'A Knight's Enchantment': review roundup

I've been delighted at some of the reviews my latest medieval has been gathering:

Night Owl Reviews have just made it a Top Pick. Terri says she'd like to see more about the characters because she's still thinking about them and goes on, 'I believe Ms Townsend has raised the bar for this era for many of her fellow authors.'

Lauren Calder at Affaire de Coeur writes: 'Ms. Townsend sneaks into the heart of the reader and continually snags them with her enchanting story, feisty characters, and blushing romance.'

'Joanna and Hugh', writes CinLee at Romance Junkies, 'are a sweet couple that the reader can’t help but take to heart.'

Linda Sole at Red Roses for Authors concludes: 'This is an earthy, passionate romp through medieval England and keeps the reader on the edge right to the last. Townsend has warmth and a way of bringing a scene to vivid life so that in turning the pages the reader is transported to another place and time.'

The difference of historicals

I've drawn the winners of my latest contest, and copies of A Knight's Enchantment are on their way to the lucky three. Now I'd like to point out a few ways in which historicals are - well, different. I love reading historical novels of all genres and I love to write them, so are my five 'star' points that I look out for in the stories that I really enjoy.
　
1. Realistic reactions. In the past, the roles and pressures on people were different to now and a good historical reveals this. Women's liberation as a movement did not emerge until the late 1960s. Women (and working class men) did not acquire the vote in Britain until the early 20th century. Before then, the role of women was determined by family and peer pressure, by the church, by society's expectations, by class and above all by biology. (My great-grandmother had 14 pregnancies, 12 births, 2 miscarriages. In the days before reliable birth-control, women often spent their child-bearing years doing just that.)

In earlier warrior societies, where brute strength was prized as a means of winning booty, only a very unusual woman would be big enough and strong enough to fight as an equal warrior. Remember, food would often be in short supply and the sons and men ate first, not simply because of their higher status but because of survival. Men are generally more physically strong in pushing heavy ploughs, and so on. They needed to be well-fed.

2. Realistic dress. Fashion and past fashions is a fascinating business to me, but in a good historical dress also reveals class and tactile elements. A heroine who is changing her gowns every chapter may not be realistic. Clothes were costly and time-consuming to make. Fashions in the country would be less cutting edge than those of the city. Even cloth and colours would vary - the rich would have access to silks and more expensive dyes.

3. Realistic settings. How people lived in the past is very different from modern-day life (at least in the developed parts of the world) and that is worth showing in a historical. The daily trudge for water would be part of someone's life, as were the anxious waiting on crops and the hunger experienced while the harvest slowly ripened. In an unscientific age the fear of the unknown affected everyone - was the hail storm the sign of an angry god? Was a sudden illness in the village the result of witchcraft? If illness is not understood, then the evil eye becomes as good a reason as anything else. If 'everybody knows' that disease comes from the stench of the gutter, it becomes understandable to protect your cottage from pestilence by growing fragrant roses around the door.

4. Realistic plotting. In the past, communications were a major problem. In a world without the internet, battles could be lost because the flanks of an army literally could not talk to each other. A messenger could take days to ride or run from one part of any country to another. There were no policemen in ancient Greece, where the family was expected to take revenge and seek redress if any one of their people was murdered or injured. A good historical is aware of these difficulties and exploits them.
　
5. Realistic names. Sorry, but - unless the story is fantasy or timeslip - in a story set in 10th century AD somewhere in western Europe, or in China or India, 'Brad' or 'Chantelle', although pretty names, simply don't fit the places or the period and pull me out of the story.

Those are my 5 key points. What are yours?

'A Knight's Enchantment' contest - two questions, three prizes

I have three signed copies of A Knight's Enchantment to give away to the three lucky winners of my instant quiz. All you have to do to get your name in the battered straw hat is to answer one of these questions based on my previous 'Knight' books:

1. In A Knight's Vow, what is the name of the castle where Alyson lives?

2. In A Knight's Captive, who is the saint whose shrine Sunniva and Marc are on pilgrimage to visit?

Simple! Just email me a correct answer by midnight on June 30, 2010 and enchantment could be yours...

P.S.: To stop the answers being given away on the blog and spoiling the fun, I've disabled comments on this post.

'A Knight's Enchantment' published today!

My historical romance, A Knight's Enchantment, is released today by Kensington Zebra. This is my third knight novel, the other two being A Knight's Vow and A Knight's Captive. They take place in different time periods and different places, but all have knights as their heroes.

