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The Plantagenets #7
A Border Knight
Weak kings need strong knights, and for Richard II few are more valiant than Harry seasoned fighter, proven leader and heir to the North.
But despite the adulation of his peers and the love of his betrothed, Harry ‘Hotspur’ is not content; his heart yearns for Elizabeth Plantagenet, the sister of his childhood friend and the king’s rival, Henry Bolingbroke.
As his infatuation threatens to destroy his marriage, he finds himself a pawn in an increasingly bloody struggle for power – and ultimately, the throne.
Set against the evocative backdrop of Chaucer’s England and an English coup, A Border Knight is stirring historical tale of love, loyalty and obsession.
For fans of Sharon Penman and Elizabeth Chadwick.
But despite the adulation of his peers and the love of his betrothed, Harry ‘Hotspur’ is not content; his heart yearns for Elizabeth Plantagenet, the sister of his childhood friend and the king’s rival, Henry Bolingbroke.
As his infatuation threatens to destroy his marriage, he finds himself a pawn in an increasingly bloody struggle for power – and ultimately, the throne.
Set against the evocative backdrop of Chaucer’s England and an English coup, A Border Knight is stirring historical tale of love, loyalty and obsession.
For fans of Sharon Penman and Elizabeth Chadwick.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published May 28, 1987
24 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
About the author
Juliet Dymoke
34 books25 followersJuliet Dymoke was born at Enfield in Middlesex and educated at a boarding school in the country. During the war she worked for The Canadian Army Medical Records and at that time married Hugo de Schanschieff who was then serving as an air gunner in he Royal Air Force.
It was while her husband was away in the R.A.F. that Juliet Dymoke turned her attention to writing and also to work on scripts for various films companies. She has published several books for children but counts historical novels with "more fact than fiction" as her particular field. She has travelled all over the British Isles in the course of her research, as she makes a special point of authenticity. Among her main interests are music, television drama and "anything to do with the countryside".
It was while her husband was away in the R.A.F. that Juliet Dymoke turned her attention to writing and also to work on scripts for various films companies. She has published several books for children but counts historical novels with "more fact than fiction" as her particular field. She has travelled all over the British Isles in the course of her research, as she makes a special point of authenticity. Among her main interests are music, television drama and "anything to do with the countryside".
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 16, 2018
Harry ‘Hotspur’ Percy is knighted as a young boy, alongside two others – Henry of Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Richard of Bordeaux, heir to the throne and the only surviving son of the legendary Black Prince. Richard wishes for they will remain friends forever, but over the next twenty-six years, two of them will become King of England, one deposing the other, and all will face each other as adversaries in rebellions, before a final clash at Shrewsbury will see only one of the three still living.
A Border Knight is another volume in Juliet Dymoke’s Plantagenet series and, while enjoyable in parts, I found it suffered from two major flaws.
The first is the same flaw that’s dogged every single one of Dymoke’s novels I’ve read thus far and will come as no surprise to those who’ve read my previous reviews – it’s just too rushed. The fact that it covers twenty-six years in 350 or so pages is a tell-tale sign. This could easily be a brick of a novel, but it’s just standard novel size. Additionally, there’s a lot of padding in the first half of the novel – a lot of Hotspur fighting on the border between England and Scotland with no clear end or purpose in sight. This means that Richard II’s tyranny and downfall, Henry IV’s ascension to the throne and the fall-out between Henry IV and Hotspur was once again rushed through with the reader getting the highlights reel, with a lot of the real drama occurring off-page and being given in summary.
The second flaw is that Hotspur is really the wrong choice of protagonist for a story about the reign of Richard II. Don’t get me wrong: Hotspur’s character is intriguing, I love the idea of having him as a protagonist and I want to read more novels with him at the centre. But he’s so cut off from the action that we really do only get the headlines of Richard II’s reign. The Great Revolt of 1381? Didn’t really affect him, only the clash between his father, the Earl of Northumberland, and John of Gaunt. The Appellant Crisis of 1388? Well, he heard about it. Richard’s revenge in 1397? Okay, he saw a bit of that but not much. The exile of Bolingbroke in 1398? He was there at the cancelled joust… but not much else. Even Richard’s capture and deposition reads like Hotspur wasn’t there for much for it. For most of the first half of the book, we’re mainly watching Hotspur being a badass and fighting the Scots while hearing about Richard’s reign in retrospect. And they’re big, dramatic events that I couldn’t help but want more of. Even when we move to the drama that Hotspur is more or less explicitly involved in, it feels like he’s just hearing a summary of events because there’s no time to go into it in detail.
