Jen Black's Blog, page 85

Necessities of castle life

Latrines are usually called garderobes in historical fiction, but they had other names – Gang, orgong, cloacum, neccessarium, reredorter and jake, which is the French form of john or jonny. The Welsh used tŷ bach  (it means a small or private place). Another popular name was the privy.

Privies varied from a hole in the ground to grand, purpose built structures – a wooden bench with a hole cut into it, or sometimes stone seats, inside a small, private space. Lids with handles were used to drop across the hole, and earth or sand was kept to throw in; often both were required in an effort to dampen the smells. Henry VIII had sand in his jake at Dover Castle. Gongscouring was a recognised trade by the 16th century. I don't know about you, but can't help but shudder at the thought of a stone toilet seat on a frosty January morning...
Usually the latrine cubicle projected out over the castle walls, and excrement piled up below. Someone (the poor gongscourer) had to go around at frequent intervals and shift it. Sometimes a chute or shaft inside the walls drained into a cesspit. In this case, latrines were necessarily grouped together at one spot in the castle. Rainwater was often directed from rooftops to the chutes to clean them out. Hampton Court had a communal House of Easement which was two stories high. “Pissing places” were common and at Greenwich Palace an effort was made to stop this habit by whitening the walls and painting red crosses on them in the belief that no Christian would piss against the Holy Cross. 
From the 15th century on, toilet arrangements within private chambers featured a chair or stool with a pot included below the seat – a close stool – and the pot would be regularly cleaned out by servants. (I imagine they emptied the contents over the castle walls! Certainly that happened at Stirling Castle in the sixteenth century.)
Water was a necessity for life within the castle. Several wells were included at most residences. The deepest well in England goes down 330 feet, (100 metres) and such depth requires a mechanism to lift the heavy bucket full of water to the surface. Systems of pulleys and counter balances were used. Rainwater was also stored in cisterns at roof level and lead pipes were in use from 1300 onwards.
Fireplaces have been found in English castles as early as 1081, but they were unlike modern fireplaces in that they projected out into the room they heated, and they did not have a chimney. The smoke escaped through small holes in the external wall at the back of the fireplace. By the early twelfth century, builders had devised a flue that carried smoke to an external chimney on the roof. By the fourteenth century, fireplaces lost their projecting hoods and were recessed into the wall, usually on a long wall, and often off-centre, so they were closer to the “higher” end of the hall. In France, the practice was to place the fireplace behind the dais, thus keeping the noble family warm. 
Decoration included abstract patterns cut into the stone in the twelfth century and heraldry made its appearance in the later middle ages. The decoration of fireplaces never transferred to internal doorways in English architecture, possibly because wall hangings and tapestries often obscured doorways. In direct contrast, the French habit, commonplace by the fifteenth century, was to extensively decorate door mouldings.

Lighting was difficult in castles. Most light sources were portable, either suspended as chandeliers of wood, brass or iron. Small wall niches are found in stone walls of corridors and latrines. Lamps could be mounted on projecting brackets in smaller chambers, usually to either side of the fireplace.

A typical nobleman's house

The typical nobleman’s house contained kitchens, communal space, withdrawing rooms and a chapel. In the early days, each function may have been housed in separate buildings, but by the 12th century the separate parts began to come together in one building.
The Great Hall had services (ie kitchen, pantry, buttery) at one end and the withdrawing space (ie  one withdrew from the hall into a private space reserved for the family members ) at the other. The Great Hall goes back into legend – Beowulf awaited Grendel in the Great Hall. Built of timber, with a huge open timber roof – ie no upper storey, the halls were built on the same plan for a thousand years, in differing scales and in every form of dwelling. Wood gave way to stone. Gradually castles expanded and life went out of great halls and into withdrawing spaces, but we still have a hall, which is the space a visitor first sees on entering our homes today.
In the middle ages, the entrance to the hall was through a porch in one of the long sides of the hall. A “screens passage” led the visitor to the hall itself. Timber screens or partitions on one side of the corridor closed off the view of the hall. Two doors led from the passage to the “low status” end of the hall; on the other side of the passage, there would be three doors – one to the kitchen, another to the pantry and the third into the buttery. The old French word for buttery was bouteillerie which was where they stored their casks and bottles. The pantry  was the bread room where a pile of stale loaves would be stored to use as trenchers - used instead of plates. The kitchen would be a long way from the hall because of the need for huge fires and the consequent fire risk. Often a passageway between the buttery and the pantry led to the kitchen. If not, then the scullions would have to go outside in the open air to reach the kitchen - or the whole carcase roasting in the open air.
A step ran across the width of the hall and separated the nobility from the hoi polloi. At the end furthest from the screens passage, beyond the step, was a raised dais at the “high” end of the hall where the lord and lady and their family sat. After the fourteenth century it was often lit by a projecting bay or an oriel window. Behind the dais a door led to the withdrawing chambers beyond. The open fireplace was in the centre of the hall, and smoke escaped via an opening in the roof. Fireplaces were common in other dwellings by the fourteenth century, but halls persisted with the central hearth.

