of East Anglia) . Edwin saw the money Eorpwald was skimming from the operation and wanted some of that. So he fostered trade in textiles, and centred it on York.

That all collapsed, for a while, after Edwin's death and Oswald's accession. Oswald was far less influenced by Rome; he would have been content to follow his northern heritage and instincts: to avoid ruins and build afresh. Besides, no doubt he would have to spend time consolidating power, not fussing with things like his trading network.

In some ways Spall and Toop's thinking is similar to mine.
This interpretation emphasises the planned nature of the settlement and sees it as a royal centre established de novo on the banks of the Ouse, thriving as part of a polyfocal network of power, with political and ecclesiastical nuclei postulated in the legionary fortress (in the form of Edwin's church near the Minster...)
Though they differ in that they interpret this as
...inextricably linked to wider process of social change...with the concomitant increase in social stratification...
It is particularly significant for the settlement sequence at York that Heslington was abandoned at the same time as the establishment of a new settlement on the bank of the Ouse, less than 2km to the west.
I think they have a point. Most big changes comes from a series of smaller, organic changes at the wider cultural and social level. But I'm writing a novel. It makes better story sense to funnel events through the lens of a Great Man--or, rather, from the perspective of named people, in this case a Great Woman (and her mother, and her uncle, the king). I do, of course, spend a lot of time on this notion of inexorable and organic social and cultural change. Because change is what this book is about: change and the woman at its heart.

* Thanks to Sally Wilde.