Settings

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I love having a real place to set my books. It helps me see the story playing out if I know the place. I used real settings which I named in my first two books. A little tricky, because I was then bound to the real history of the place. I made freer with my Icelandic books. I knew the places, but I didn't name them. So I was free to visualise the bay and hillsides, but could play a little with them.

In Runaway, I needed a big stately home for my setting. I chose Dyrham Park, which was just the right era, built in the early Georgian period, but wary of my experience of using Farleigh Castle, I renamed it Deerhurst Park. Now I had all the freedom I could want, to explore the beautiful setting on visits and imagine it, but without tying myself to its actual history and the people who lived there.

I could imagine the horses and carriages travelling down the wide sweep of the carriageway into the picturesque park. I could place characters at the lodge house (now a ticket office). I could describe negotiating a team of horses through the sharp turn into the gates and the archway into the stableyard:

I even knew what the stable yard was like - though it's now a tea room and a shop; as mentioned in an earlier post:

Here, I was able to imagine tethering and grooming the horses, harnessing them, riding them in and out, even walking them when they had colic. And I could imagine and describe all the daily coming and going of a busy stable yard and the people who once worked there.

I even felt familiar with the gardens and the view of the back of the house, which the servants would have crossed to go to church on Sundays:

An image of Dyrham Park even made the back cover of the paperback. So it's an open secret, but I still got to invent my own people and story for the place. 

I'm sure other authors can successfully use imagined settings, but I definitely find real ones easier and more vivid. And it gives me an excuse to post all these lovely pictures. Perhaps the real secret is that when I visit these incredible places, I love to imagine what it must have been like to live there. I suspect that might be the basis of a lot of our historical fiction.

Follow me on twitter: @jensen_ml

Changing Language

by Marie-Louise Jensen

When I'm researching and reading old books, I love to find and note all the ways language has altered over the centuries. Writing my first Georgian book, The Girl in the Mask, I had to write down a note for myself:

1) You keep your clothes in a closet.
2) Your wardrobe is your collection of clothing
3) Skirts are the part of a man's coat below the waist
4) Ladies skirts were referred to as petticoats or 'coats
5) A dress was a gown.



There were others, but those were the frequently used ones I was concerned about getting right (I did make one mistake in Smuggler's Kiss which slipped through).


When I ask school children today what ladies in the 1700s called their dresses, they struggle to get the right answer, instead guessing robe, frock, tunic etc. The word gown has been pretty much lost.

Incidentally, I remember my grandmother always talking about 'frocks'. With the arrogance of youth, we'd roll our eyes and sigh, but in fact the word has come back into fashion now in the phrase 'posh frock'. I secretly always rather liked it.

I had fun in Runaway with a few Georgian phrases. For example, I used the expression 'sick as a cushion'. I'd come across it in Georgette Heyer novels and always found it amusing, so I put it into some dialogue. But the copy-editor queried it. When I hunted for it in the OED, I couldn't find it, but I did find 'sick as a parrot', which I thought was equally amusing, if not more so - given that parrots can be green. In the end, lovely assistant editor tracked down 'sick as a cushion', so although I kept parrot, I've notched it up as a phrase to use in future. I have quite a store of them and I always love coming across them when I'm reading too.

Posting Inns

by Marie-Louise Jensen

With the rise of travel and tourism in the 18th Century, coaching inns or posting inns began to spring up all over the country. The heyday of coaching, stagecoaches and the mail coaches wasn't until some fifty years after the period I researched for Runaway, but even in 1725, well-heeled travellers were on their way places - to London, to the newly-popular resorts of Bath, Bristol, Tunbridge Wells and Harrogate and to their grand country houses.
As slowly the roads and carriages began to improve and as the upper class became wealthy unlike ever before, they wanted to travel fast.
In order to do this they needed inns that could supply them with changes of horses as they travelled - whether for their own carriage or for a hired carriage. The early stagecoaches were also established by 1725, with regular timetables on popular routes, especially in summer, and stagecoaches too required fresh horses at each stage.
The inns provided refreshments for travellers - either in their coffee rooms or tap rooms, or brought out to the carriage. The change of horses grew more and more efficient until the best inns on the busiest roads prided themselves on scarcely keeping travellers waiting before they set forth once more on their journey. There are very few of these inns surviving, they fell out of use with the advent of the railways, but the George inn in London is one that still retains its traditionally galleried yard and is worth a quick google for images.
My question writing Runaway was not so much what is was like for travellers in these inns. I've read plenty of fictional and historical-fictional accounts of that. I wanted to know what it would be like in the stables. What kind of a life was it for the horses and the stable boys?
It doesn't take a genius to work out that it was a gruelling life. In the busy season most of the horses would do more than one shift with different drivers every time and no guarantee of being well treated. But according to what I've read, it wasn't only the work that shortened most horses' lives.The quality of the stabling was far more of a factor. Often to cut costs, at least some of the stabling would be run-down and inadequate, with holes in the roof, damp and poor care. The horses who were stabled like this had very short lives indeed.
The stable boys, as far as I can work out (information is scarce) hardly fared better. Stable boys slept in the stables with the horses, so whatever the conditions were for the horses, they shared them. They worked long hours under a great deal of pressure for little pay. I don't think it was an enviable life for boy or beast.