For me the appeal of a knight isn't his shining armour or his wealth. It isn't even the knightly code which he would be supposed to follow: too often in the middle ages, such ideas of courtesy and honour applied only to the nobility and no one else. But a knight as a protector - now that appeals.

My heroines, too, are great rescuers. In A Knight's Enchantment, Joanna is striving to free her father from captivity and throughout the novel she 'rescues' the hero Hugh, prompting him to reconsider many part of his life and his relations with his family.

Their early encounters are fraught, as neither is sure they can trust the other and Hugh especially makes wrong-headed assumptions about Joanna. He has his own powerful reasons for seizing her, but his self-justifications are flawed. Later he realises and admits this and they join forces.

You can find more details, the 4-star Romantic Times review and an excerpt here.

Setting the scene for 'A Knight's Enchantment'

One of the pleasures of writing historical fiction is the chance to explore the way places were hundreds of years ago, so, as part of my background research for A Knight's Enchantment, I paid a visit to the West Country.

Templecombe, where some of my scenes are set, is one of those thousands of English villages with a quiet present and a busy past, sitting in a land of wide green valleys and warm golden stone on the Somerset/Dorset border with the abbey towns of Shaftesbury to the east, Sherborne to the west and Bath to the north. A main road cuts through it, trains belting along the main line between London and Penzance occasionally stop at its tiny station, and that, to the casual eye, appears to be about it.

Go back a thousand years and the place is different. Domesday Book records that Odo of Bayeux was given the land around here by his half-brother William I of England, the Conqueror, and a century later, in 1185, his descendent Serlo fitz-Odo gave part of it to the Knights Templar. Since the Templars were not only a monastic order but a fighting one, they needed not only a church (St. Mary's, at the top of the village) and a preceptory for spiritual training (where a seventeenth-century building, Manor House, now stands on the High Street), but space for military manoeuvres, sword play, working with warhorses. No sign of this remains, though the archaeologists of Channel Four's Time Team programme spent a frenzied few days in 1996 trying to discover more evidence for the Templars' activities.

In spite of the importance of Templecombe to the Order, which used it as a base for Templars throughout the West Country, their habits of frugality, modesty and secrecy have left little behind, except for one thing. In the 1950s a painting came to light hidden in the roof of a local cottage. Dated to around 1280 AD, it shows the face of a man, possibly Christ or John the Baptist.

Love and magic in the Middle Ages

Imagine you're a young medieval lady and a young man creeps up, whacks you three times over the head with a hazel stick inscribed with the magical incantation pax+pix+abyra+syth+samasic and tries to kiss you. It sounds a touch desperate these days, but in the Middle Ages this was seriously suggested as a way for a man to get a woman to fall in love with him.

Medieval lovers tried subtler ways, too - spells, charms, amulets and potions - to win the affections of those they desired, all in defiance of the church, which objected to magical interference with a man's or woman's free will.

Love magic was practised and feared by all sections of medieval society, including royal courts. This is reflected in the stories of the time. In the romance of Tristram and Iseult, the couple fall in love because they accidentally drink a love potion intended for Iseult and her betrothed, King Mark. In the story The Two Lovers, composed in the late 12th century by Marie of France, a suitor must carry his beloved up a high mountain before he can marry her. Too proud to drink the magic potion that will give him strength, he completes his quest by the power of love - even though he dies of exhaustion afterwards!

A possibly Viking love spell that has passed into folklore in northern England is a custom where on certain nights unmarried girls chant: 'Hoping this night my true love to see,/I place my shoes in the form of a T'. T surely stands for Thor, the Norse god for storms and also for marriage, the idea being that the girl would then dream of her future husband.

Men and women in the Middle Ages also believed in a multitude of herbs and spices to bring them luck in love. Caraway was used in love potions, as were cloves, coriander and mallows. Garlic and ginger were believed to inspire lust and so good sex. Valerian mixed with wine was claimed to make even the most pure woman lustful. And in Italy, women would wash their eyes with the diluted juice of the deadly nightshade to increase the size of their eye pupils and appear more beautiful (which is why nightshade is known as belladonna.)

In medieval England guests to a wedding would bring small cakes and pile them into the middle of the table. The bride and groom would try to kiss over the cakes for good luck.

In northern Europe, it was the custom to supply a newly married couple with enough mead for a month, to ensure their happiness and fertility - hence our term 'honeymoon'. If a man had problems with virility in bed, it was often assumed he was bewitched and the couple was advised to remove any evil charms that might be placed under or near the bed, such as the testicles of a rooster. Once these were removed, the man should be free of the curse. To drive a woman wild with desire, it was believed that mixing ants' eggs into her bath would do the trick. Hmm.