Stuart Sharp's Blog, page 5

H is for Histories

This A-Z, I’m looking at some bits of medieval history, and thinking about ways they could add to the detail and interest of fiction. It’s worth remembering that while historians pick apart medieval life today, there were also historians in the Middle Ages. They wrote chronicles such as the Anglo Saxon ones, or works such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, or rather lopsided accounts of the crusades such as the Gesta Francorum. We also find some of the earliest biographies of non-kings/emperors, such as the one commissioned about William Marshal by his son.

Historians/chroniclers can be fun characters for historical or fantasy fiction. No, really, they can. They give you an excuse for asking questions as an author, and for the characters to try to interpret the story themselves as they go along. It can make for more complex and interesting takes on events, so that you have characters simultaneously living events and trying to interpret them. Which is something we all do.

G is for Guilds

In the A-Z this year, I’m looking at fragments of medieval history that might be of use to writers. Today, I want to look at guilds. Fantasy fiction is full of thieves guilds, mages’ guilds and so on, but what was it really like?

Well, the obvious point is that guilds tended to be more about crafts than anything like that, controlling standards within a particular city and driving people out of work who didn’t meet those standards. Interestingly though, there’s a case for saying that this wasn’t how they started out, since the earliest mentions of guilds I’ve found were all in a religious context. My father and I once argued about this when I mentioned them in the course of doing my PhD, since his essentially Marxist take on history couldn't accept the possibility that they were about anything other than workers banding together to fight against their oppressive employers.

Instead, at least some of them were about banding together to meet the medieval requirements of the Good Death (for which, see D) and fighting against Purgatory. The ones I’ve seen started life as a kind of funerary club, with members putting money in to see to their funeral arrangements, but also to pay for the celebration of masses for their members’ souls. I’m not saying that this is definitely how guilds started, or that they were all about this, but I do think it’s worth bearing in mind that they had a function beyond the jobs of their members. Mostly because, in too much fiction, that’s forgotten and supporting characters get pushed into these neat little boxes where they are nothing but their role in life.

F is for Feudalism, Fiefs and Freedom

I’m looking at aspects of medieval history here that might be of use to writers of fantasy. Today it’s about the ways in which medieval societies were structured, and the amount of freedom that gave people. The idea of a fixed “feudal” system isn’t often accepted these days, since it’s all a bit neat and tidy. It’s the idea of everyone owing fealty to someone above them in this perfectly arranged feudal pyramid, when in fact, it was far more complex. People could owe formal fealty to a number of lords. Kings could do fealty for particular pieces of land to other kings, or even barons. Wars almost always featured the betrayal of various feudal “commitments”, so that it’s often more useful to think of a rough clump of friendships and attachments than a formal structure when describing medieval society.

If the feudal system is one medieval element that writers sometimes put too much emphasis on, one that modern writers shy away from is the lack of freedom in the lower echelons of medieval societies. These were societies that practiced slavery even if the Church nominally frowned on one Christian taking another as such. They were certainly societies with numerous serfs, who were as unfree as any slave, but tied to a particular piece of land.

It’s tempting for a modern writer to gloss over this, but doing so can paint an overly rosy and pleasant picture of the middle ages, and also ignore potential complications for your characters. If they’re in a generically medieval fantasy world, how do they feel about this big and frankly evil thing at the heart of their social structure? If they’re not noble, are they free to leave their land and go off on an adventure?

E is for Empires and Expeditions

I’m looking at bits of medieval history this A-Z that are useful to writers. Today, I’m talking about empires. A lot of people in fantasy fiction like to set their works in empires, often with a Western European flavour. Yet how common were empires? In the Central Middle Ages at least, Europe was mostly a lot more fragmented than that, consisting of many states or regions much smaller than those we know today. Even the “empires” we talk about today, like the brief Angevin one or the Holy Roman Empire, weren’t on the massive scale we imagine today. The Holy Roman Empire was more the memory of an empire than its reality, while the Angevin one consisted of a few bits of France, Britain and the surrounding regions.

Yet there were real empires. The Byzantine one springs to mind, as does the empire the Golden Horde Mongols carved out (getting as far West as Vienna in 1247). There was the Islamic Empire in North Africa that spilled over into southern Spain as well. And there were expeditions to them. The most famous was probably Marco Polo’s journey east but Harald Hadrada made his name before invading England by working as a mercenary in the Byzantine Empire, and the background to the First Crusade in 1096 included the closing of the routes to Jerusalem to European travellers. Implying that it had been open before. Those moments of connection between the established empires and the often fragmented and emerging nations provide all kinds of inspiration for writers.

D is for Death

This A-Z, I'm trying to look at aspects of the Middle Ages that might be useful for writers. Death was a big deal in the period, and not just because disease, war and life in general made it so common. It was the period that Aries, in his The Hour of Our Death, characterised as the rise of the Good Death. The good death was the idea that while the Romans and the Greeks might have been a bit vague about death and the dead, those in the Middle Ages thought that it was important to have the right sort of death, with the right sort of rituals around it, and the right sort of commemoration. While his categories always strike me as a bit wide and weirdly argued, the Good Death is a concept that is extremely relevant for the medieval period.


There was a level almost of obsession when it came to death and remembrance in the period. Whole monastic orders sprang up, not because of some philanthropic tendency on the part of the nobility, but because they wanted their own monks to pray for their souls after death. This was also the period when chantry chapels started to spring up, and when many ideas about the afterlife were still being argued over through a combination of religious debate, popular culture, and records of visions.


Then there were the arguments over what you did with the bodies. This was the era of relics, after all, and getting hold of important bits of famous/saintly people was a niche industry. St Wilfred of Ripon's remains, for example, were dug up by the Archbishops of Canterbury and taken there to attract pilgrims, only for those at Ripon to insist that they'd managed to hide the real relics and he was still there.


Yet it wasn't just saints. This was an era when nobles started trying to buy burial space within churches, typically trying to get as close to the altar as possible. It was an era of effigies and remembrances. Of course, it wasn't unique in that. Unlike Aries, I suspect the Romans probably didn't forget the dead as soon as they keeled over. Yet in the Middle Ages, a sense of the dead was definitely all around, making it probably the most death focussed culture certainly since Ancient Egypt.

C is for Castles

My goal here is to provide some glimpses of medieval history that might be useful for writers. Today I want to talk about castles. Castles weren’t one thing. They came in all kinds of shapes and sizes, from simple fortified keeps to motte and bailey constructions, through multiple concentric rings of defences, to the over-elaborate fantasies of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Commonly, we tend to think of castles as a Norman introduction to Britain, and they certainly made the most of them. Yet if we think of a castle as simply a fortification with some living space, we have forts dating back to the Romans and before.
 
What were castles for? Defence is an obvious answer, but actually, there are many examples of country houses with castle-y features like moats or crenulations, but which would never function defensively. They might be overlooked, or lacking in real walls, or any one of a dozen other things. In these cases, castles were more about projecting authority and status. They were a big staple in the countryside, saying “I own this”. They were also a way of saying that the owner was of a level of nobility that allowed them to build castles.
 
Some kings required the building of castles (religious institutions only sometimes being exempt from the obligation), while others required licenses to build them. For a writer, that could provide a useful source of ongoing disputes with authority, if you need them. At the very least, you should consider doing something more than just a big ring of walls with a tower the next time you need a castle.

B is for Burghers

My aim in these posts is to look at those bits of medieval history that are relevant to writers. I want to look at burghers here, or the wealthy but not noble inhabitants of cities. They’re a group who are often ignored in medieval sources. Even the most famous division of medieval society carves it up into those who work, those who fight and those who pray, meaning rural peasants, military nobles and priests/monks.

Where wealthy city dwellers and merchants were mentioned, it was typically to say how awful they were. Medieval fiction portrayed them as rapacious villains, or suggested that it was fine to pillage their possessions in a way it wasn’t when honest peasants were mentioned. It was essentially a reaction to the idea of non-nobles having wealth, coupled with a disdain for business. Harsh taxes and charges of usury were common. But the merchants and the business people were there.

What does this mean for writers? Well, it could help shape a few attitudes in your novels, if you like, but the main point here is not to forget that these people existed. It’s tempting to just go ‘peasants, fight-y people, priests’ and leave it at that, but always remember the people with whom they spend all the gold from their adventures.

A is for Archery

So, it's the A-Z. My goal in these posts is to look at the bits of medieval history that are useful to writers of fantasy. I’m going to begin with archery. Descriptions of medieval battles have a couple of oddities to them. The numbers in armies (another A word for you) were usually massively over inflated. At the same time, the impression given was that knights did most of the work, being effectively invulnerable.

Archers were written out, perhaps because the bow wasn’t seen as a weapon for a noble man. Yet they were effective. Agincourt didn’t come out of nowhere. Curiously, fantasy writers also have problems with bows. Book after book has shown the big, muscly types at the front avoiding their use. Bows are for elves. Or girls, because it is another issue with fantasy fiction that women are often stuck at the back in fights, shooting stuff while the men get on with swinging swords. Even in the Hunger Games, what weapon do we see the main character using? It says something about both our attitudes to female characters and our attitudes towards archery. If you’re writing fantasy, it’s probably worth looking hard at both.

Re-reads

I'm re-reading Tricia Sullivan's Someone To Watch Over Me at the moment, and it's interesting how reading a book again after a while away from it can totally change the way you see it. Obviously the book hasn't changed, so that leaves me. But then, I think it's been probably something like ten years since I last read this one.

The first time I read it, I wasn't really in the right space for it. I didn't get the more literary SF elements, or didn't see them for what they were, so reading it now is at least partly an exploration of the way time can unlock different approaches to reading. Mostly though, it's just an enjoyment of one of the best SF books I've read.

Stuff

Okay, all kinds of things, all at once today. I've been away from the blog for a bit because my interest in it tends to come and go, and because I've been busy.

How busy? Well, I'm very nearly at the end of the biggest piece of writing I've ever done. Not by much. I've written 90,000 word things before, but this breaks into three figures, which feels like some kind of milestone. Particularly when it's non-fiction. Making stuff up and writing it down is easy. Writing real stuff down and getting it right is harder. This one is longer (though hopefully less dry) than my PhD was.

I've also started writing a list of things for the April A-Z, trying to stick with my theme of medieval stuff for writers. The trick there seems to be finding things that are interesting and medieval enough, while still being useful to other people.

I've got a couple of pieces of work in the pipeline at the moment, one of which is out to publishers, the other I'm writing. Although I'm writing bits of several things at the moment, trying to find what works for me. I typically find that I need to go at a particular piece of work repeatedly to try to get the shape of the story clear enough to work.

Oh, and I've worked out how to do freebies on Amazon now, so anyone who wants to pick up a copy of The Glass, but who doesn't really do Smashwords can get the kindle edition for free from Saturday for five days.

Incidentally, if you've read any of my novels and you liked them, it would be doing me a big favour if you took a moment to review them, whether over at Goodreads, on Amazon, or on your blog. I'm sure you've got a lot of authors asking the same, but it really does help other readers to see what books are like.