And where is he, this cunning king who has moved civilization forward?
He has left his judges to proceed about their business and has gone hunting. We can hear his hounds baying over the hills.
Perhaps he knows, as we know, that he will be remembered in popular memory only for the murder of Thomas à Becket.
Perhaps his Jews know-for we know-that, though they have been locally absolved, they still carry the stigma of ritual child murder and will be punished for it through the ages.
It is the way of things.
May God bless us all.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It is almost impossible to write a comprehensible story set in the twelfth century without being anachronistic, in part at least. To avoid confusion, I’ve used modern names and terms. For instance, Cambridge was called Grentebridge or Grantebridge until the fourteenth century, well after the university had been founded. Also, the title of doctor was not given to medical men at that time, only to teachers of logic.
However, the operation described in chapter two is not an anachronism. The idea of using reeds as catheters to relieve a bladder that is under pressure from the prostate may make one wince, but I am assured by an eminent professor of urology that such a procedure has been performed throughout the ages-pictures illustrating it can be found in ancient Egyptian wall paintings.
The use of opium as an anesthetic is not described in medical manuscripts of that time as far as I know, probably because it would have caused an outcry by the Church, which believed in suffering as a form of salvation. But opium was available in England, especially the fenland, very early on, and it is unlikely that less pious and more caring doctors wouldn’t have employed it in the same way that some ship’s surgeons eventually did. (See Rough Medicine by Joan Druett; Rout-ledge, 2000.)
Although I have added fictional missing children and located it in Cambridge, my story of Little Saint Peter of Trumpington is more or less a straight lift from the real-life mystery surrounding eight-year-old William of Norwich, whose death in 1144 began the accusation of ritual murder against the Jews of England.
Though there is no record of a sword belonging to Henry II’s first-born being taken to the Holy Land, the sword of his next son, another Henry, known as the Young King, was carried there after his death by William the Marshal, thereby making him a posthumous crusader.
It was under Henry II that the Jews of England were first allowed to have their own local cemeteries-a grant made in 1177.
It is unlikely that there are mines in the chalk of Wandlebury hill-fort, but who knows? Neolithic miners digging out flint for knives and axes filled their pits with rubble once they’d exhausted them, leaving mere depressions in the grass to show where they had once been. Since Wandlebury became privately owned racing stables in the eighteenth century (it now belongs to the Cambridge Preservations Society), even these would then have been obliterated to make the land smooth for the horses.
So, for the sake of the story, I felt justified in transferring to Cambridgeshire one of the four hundred or so shafts discovered at Grime’s Graves near Thetford in Norfolk. Even these amazing workings-the public is allowed to descend the thirty-foot ladder leading down into one of them-were not recognized for what they were until late in the nineteenth century, the depressions in the ground giving rise to the belief that they were burials, hence the name.
Last, the episcopal sees of twelfth-century England were fewer in number than today, and enormous. For a while, for instance, Cambridge came under the diocesan control of Dorchester in faraway Dorset. Therefore, the bishopric of Saint Albans is fictional.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been particularly fortunate in the three fine editors who have guided the manuscript through to publication: Rachel Kahan of Penguin Group USA, Francesca Liversidge of Transworld UK, and David Davadar of Penguin Canada. My gratitude to them all.
As for my agent, Helen Heller, bless her, she knows how deeply indebted I am to her.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ariana Franklin, a former journalist, is a biographer and author of the novel City of Shadows. She lives in England.