Dymoke’s characterisations and handling of events felt like there was a great deal of thought and care put into them. I liked Hotspur as a character – how his strong morals are complicated by his reckless temper. I was less impressed with the romantic subplot between Hotspur and Elizabeth of Lancaster, one of John of Gaunt’s daughters. This is a fictional invention which is admitted to in the foreword to the novel, but one I don’t really see the need for. It added little to events beyond melodrama and ended up feeling a little unfair to the historical Elizabeth, whose main contribution to the plot is to torment Hotspur over his unrequited love, prevent him from being happy with his wife, Elizabeth ‘Bess’ Mortimer, and then break his heart so he can finally be “free” to love Bess properly.
I loved Dymoke’s sympathetic take on Richard II – he’s inconsistent and tyrannical, but when Hotspur recalls him as “the boy who had bullied and tormented and allowed no freedom”, the reader is allowed to see him as being shaped by his upbringing and treatment, not just as a tyrannical monster. However, because the book is so rushed and Hotspur so distant from events, Richard’s swing from the rather sensitive boy at the start of the novel, who cries at the memory of his dead father, doesn’t want to be king and who wishes to remain friends with Hotspur and Bolingbroke forever, to the tyrant screaming about how he’s the king and can do what he likes is rather hard to clock. It’s not that it’s flat-out unbelievable, but because we see so little of Richard and everything is at break-neck speeds, there’s just not the time and space for Dymoke to show his character arc in the detail it needs to be believable.
In terms of historical accuracy, this was published in 1987 and so isn’t up to date with current scholarship on Richard II’s reign. Dymoke presents Richard II as the youngest out of him, Bolingbroke and Hotspur, but it’s now known that he was six months older than Bolingbroke, who was born a year later than previously thought. If you’re used to Shakespeare’s plays, where Hotspur is seen as Prince Hal’s (Henry V’s) contemporary/double, Hotspur being a contemporary of Richard II and Henry IV might be a bit of a shock, but it is historically accurate. Hal (as Dymoke calls Henry V in this novel), is stated to be 14 years of age at Henry IV’s coronation, but he was actually 13 (he was born August/September 1386, the coronation took place October 1399). It’s also suggested that Mary de Bohun, Bolingbroke’s wife, died of plague alongside Constance, Duchess of Lancaster, and Anne of Bohemia, Richard’s queen, but it’s more commonly accepted that she died of complications in childbirth. Dymoke also takes the view that Richard II’s revenge against the chief Lords Appellant in 1397 was driven by the revelation that they were freshly plotting against him, but historically it’s unclear whether such a plot existed, was invented after the fact as justification or was prevented by coming to fruition by Richard’s actions.
I did like reading this and it has whet my appetite to try and find out more about Harry ‘Hotspur’ Percy. But, in the end, it was disappointing because I was cut off from the real drama of Richard II’s reign and because everything was so rushed. 2.5 stars.
A Border Knight is another volume in Juliet Dymoke’s Plantagenet series and, while enjoyable in parts, I found it suffered from two major flaws.
The first is the same flaw that’s dogged every single one of Dymoke’s novels I’ve read thus far and will come as no surprise to those who’ve read my previous reviews – it’s just too rushed. The fact that it covers twenty-six years in 350 or so pages is a tell-tale sign. This could easily be a brick of a novel, but it’s just standard novel size. Additionally, there’s a lot of padding in the first half of the novel – a lot of Hotspur fighting on the border between England and Scotland with no clear end or purpose in sight. This means that Richard II’s tyranny and downfall, Henry IV’s ascension to the throne and the fall-out between Henry IV and Hotspur was once again rushed through with the reader getting the highlights reel, with a lot of the real drama occurring off-page and being given in summary.
