The two of them walked their horses back down the hill, chatting.
From where he lay under the shadow of a juniper bush, a man known as Scarry watched them go. At least, he didn’t watch the king, because he didn’t know it was the king. He watched Adelia, and his eyes were those of a stoat waiting to kill-a stoat that spoke Latin.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I HAVE SET the story of the “finding” of Arthur and Guinevere’s grave at Glastonbury fourteen years earlier than the chroniclers who tell us it happened in 1190, but there is good reason to believe it wasn’t as late as they say, because the Glastonbury monks also “found” Excalibur-it was known as Caliburn then, but I’ve used the now-familiar name-and the sword was undoubtedly in the possession of Henry II before his death, which was in 1189.
Eventually, Henry sent Excalibur as a present to his friend and future son-in-law, the King of Sicily. When I asked John Julius Norwich, that fine historian of Norman Sicily, if he knew what happened to it after that, he said he didn’t. But, he told me, it is interesting that there is a strong tradition of the Arthurian legend in the area of Mount Etna.
Nobody knows what Excalibur looked like, of course, and my re-creation of it is based on the wisdom and writings of an old and dear friend, the late Ewart Oakeshott, who has been acknowledged on both sides of the Atlantic as the great authority on medieval weaponry.
That a sword from the age attributed to Arthur (circa the mid-sixth century) and earlier could survive intact is due to the fact that thousands of them have been preserved in peat bogs or river bottoms where they have been recovered. To quote Mr. Oakeshott’s Records of the Medieval Sword (The Boydell Press, 1991), “A sword falling into deep mud, free from stones or organic material that might trap oxygen or allow it to penetrate the close covering of mud, will initially become covered all over with a coating of rust, but as time passes the chemical interaction of this rust with the surrounding mud covers all the surface of the metal with a flint-hard coating of goethite which, once formed, prevents any further corrosion and so yields up to the archaeologist (or treasure hunter with his metal detector) a well-preserved weapon, sometimes in almost pristine condition. This coating or patina can be removed… by long and arduous work with abrasives.”
In the book, I have Roetger bringing definition back to Excalibur with a pickled preserve-not as mad as it sounds. Once, steering me round his private collection, Mr. Oakeshott showed me an incredibly ancient and marvelous sword dug up from a Kentish bog that he’d restored to a condition its Viking master would have recognized. He’d tried cleaning off its patina first with lemon, then with vinegar, to no avail. “Do you know what did it in the end?” he asked. “A bottle of Worcestershire sauce.” Which, as far as I’m concerned, pace its manufacturers, is runny preserves.
The Arthurian legend accreted stories over the centuries, which is why I have been scrupulous not to mention the Holy Grail or Lancelot and his affair with Guinevere-all later additions to the story.
Where I have used artistic license is in changing the date of the great fire that destroyed Glastonbury Abbey in 1184 to the time of my story-again, eight years earlier.
After the fire, appeals for funds were sent out and the monks of Glastonbury traveled Europe in a money-raising campaign-there’s nothing new under the sun, not even advertising.
Incidentally, since the pyramids between which “Arthur’s grave” was found no longer exist, I’ve taken their description from the writings of the twelfth-century annalist William of Malmesbury, who saw them when he visited Glastonbury.
And the skeletons of two babies were found in the monks’ graveyard. How they got there can only be speculation.
What does still exist is a tunnel leading from a cellar in Glastonbury’s fourteenth-century George and Pilgrim’s Hotel (I’ve put my twelfth-century Pilgrim’s Inn on the same site on the assumption that there was always a hostelry there) to somewhere in the abbey grounds-we don’t know exactly where, because it is blocked halfway through under the High Street and hasn’t been excavated.
I should point out that there was no bishop of Saint Albans in the twelfth century, although there is now, so mine is a fictional predecessor. However, the dispute between the abbey of Glastonbury and the bishopric of Wells is a historical fact; the two were at daggers drawn for centuries.
Also, in those days, the title of doctor was reserved for masters of philosophy, et cetera, and not for medical men, but, again, I’ve used the anachronism in the interest of clarity.
The use of trial by battle to prove a property dispute had an extraordinarily long life, though it began to die out when Henry II’s judicial reforms were introduced. The last known instance of it is thought to have taken place during the monarchy of Elizabeth I. It wasn’t abolished from the statute books until the eighteenth century in the reign of George III.
As to the introduction into my story of Brother Peter, there is some dispute over whether the Benedictine monks-which is what the brethren of Glastonbury were-used lay brothers to relieve them of laboring work, but I am assured that in some cases they did.
In modern times there has been speculation that leprosy, so rife in the Middle Ages, was not leprosy at all, but that other disfiguring diseases were mistaken for it. This is now mainly being disproved by the new ability to test the bones found in the graveyards of ancient lazar houses, where it has been discovered in some cases that seventy percent of the dead suffered from the leprous condition proper.
In the matter of the writ Morte d’Ancestor, the twelve men hearing the case were technically not jurors as we would understand them now; they were an “assize,” men cognizant of the facts concerned. But again, for simplification, I have called them a jury.
I am occasionally criticized for letting my characters use modern language, but in twelfth-century England the common people spoke a form of English even less comprehensible than Chaucer’s in the fourteenth; the nobility spoke Norman French, and the clergy spoke Latin. Since people then sounded contemporary to one another, and since I hate the use of what I call “gadzooks” in historical novels to denote a past age, I insist on making those people sound modern to the reader.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I OWE KNOWLEDGE of such Welsh words as I’ve used to Mr. Alan Jones of Datchworth, who was so kind as to instruct me in what he calls “the language of Paradise.” Thank you, Alan.
As ever, I’m grateful to the wonderfully efficient team at Putnam and especially my editor, Rachel Kahan. I just wish sometimes that she and my equally marvelous agent, Helen Heller, didn’t persist with their advice being right in every single instance.
The London Library, that great reservoir of knowledge, stops me from making more historical mistakes than I do.
And I don’t know what I’d accomplish without the help that my daughter, Emma, gives me in coping with secretarial and financial matters, or without Barry, my husband, abandoning his own work to accompany me on research trips.
Ariana Franklin
ARIANA FRANKLIN, a former journalist, is a biographer and author of the novels City of Shadows, Mistress of the Art of Death, and The Serpent’s Tale. She is married with two daughters and lives in England.