Trestle tables, set lengthwise along the walls, were set up for meals while the head of the household sat at a single high table that ran across the width of the dais. There would be several “sittings” for meals in large households, and by the fourteenth century the head of the house most likely ate in his withdrawing chamber.

Castle life

After the conquest, castles developed into administration and judicial hubs, and came into the hands of the
greatest families of the realm. For a long time, these were noblemen from Normandy who came with William the Conqueror. A castle became the grandest residence you could own: an “inheritances” in its own right. The monarch generally licensed applications for castle construction, though at certain times over the centuries, the Bishop of Durham, the earl of Chester and the earl of Lancaster also issued licenses.

What went on in castles? Essentially a castle was a great household divided into two parts. The steward oversaw the practical management of the household, ie preparation and distribution of food. The chamberlain attended to the public, ceremonial side of the castle. These people were predominantly male. The third, lesser strand was clerical, with responsibility for divine service and maintaining household accounts. In the royal household, this post would be held by the Chancellor of England.

Outdoors, the horse was important for so many reasons – travel, hunting, farming, and war, so stables were important and some animals lived in stony splendour while others made do with planked accommodation.

Livery held a different meaning in medieval days. All followers received “liveries” – and in 1130 this included money, food and goods. The King’s Chancellor received a livery each day which consisted of five shillings, one fine and two salted simnels (wheat bread), a sextary (probably four gallons) of sweet wine and another of ordinary wine, a large wax candle and forty candle ends. This was seen as a pretty good deal. (Eight gallons of wine a day may seem a lot but neither tea nor coffee had been discovered, and the water was often undrinkable. Herbal teas would have been available, but try as I might I cannot picture a man in armour demanding a rosehip tea.) From 1200 it became common for the livery to include clothing. By the fourteen hundreds this had become so complex that it was virtually a uniform that identified the employer and the capacity in which the servant was employed.

The household moved at regular intervals, partly to visit remote estates and use the resources there, and partly for sanitary reasons. The lord's possessions went with him, including bedding, furniture and utensils. Royal households had in effect two separate households, one for the king, and one for the queen. The Earl of Northumberland had a household of 166 people, but when he took off to his estates, his household was reduced to 36 – the “riding” household. With all this in mind, a castle had to house vastly different numbers of people at different times. Spaces were flexible, and often changed use.

Fake castles

Today it is a given that castles were military buildings. We accept  the fact almost without question. But the strange fact is that medieval people did not use the term, and nor was there a single term to describe the complex buildings they built and used. 
  Twelfth century words included: chastel,(Fr) castellum, arx, mota, turris, oppidum, munitions, firmitas and municipium (all Latin). Sometimes, we use one of the rare medieval terms today without realising we are doing so. London’s castle is called The Tower of London; and the name comes from its medieval name Turris Londiniensis.

Nowadays, some people talk of Real Castles. They are talking about the private and fortified residence of a lord. The trouble is that then we have to give another name to all those other buildings we generally think of as "castles," or else they automatically become "fake castles." The Anglo-Saxon chronicler who wrote of Dover’s castelle in 1051, before the introduction of feudalism and the concept of “castle,” was actually talking about what should technically be called a fortified settlement or burh.

Modern historians also talk of castles of display, or chivalric castles when they mean buildings that have crenellations but no proper fortifications. These, Goodall says, are the castrati among castles – appealing but singing in the wrong register.

There’s also the confusion about manors, which are also seats of lordly authority. Some manors have crenellations, especially in the border country. When is a manor distinct from a castle? Again there is confusion. In 1521 the Duke of Buckingham’s new residence was described as the manoror castell. Sir John Paston’s will dated 31/10/1477 refers to Caister in Norfolk, usually called a castle, as “my seid maner and fortresse.”

But whatever the correct technical term, the medieval and early modern nobility of England occupied buildings we loosely, and probably incorrectly, call castles. From 1066 to 1640 castle were so important that a nobleman without a castle was like a knight without a horse. 

Castles

There is a wonderful book by John Goodall, Architectural Editor of Country Life. It’s called The English Castle, and it’s horrendously huge and heavy with loads of pictures and 547 pages. A great weight to carry home from the library, as I did once, but a book I look at every time I visit to admire the wonderful photographs and check facts.

In his introduction, Goodall says we have the French to thank for our ancient castles. Evidently the overthrow of the French nobility after the revolution in 1789, and the subsequent necessity for the government to care for the medieval buildings that were left, meant that the ancient buildings in this country were studied, analysed and valued. At the same time, Walter Scott had something to do with it too; the success of his novels Ivanhoe and Kenilworth, which celebrated castles and all things chivalric, fed popular interest and as early as 1882 we had the Ancient Monuments Protection Act.

It’s often hard to distinguish a castle from a hall. I’ve noticed that in my own locality when I was wandering around Aydon Castle/Hall and wondering which term to use. The definition is this: a castle is a private and fortified residence of a lord. The Normans introduced castles at the Conquest to enforce the Norman, feudal political settlement over an unwilling Anglo-Saxon population. When government failed, people retreated to their castles and waged war on each other. Governments made attempts to obstruct the building of private castles, but it was only when new siege technology made earth and wood defences obsolete in the late 12th century, that the sheer cost of building in stone limited their construction.

You would think that something built of massive stones would last forever, but it is not so. Rain and wind do their damage by trickling inside the stones or between them. In winter the water freezes and expands, cracking the stone or rupturing the wall.
 Wind scours sandstone, as in the picture, which is essentially a soft stone, but easy and attractive to use.Too much rain and landslides occur, taking castle walls with them. Even a small subsidence will do damage. Trees and shrubs sprout in the oddest places and look attractive, for a while. We've seen buddleia growing in someone's forty foot high gutter!  But trees and shrubs grow, and push stones apart and eventually bring down walls. Fire damage cracks stone and destroys roof beams. Once the roof is gone, the place is doomed. Nothing, not even castles, live for ever. Treasure the ones we have.

The Devil Rides Out

Back ache blues disappearing at last. The only trouble is Tim got hold of the sheet detailing the movements required to keep joints supple. He ate half of it and shredded the rest. He's much better than a shredder, I can tell you, and no running costs to speak of.

Further to the cheering up we have booked a two night stay at Crinan Hotel in April, so we have that to look forward to. We know we're going to France in early summer, and we've promised ourselves more quickie breaks. It means I'm going to need to be very disciplined with my writing if I want to continue. A few days ago I seriously contemplated abandoning it as I got little pleasure from it, but yesterday and today I've written chapter 20 of Blood Feud, and feel back on the ball again. Health is everything, isn't it? I can't write when I'm not feeling fit.

I've just finished reading Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, probably first published in the 1930s. His books were very popular until the 1990s and then he seemed to fade from view. I discovered his stuff on Amazon Kindle, and was tempted to read one and see if I enjoyed it as much as I did all those years ago. I'd forgotten how rich all his characters were. Le duc, Rex, Richard - all millionaires. The action and plot read just as well now as back then, but there were one or two spots in the second half of the book where description got the better of him.

Car trips were described in detail, and Richard's private four-seater turned out to be a plane rather than a car. He took off from home, talked of Croydon airport, and whizzed through customs in France with a loaded revolver in his hip pocket. Laughable, given today's security strictures. Then the flight to Greece was described at length - too great a length to my mind. I suppose in all fairness that not many families owned a car in the 1930s and forties, even the fifties. Plane flights were a luxury and foreign places largely unknown, so the readership back then probably lapped it up. We're all too well travelled and blase now. But on the whole, the story passed the test!

I thought I'd loaded Part 1 of Chapter 5 of Capture a Queen to Wattpad on Monday, and only today discovered that it was still in draft form. I remedied that, and if anyone is reading - apologies - and the link is:

http://www.wattpad.com/37913888-capture-a-queen?d=ud

Back ache blues

I've put off blogging today because I'm disenchanted with everything. You name it, I don 't like it. Now, this state of affairs may not last - in fact, I hope it doesn't. It's a good thing I'm not critiquing today!

Several months ago I had a fall when out with Tim. I turned my ankle on the curb hidden by grass at the precise moment he took off like a streak of lightning for some unknown delight several yards away. Result? I crashed down shoulder and hip on the tarmac path. It must have looked spectacular, for a gentleman walking some distance away ran  up to ask if I was OK. Tim, of course, licked my face like a concerned dog would
Anyway, it jarred something in my spine and I finally got tired of the aches and the morning stiffness - in fact, getting out of a chair of an evening ment I walked at a crazy angle for a while. I booked an appointment to see Dr Melrose.
He's an osteopath rather than a chiropractor, according to my local GP. He's good, very good. One, or perhaps two visits, should be enough, he says. I'm always afraid he'll have retired when I really need him. He doesn't agree with these modern practitioners who require patients to visit every other week. No need for it, he says. I've been precisely three times in the last sixteen years, including the visit I made this week, and each time he has cured the problem. He can deal with the mechanical problems, but insists I must undertake to keep my spine supple so that  future falls will not be so punishing. Five movements, thats all it takes. I know them off by heart, and they are very simple. I am doing them religiously at the moment. I'm also sitting here with a heated bean bag wrapped around my spine to ease the soreness following the manipulation.

It probably wasn't a good idea to help out in the garden today while dh took a chain saw to several overgrown cottoneasters and a thorn tree that was threatening to break the fence.  By the end of the day, in spite all our hard work, we still had a lawn full of spiky thorn branches. They'll have to be chopped up and taken to the tip tomorrow. Tim is wondering why he's only had one walk today.

Pic - waterlogged fields and the shifting light on the local countryside where I walk with Tim

Procrastination

I know now why I haven't finished anything in a while. It's because I keep starting over with something. Bad habit, must break it. Not only am I editing Matho's story, but I've started over with Blood Feud. Some people would call "starting over" editing, and I think I shall have to in order to preserve my sanity. It's a good thing I did take a new look at BF, because I discovered that I have two versions of a scene. So I spent yesterday with the two versions isolated and on my screen so that I could view them together and amalgamate into the best version. It wasn't hard to do, but what if I hadn't been reading through in a continuous sequence, I probably wouldn't have found the fault. It's something critique partners might not notice, because they read chapters weeks apart sometimes.

To add to the procrastination, I've started sending chapters of Matho's Story to Wattpad. I wondered what kind of reaction - if any - it would receive. There are about 6,000 people registered for the Historical fiction group, so there should be plenty of readers. We shall see!

As for real life, we had a sharp frost the other morning, but today I had to take my jacket off as I walked Tim on the riverside or I would have been far too warm. Spring is here. The grass is growing, much to dh's disgust, and some of the trees and shrubs are showing tiny new leaves. Daffodils are poking through, heads still pointing down, and snowdrops - those delightful hardy little flowers - are everywhere this year. The pic is a track Tim and I walked yesterday. Still muddy, but delightful in the sunshine.

Added to this I just got a good review for Dark Whisky Road on Amazon, so things are looking good today.
 Here's the link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dark-Whisky-Road-Jen-Black-ebook/dp/B00AT4NPTA

Top-selling authors

Top selling authors belong to a rare club and I suppose we all, secretly, in our heart of hearts, want to join! Jeff Bercovici of Forbes has some interesting thoughts to share in his articles on the topic. So what lessons can the rest of us pick up? The most sound seems to be - Write in a genre that has mass commercial appeal.(FORBES bases its estimates on sales data, published figures and information from industry sources between June 2012 and June 2013.) 

Top of the list in 2012 is E L James (aka Erika Leonard, nee Mitchell) who has reputedly earned $95 million (£60 million) for her bondage trilogy. As everyone probably knows, she originally wrote it as fan fiction in the style of Twilight author Stephanie Meyer. The books leapt straight into every bestseller list, which throws an interesting side light on modern culture purely because of the theme running through all three books. However, that is not what interests us in this instance. Instead we should speculate if s the books would have had such success if the electronic reading device – which gave every reader a discreet way to imbibe such spicy stuff - had not been invented. 70 million copies sold between Jan-Aug in the USA.  As my good friend Jeffrey once said when he heard I'd taken up writing - “Remember – shagging sells!”
In second place that year was James Patterson, who publishes five or more titles a year with $91 million (£58 million) earned between June 2012 and June 2013. 
It seems fantasy fiction for young adults is a good market, especially if it attracts adult readers. No 3 on the list is Suzanne Collins, who published The Hunger Games trilogy. And earned $55 million. If you can manage a hit film of the story, that will really push book sales. You may have heard of Nora Roberts, too. Well, she stands at 8 on the list, having earned $23 million in 2012. You would think, wouldn't you, that they had all earned enough and they would stop writing and let some other author have a chance at the top prizes.
Michael Pietsch, CEO of Hachette Book Group thinks it’s the surprise and originality of some stories that leads to the giant sales. That’s why there are all these delicious stories of the book that was rejected by 96 publishers – because people are looking at what worked in the past. Then suddenly one brave publisher decides to take a risk, and finds a success on his/her hands.Unhappily, there is no science behind forecasting the next bestseller, but there is a lot of luck.Read some of the original articles at the links below:http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fifty-shades-eljames-forbes-highest-paid-authors-499478
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/08/09/women-on-the-rise-among-the-worlds-top-earnings-authors/

The best selling e-books of 2012

Publishers Weekly has an interesting article - OK, it came out mid 2013, and it's already 2014, so you may have seen it. But I've just found it and I want to keep it ot at least the link to it. I may want to look back at it some day. And there is a certain curiosity in knowing how many titles authors sold....

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/56408-the-e-book-explosion-facts-figures-2012.html

The magazine asked publishers for information on e-book sales. Because they were not specific enough in their questions, they got more info than they bargained for, but when they looked at it, they found lots of  interest. Here's a little quote:

"All the publishers that shared digital information were houses that rack up enough print sales to compete in the bestseller race. And while we estimate that we have more than 1,000 e-books with sales of 25,000+, we know this does not reflect all e-book sales in the book industry. Still, a look at this quantity underscores that the book business is quickly moving to digital. It would be safe to say that the lackluster performance in mass market has a lot to do with the fact that readers are enjoying the convenience of the electronic devices instead of the more traditional convenience of the paperback.

Also, it is clear where backlist sales have gone. Peruse the list and you will see double-digit numbers of titles for most of the bestselling veterans. Nora Roberts may be the most prolific in this area: she has 40 titles on the e-book list, adding up to about 3.2 million in total e-sales; James Patterson has 29 books on the list, with a total of more than 2.6 million; Janet Evanovich scores close to 1.8 million with 19 books."
One phrase leapt out at me: the book business is quickly moving to digital. 
In view of this change in the business, which after a slow, tepid start now seems to be gathering speed like the proverbial stone rolling downhill, I am now seriously thinking about publishing Matho's story myself. I can do it. No worries on that score. I can - indeed, already have, a cover that I think is good enough to be THE cover. The big worry is promotion. The stumbling block to self-publishing is getting the information out there. While I tinker about with yet another edit of the story, and finish off my Viking tale, I shall be exploring better ways of promotion.