The second flaw is that Hotspur is really the wrong choice of protagonist for a story about the reign of Richard II. Don’t get me wrong: Hotspur’s character is intriguing, I love the idea of having him as a protagonist and I want to read more novels with him at the centre. But he’s so cut off from the action that we really do only get the headlines of Richard II’s reign. The Great Revolt of 1381? Didn’t really affect him, only the clash between his father, the Earl of Northumberland, and John of Gaunt. The Appellant Crisis of 1388? Well, he heard about it. Richard’s revenge in 1397? Okay, he saw a bit of that but not much. The exile of Bolingbroke in 1398? He was there at the cancelled joust… but not much else. Even Richard’s capture and deposition reads like Hotspur wasn’t there for much for it. For most of the first half of the book, we’re mainly watching Hotspur being a badass and fighting the Scots while hearing about Richard’s reign in retrospect. And they’re big, dramatic events that I couldn’t help but want more of. Even when we move to the drama that Hotspur is more or less explicitly involved in, it feels like he’s just hearing a summary of events because there’s no time to go into it in detail.
Dymoke’s characterisations and handling of events felt like there was a great deal of thought and care put into them. I liked Hotspur as a character – how his strong morals are complicated by his reckless temper. I was less impressed with the romantic subplot between Hotspur and Elizabeth of Lancaster, one of John of Gaunt’s daughters. This is a fictional invention which is admitted to in the foreword to the novel, but one I don’t really see the need for. It added little to events beyond melodrama and ended up feeling a little unfair to the historical Elizabeth, whose main contribution to the plot is to torment Hotspur over his unrequited love, prevent him from being happy with his wife, Elizabeth ‘Bess’ Mortimer, and then break his heart so he can finally be “free” to love Bess properly.
I loved Dymoke’s sympathetic take on Richard II – he’s inconsistent and tyrannical, but when Hotspur recalls him as “the boy who had bullied and tormented and allowed no freedom”, the reader is allowed to see him as being shaped by his upbringing and treatment, not just as a tyrannical monster. However, because the book is so rushed and Hotspur so distant from events, Richard’s swing from the rather sensitive boy at the start of the novel, who cries at the memory of his dead father, doesn’t want to be king and who wishes to remain friends with Hotspur and Bolingbroke forever, to the tyrant screaming about how he’s the king and can do what he likes is rather hard to clock. It’s not that it’s flat-out unbelievable, but because we see so little of Richard and everything is at break-neck speeds, there’s just not the time and space for Dymoke to show his character arc in the detail it needs to be believable.
In terms of historical accuracy, this was published in 1987 and so isn’t up to date with current scholarship on Richard II’s reign. Dymoke presents Richard II as the youngest out of him, Bolingbroke and Hotspur, but it’s now known that he was six months older than Bolingbroke, who was born a year later than previously thought. If you’re used to Shakespeare’s plays, where Hotspur is seen as Prince Hal’s (Henry V’s) contemporary/double, Hotspur being a contemporary of Richard II and Henry IV might be a bit of a shock, but it is historically accurate. Hal (as Dymoke calls Henry V in this novel), is stated to be 14 years of age at Henry IV’s coronation, but he was actually 13 (he was born August/September 1386, the coronation took place October 1399). It’s also suggested that Mary de Bohun, Bolingbroke’s wife, died of plague alongside Constance, Duchess of Lancaster, and Anne of Bohemia, Richard’s queen, but it’s more commonly accepted that she died of complications in childbirth. Dymoke also takes the view that Richard II’s revenge against the chief Lords Appellant in 1397 was driven by the revelation that they were freshly plotting against him, but historically it’s unclear whether such a plot existed, was invented after the fact as justification or was prevented by coming to fruition by Richard’s actions.
I did like reading this and it has whet my appetite to try and find out more about Harry ‘Hotspur’ Percy. But, in the end, it was disappointing because I was cut off from the real drama of Richard II’s reign and because everything was so rushed. 2.5 stars.
December 27, 2018
A Medieval tale of love, honor, & duty. Based on the real life English knight, Henry Percy, A BORDER KNIGHT tells the story of 14th century Percy as he gains the respect of his countrymen through his exploits in battle. Dymoke evokes enough romanticism to keep readers who enjoy their history interspersed with interpersonal love stories invested.
A quick, enjoyable, historical novel.
A quick, enjoyable, historical novel.
November 3, 2020
I have been waiting for this 7th book in The Plantagenets series it was a page turner. I love reading about this time era and am hoping there maybe a book 8.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews