"My Era's Better Than Your Era": reported by Penny Dolan

I’ve been writing my Christmas List, as requested by some nearest and dearest, and as ever, the list is mostly books, However, as I scan down the titles, I can see I’m not being very loyal to the Victorian setting of my work-in-progress. I am very easily lured away by the excitement and interest of a different period.

So I was intrigued when I heard four historians defending a chosen era recently.

Which era did they claim was "the best"?

Ben Kane chose the Romans for their amazing influence on the world, and for their empire which lasted two and a half thousand years. The Roman legions were bold fighters, defeating the German tribes who wouldn’t pay taxes. Their language, Latin, underpins the English, French, Spanish and Italian languages, wherever they have spread across the world. They had a good legal system, even if it was largely borrowed from the Greeks. They built aquaducts and miles of roads and impressive buildings which can still be seen today. Not only that, he said, but there are a host of great tales about the Romans from the well-known legends and histories through to interesting small stories, such as the Roman cow that ran up to the third storey of a block of flats and jumped off into the street below, or the fact that famous gladiators would sell small bottles of their sweat to rich ladies. Not only that, but the Roman era can also boast of that political & military genius, Julius Caesar.

Janina Ramirez was roused to defend the era of the Vikings. They were, she said, the roots of the British identity. She agreed that the Vikings - especially with the destruction of Lindisfarne - had had a bad press but the Viking invaders only took gold and treasures at the start. Over thirty years, they became cosmopolitan and cultured, she said, settling and trading and establishing the area known as the Danelaw, Although the Romans classifying the Vikings as Barbarians, that was because the Romans simply viewed any other culture as un-civilised. Janina felt that the Vikings were different and fascinating. They were the first to reach America, Russia and North Africa; their skills included the fine boat-building, metalwork and jewellery while their sagas and literature  show a modernity about their language and are evidence of the Vikings great love of learning. Janina spoke about the role and respect of women within the Viking culture, demonstrated in Queen Emma of Norway, whose marriage to Cnut, the King of Denmark and England created an ultimate power couple. That long and successful reign so transformed the country that in many ways, Janina claimed, the Vikings have never left but exist deep within the culture and landscape of the British Isles.

S.J.Parris said she hardly needed to suggest the importance of the Tudor era. The sexual and religious politics of that era explain why England is not now a small colony of Spain, and why we enjoy the religious freedoms of today.

It is hard now, she suggested, to understand the feeling among people back in 1580, when the Protestant faith was still seen as just a passing fad. Many went along with the new religion because of the need to keep their head on their shoulders. It was an insecure time. Many of the Catholic families believed that the whole of Protestant England hung on the “person” of the King. If only Queen Elizabeth could be removed, they felt, all would be well, especially with Mary Queen of Scots waiting in the wings.  .

Moreover, the Pope had issued a Papal Bull, declaring Elizabeth’s reign illegal and implying that killing her would not be a sin. With religious schools on continent eagerly sending their students to convert Protestants and drumming up support for the Catholics once Elizabeth had been assassinated, there was no shortage of young men glad to do the deed.

So, said S,J, Parris, the Tudor age saw the beginning of modern espionage, in the person of Sir Francis Walsingham. He was, she said, quoting the Bond franchise, “the first M”. Although his grandfather was a common vintner and tradesman, Walsingham himself became central to the safety of England.  Using a system of spies and ciphers and dead letter boxes, he set up a centralised intelligence system that led to the uncovering of treason such as the Babbington plot. This network helped the Tudor age become an era rich in exploration, science and intellectual growth.

Edwin Thomas, coming last on the list, spoke of the Ancient Greeks. Their culture, he pointed out, lay behind the grandeur of Rome. The Greeks were cosmopolitan globetrotters, valuing intellectual freedom and if we were to judge the best era as the one whose influence lasted longest, it was possible to see examples of Greek architecture, such as perfect Grecian pilasters, on many buildings around town. The Greeks, being great ship builders, invented the tri-reme. They fought many military wars of defence, including those against the Turks, a conflict that still has echoes in that area to this day. Without the Greeks, Thomas suggested, we could have been a colony of Iran. The Greek culture fed deep into the cultures of the Mediterranean and Britain, and their ferment of the Greek intellectual ideas still speaks to us today: witness the series of Greek plays running at The Almeida theatre on London. Democracy existed in Ancient Greece, he said, but did not reach England until the nineteenth century, and we have only just caught up, he claimed, with their relaxed attitude to sexuality. Besides, he added, think of the weather in Greece, a climate that allowed the establishment of open air symposiums, and to the teachings of Socrates and Plato.

I must admit that novelist Antonia Hodgson was so busy keeping the peace between these four passionate arguments that she had no time to defend “her” era - the eighteenth century - during this "contest" at Harrogate’s History Festival.Janina won the vote, mainly because she stressed the role of women in the Viking era which rather won this particular audience.

I wonder what era would be your personal favourite - or maybe it is really is impossible to choose?

Cloaks, Daggers and Masked Maurauders by Imogen Robertson

The Harrogate History Festival is coming up in October and I’m going along to see if I can grab a selfie with Neil Oliver and Melvyn Bragg. Ideally both at once. 

I’m also chairing an event about historical crime fiction ‘Cloaks, Daggers and Masked Maurauders’ with Robert Goddard, Michael Jecks, Shona MacLean and Andrew Taylor. I do hope that some of you can some along to the festival. There are some fantastic people appearing and you can guarantee the bar will be full of friendly writers between talks. 

So my panel is made up of superb writers who are all critical and commercial success stories - a testament to the success of the (sub)genre. And if you needed any more convincing that historical crime is still drawing the crowds, no less than half of the shortlisted authors for the HWA Debut Crown are writing crime. Antonia Hodgson, MJ Carter and Ben Furgusson in fact. So why is it in such rude health?

The genre makes sense to me as a reader and as a writer. Crime fiction has the virtue of some clear genre rules, a contract with the reader. There will be a crime. You will find out the who, where, what, how and why of that crime before the book is finished, and you will be able to follow the investigation of that crime. The Detection Club have a fuller and funnier set of rules you can read here - but you get that idea.

Crime, especially murder stories, means high stakes, a strong, clear narrative drive and characters under pressure. That always sounds like a good read to me. And why does it works so well in a historical context? Well, it it seems to me the great virtue of the crime novel is that a detective is given (or claims) the right to ask questions and ask them of unusual people in unusual places. That detective is then the avatar for writer and reader, looking at how things work with an outsider’s eye and that perspective can be a great help when writing historical fiction. 

Outsiders see what insiders do not - I’m sure that’s was why when I was writing The Paris Winter I found the memoirs of foreigners living in the city much more useful than those of the French. Detective fiction is a licence to uncover, to snoop, to examine and to speculate and I think historical fiction is driven by a similar sense of curiosity - a fascination with the small details that imply larger stories. 

But perhaps something entirely different will come across in the discussion in Harrogate. I’ll be asking the writers about how they mix fact and fiction in their work, what draws them to certain subjects, individuals and periods, why they are attracted to crime fiction, and the difference between characters in a standalone novel and those that carry a series, but I’d love to know what readers of the History Girls would like to ask them.   So what do you think? Questions for the individual writer or the whole group, please and I shall take them with me. 

www.imogerobertson.com

TO BATTLE! CONFLICT IN FICTION. Notes from Harrogate History Festival by Penny Dolan.

When writers mention conflict they are often talking about a tension between two or more of their characters.  However, when Harrogate History Festival hosted a panel on this theme, conflict meant “battle and action and weapons”. 

The panel was chaired by John Henry Clay, whose interest is late Roman history and the three speakers were A.L.Berridge, who has written here on the History Girls about the Crimean war, Robyn Young, who created a weighty trilogy on the Crusades, and the Viking author Rob Low. The following post is based on my notes of the session.

JHC: Conflict scenes can be the most difficult scenes to write, and to get right. Of all the “living in the past” historical experiences the writer might identify with, being in the middle of a battle is the possible hardest to understand. 

Not only does the writer have to meet their reader’s expectations, the battle scenes have to fit into the full story and be read as part of the characters life or lives but battles are, by their very nature, incredibly complex events.

So, what makes a good battle scene? 

ALB: Jeopardy! The character has to have something at stake. There must be turning points. Even when the historical outcome is known, the scenes can’t be predictable. You need variety, but there’s more variety in some conflicts than in others. For example, the Battle of Inkerman took place in thick fog, which doesn’t offer a great range of opportunities, but the Battle of Balaclava contains many different elements.

ROB: You need variety to for yourself as a writer, too. Battle scenes can be hard and exhausting to write, especially if you are working on a long book. It helps if the battle setting offers a variety of terrain, or landscape. Variety of action too: you have to find new ways to kill people and make use of when and where the fight takes place and the range of weaponry. Is it arm-to-arm fighting in mediaeval alleyways, a campaign across deserts and plains, or a battle set in the Scottish highlands? It can be hard to maintain suspense if the reader knows what happens to certain characters.

ALB: But the reader doesn’t know what’s going to happen to your characters!

LOW: There’s also the change that happens within a battle. For example, Robert the Bruce began the battle with a full range of armour and accoutrements, riding a fine horse, with pennants flying around him. By the end, he was on the ground, fighting with barely the shirt on his back. I’d say that terrain is everything in a battle. Are you fighting from high to low ground? Is there a water or marsh behind you? Is there a bridge? Are you on horse or foot? At Bannockburn, the English cavalry were falling on the infantry, who were trying to escape across a bridge of trampled flesh.

ROB. In a funny way, sex scenes and battle scenes are both hard to write. Everyone “knows” what’s done, but it is everything that the individuals bring to the scene that make it interesting.

LOW: Another thing I’ve learned, even through battle re-enactments, is that time within battle works in an odd way. It is mostly hours of faffing around followed by a few minutes of sheer, absolute terror and one-on-one experiences. There’s also the variety of people involved. Remember, for centuries it was always the “wee guys” who did all the fighting for the “big guys. The wee men did not have the big plan. They just fought as best they could, hoping that everyone else around them was doing their job.

JHC: Is it necessary to keep the reader informed of the wider view of battle and if so, how?

ROB. It depends on what you want to achieve. For example, when I was writing about the Crusades, I wanted to show the panorama of the landscape and the larger scale action.

ALB. One advantage in writing about the Charge of the Light Brigade is that information could be held back: from the point of view of those first in the Charge, they did not know they were heading for defeat. They did not know Lord Lucan had turned back. 

Historical writers have to take care with fairly recent history. Readers can be very knowledgeable and sensitive about the regiments and reputations involved in a battle so get the facts of the action correct. One way of dealing with this complexity is to show the battle from several different character’s points of view, including enemy action. This does mean that you have to plan out the writing of your battle scenes in advance.

 

LOW: The climate and seasons and weather will affect your battle setting too, not just the location on the map. If you visit Bannockburn at Midsummer, the ground can be rock hard, crossed by little streams here and there, not a bog or marsh.

JHC: Is the documentation of battles a blessing or a curse? Before the Crimea, “documentation” usually meant the general’s formal reports. Since the Crimean war, there have been newspaper articles as well as many accounts by ordinary people.

 ALB: There are so many wonderful accounts, but the downside is that many or so very, very literate, bringing you the sounds and the smells. As a write you can’t improve on that, so the only way is to go for another man’s experience.

LOW: Accounts get changed and re-written. Back in time, there were the Viking sagas. Originally they were the fragments of tales for telling around the fire. Then a collector nailed them together in an often-incoherent way. Even so, such accounts are invaluable as a way of understanding the ethos of the period and discovering how people thought and lived and died.   

For example, Vikings didn’t think of wanting battles. They just thought of killing people. Besides, the details are important. You have to remember that you’re writing for people who may not know the historical details. (People who believe “Braveheart” to be history, for example! Much laughter.) If you look at the accounts of the numbers who died, often the wee man aren’t recorded, only the aristocrats.  You have to be careful of tradition too, and think of the audiences that “historical” writers and novelists were writing for, and why they were writing.

JHC: Thinking about the writing of your characters, do you think fighters in the past suffered the same traumas that we hear soldiers suffering today?

ROB: I’d heard my granddad’s war stories about all the ordinary difficulties and illnesses. Then, for the Brethren novels, I talked to a lot of people, both military and medical. Besides, the mind-set in the past was probably very different. Ordinary people did not matter. They fought when the call from their lord came and, if they survived, went home back to their farms. The valuable people were those with riches and property, because they could be offered for ransom. The first time that we hear of nobles fighting in battle was in the Second Barons War in the Vale of Evesham when Prince Edward wept because the battlefield was “covered in bloody red ribbons” of all the gentry he knew.

ALB: The attitudes of the past and present don’t always match. Religion was very important to people’s lives and culture in the past, in the17^th Century. Peasant’s lives were always difficult and harsh. They faced death in so many ways already: disease, injury, starvation, lawlessness and, for women, childbirth. If daily life has such a high death rate, dying in battle might not seem so terrible.

LOW: In some societies and times, the acceptance of death was almost a cult. A Viking would be ashamed to die in his own bed. His greatest fear would not be death, but the fear of not being brave, of letting his brother warriors down, an attitude that still exists as part of today’s squaddie culture.

JHC: What do you feel about the amount of gore needed to write battle scenes?

ALB: In some ways, “gore” is voyeurish: blood and injuries seen by the onlooker not the participant. When you are in action in the middle of a battle, you don’t register such things the same way. You are too busy worrying about what’s happening next. However, the soldiers involved in the Charge of the Light Brigade were also spectators, because they were charging at cannons. They did see heads blown off, horses running with dreadful injuries, their friends blown apart. The carnage was visible.  The survivors, retreating, saw the vultures already gathering on the bodies of their dead comrades. 

ROB: You do a disservice to your readers if you don’t give them a realistic idea of what the battle was like.

Finally, a couple of the questions from the audience:

How do you approach trying to convey sounds in battle?

ROB: Re-enactment helps. You need to hear the difference between the sounds. How does a pistol sound? Or a musket? There’s also all the other sound, such as bugle calls or drums. 

ALB: First hand accounts help. Two genuine writers were at the Crimea, and they recorded the details a sthey . One Captain wrote about the terrible “slosh” of the cannonball when it hits a human body.

ROB: It’s useful to take part in or attend re-enactments. For example, chain-mail does not rattle, it “shushes”. (LOW demonstrates with a handy tunic)

 

LOW: But in the middle of a battle or fight, your ears may be covered by a metal helmet so you hear your own breath and not much else. (LOW demonstrates with three handy helmets, one with no ear-gap, one with, and one with hinged ear flaps.) ou might pick up bugle calls but you can’t hear commands. You see the standards and rally towards them.

How do you draw the line between creating a hero and the horror of war?

ALB: You have to remember that the antihero and the villain are aspects of the hero.

ROB:  Also, you can’t judge a “hero” by modern sensibilities. You need to find the areas where the hero and the reader connect.

LOW: Heroes are accretions of other people’s dreams and hopes. For example, the hero Robert the Bruce was a ruthless, cunning and mean s-o-b, but he was better at it than most of the others at that time.  A hero is a symbol, a figurehead. He is a human being whose side you can be on. Their task is to do other things and survive.

ALB. When you write, you try to show both the good and bad aspects of ordinary human people. In my opinion, Cardigan and Lucan are the villains of the piece.

Conflict in Fiction was a totally fascinating session, so thank you to all the speakers quoted here, and apologies for any errors in my note-taking or attribution.

The first Harrogate History Festival was supported by several history publishers and planned with the help of the Historical Writers Association. I’m fortunate in living quite close to The Old Swan Hotel so, while I couldn’t attend the whole weekend, I was able to drop in and out of sessions and talks. I’m already watching out for next year and may be offering my notes on a couple of other talks here on History Girls over the next month or so.

Penny Dolan