The Packhorse Trains

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I posted last month about the slowness of wagons on narrow rutted roads in the 18th Century. There was another form of transport that was far quicker and less affected by the poor roads. All over Britain trains of pack horses carried loads of goods from city, countryside or coast to city.
Pack horses were much faster than wagons and for this reason were more suited to transporting fresh goods that would spoil on the journey. In the early 18th century, London was growing fast and food and raw materials needed to be brought in from all over the country.
There was a pack horse train for example, that travelled down every night from the North of England with fresh fish. Trains of pack horses carried fruit and vegetables into the city from all over the country. And from the West Country came a continuous supply of wool to be processed in the city.
All these goods were ideal to be transported by packhorse, being small and relatively light. Bulky and heavy items were better suited to wagons.
The pack horses could avoid the worst of the ruts, not get stuck in the mud like a heavy wagon, take shortcuts and they could also evade the new tollgates that were springing up all over the country, by simply leaving the road for a spell, which the wagons couldn't do, making pack horses cheaper.
It amazed me to find that pack horses were so widely used in the UK and until so recently. I should have guessed, of course, from the number of pubs called the packhorse. I live in the wool-producing West Country and there's one pub with that name within walking distance.
Gradually, the improved roads and the new four-wheeled carts, not to mention canals, put them out of business. But until the mid-18th century they were very much in use.
It was impossible to resist including the pack horses in Runaway once I found out about them, so my character Charlie gets a job with a packhorse train which travels between London and Bradford-on-Avon.
She and her employer (a woman - I checked, and there really were a few women known to have been working the packhorse trains, sometimes dressed as men for protection) walked beside the horses with a stick, one at the front of the train, one at the back and used voice commands to direct them. The horses knew the route by heart and would speed up as they got closer to the inn where they were to be quartered that night. Their stabling would be booked, including feed, at convenient inns on the route, depending on how long the journey was.
My research taught me wisdom such as 'a badly tied pack ruins a horse quicker than bad roads' and a lovely collection of words that have now long ago passed out of the language, such as 'sirsingles' and 'wantyres' which were part of pack horse harness, the wantyre being the strap that fastens around the horse's tail to help secure the load. They are still in the OED with a wide variety of possible spellings.

Wagon Wheels

by Marie-Louise Jensen

When I think of wagons, I tend to visualise the covered wagons settlers used travelling westward in America. But of course wagons were a major form of transport in Europe too - both covered and uncovered. A farmer would stack his hay or straw on an open wagon to transport it to his barn or for sale. Goods were transported all over the country by wagon too.
Up until the early 18th century, most British carts were two wheeled affairs and thus unstable for goods. Lumbering wagons were therefore the main form of transport for heavy goods.
In the days before stagecoaches, passengers could also book a seat on a wagon and travel.
It's thought that initially simple straw bales were used for seats and to divide passengers from cargo. Later, transporting passengers became increasingly profitable as people travelled more, and the conveyances became marginally more comfortable.
Wagons couldn't cover more than maximum 8 miles an hour (and often managed far less) on the type of road surfaces that existed then, so it was slow going. It wasn't just road surfaces that slowed travel down. The roads were also surprisingly narrow, as I mentioned in my last post. In fact in many places they were so narrow that it was challenging to have horses harnessed side by side, so instead the wagons were pulled by horses at length which means one behind the other rather than in pairs. The further away a horse is from the object he's pulling, the less efficient the force he exerts on it. Don't ask me to explain the physics behind this, but apparently it means a long line of up to eight horses, chained together, pulling a wagon was way less efficient than two or three pairs. It must have been quite a sight though. I haven't been able to find a non-copyright picture, or I'd have posted one here.
Waggoners were only allowed to use six horses pulling at length with an extra two allowed for short sections where the road was particularly steep or muddy.
The waggoner walked next to his horses with a stick or a whip to keep them going. Obviously it wasn't possible to drive such a long line of horses from the wagon itself with reins.
I can't help wondering whether wagons caught one another up on the roads and being unable to overtake, ended up in long convoys like big lorries on our motorways today. I think this must almost certainly have been the case.

Roads for Runaways

by Marie-Louise Jensen

Researching 18th century roads in England for my most recent book was a fascinating learning experience. I'd read of poorly maintained roads, of course, and of toll gates and pike roads, but they were all vague terms that swirled about in my mind rather. I'm far from an expert now, of course, but I did learn some interesting things. 

Last year, there was  flurry of talk in the media about privatizing the roads. It then went away and hasn't (to my knowledge) been talked about since. So I imagine the next we will hear of it is toll booths being erected all over the country and an outcry about roads having being sold off to foreign investors. Who can tell?
What is interesting is, that it wouldn't be the first time that roads have been put into private hands in the UK.

In the 17th century, most of the roads here were in such an appalling state that travel was a penance. It's hard to imagine just how bad appalling is. Imagine the narrowest, most rutted and muddy lane you've ever seen, completely impassible for cars, send a riding school along it with big trains of horses every day, add a few herds of cattle and you are probably accurately visualizing one of England's main 17th century thoroughfares.

Maintaining the roads was the responsibility of the parish through which they ran. Each parishioner was obliged to give a number of days labour per year to maintain the road and a local squire would be appointed to oversee it.
As with any voluntary, unpaid task, adherence was patchy (like the roads!) And for practical and financial reasons only local materials were used, so in boggy areas, you'd get boggy roads.
Another huge problem was that in a populous parish with a little used road, the road would probably be fine. But there were sections of the great North Road, for example, that passed through scantily inhabited parishes where it would have been a full-time job for the few residents to maintain the roads adequately.
Thus as travel increased, with a growing economy and early industrialization, the system didn't work.

In the early 18th century, the government began handing over sections of road which were to be maintained in return for charging travellers toll.The Turnpike Trusts, and the turnpike roads, were born.
Initially, this scheme was so successful that it was quickly expanded. The turnpike roads helped speed up travel considerably.
In the long run, many of the problems we see today in privatized services surfaced. Some trusts maintained their roads meticulously, others pocketed the money and let the roads go to rack and ruin. Travellers were furious at paying toll for such roads and eventually road maintenance was taken into government hands.

The road my runaway flees on is the Great Western Road, or what was also known as the Bristol Road or the Bath Road which ran westwards from London. Although this, of course, is only the start of her travels. But more about that in later posts.
Runaway is published by Oxford University Press on 5th June 2014

Cant

by Marie-Louise Jensen

In early Georgian times it became fashionable, especially for well-to-do young men to speak 'cant' or slang; the language as spoken by the poor or more especially by the less-respectable members of society. Namely, the sharpers, the sharks, the bites, the wild-rogues, the varlets, the queer-bluffers, the rascals and scoundrels.

There is a lot of fun to be had. I've not yet been able to master the vocabulary fully enough to create a canting character, and in any case I think it might be bewildering for my young readership, but I do like to throw in a few Georgian expressions now and again. Some of these are cant and some are simply expressions that have fallen out of usage.

We had some discussions about some of these at the copy-edit stage recently. Because most are outdated and unheard-of now. Where would be the fun if they were still current? But who today knows about job horses, match-bays or wantyres? Horses are no longer our form of transport.
Nor do we any longer have such widespread suffering from gout, so the expression 'in the gout' to depict an ageing gentleman rendered grumpy, difficult and at times incapacitated by a painful condition is no longer familiar.
I also wanted a character to use the expression 'sick as a cushion' for comic effect. Then when called upon to defend it, I couldn't find it anywhere. One of my editors did track it down in the OED (hurrah!) but in the end we settled for 'sick as a parrot' which is probably more comic.
I haven't yet managed to work in 'farting crackers' to a manuscript (a cant term for breeches) although I fully intend to one day. But I did have to track down an era-appropriate term for a man's privates. I found tool, which I thought was comic without being crude. And did you know that a cant term for testicles was 'whirlegigs'? I don't even want to think about how that might have originated...
 Here is the cover of the new book (publishing next June) that provided the fun: