Early this summer I spent a few days looking at landscape and ruins in Morayshire, where some of my novel would be set. One very sunny afternoon I visited the ruins of Spynie Palace, once the residence of the powerful bishops of the region before they moved to Elgin. Very little remains now except the shell of the building, a narrow tower you can enter and a castle keep, which I couldn't get into because of building work going on. I sat on the remains of the stone walls and read through my Historic Scotland brochure, which provided several illustrations of what the place might have looked like in its heyday.
At one time the palace looked out on an extensive sea loch and was therefore a centre of trade as well as 'spirituality'. In time the loch silted up and shrank, its access to the sea blocked. There is still a small loch there, but no longer near the ruins of the palace. You look down on a wood and a jungle of vegetation. As I wandered about trying to make sense of what the ruins represented I thought that they did constitute a metaphor for the history I was trying to reconstruct. All we have from history are ruins - bits of stonework, battered weaponry, manuscripts written in to the layman impenetrable holograph, tombstones, fragments of clothing, domestic implements, etc. etc. To the historian these items are eloquent, but only to a certain degree. I was fascinated watching a television documentary recently in which forensic specialists examined four skeletons from a naval cemetery at Portsmouth (I think) and full of admiration for what they were able to tell us about the individuals these skeletons once inhabited. I found their commentary astonishing in its detail. But for all that we cannot wholly reconstruct the past. There are always gaps. We can only come at a tentative understanding through speculation, attempts to empathise, imagination.
Trying to do what I have set myself to do isn't easy. It feels at times like chipping away at a forbidding rock face. I can't make it move fast. I want to be sure of my context and the more I discover the less I feel I know. I don't want to play fast and loose with indisputable facts. I had a look at one of Nigel Tranter's novels that deals with this period - Honours Even, it's called - and he does exactly that. He has Charles II crowned at Scone before the Battle of Dunbar and has the Scottish regalia placed in Edinburgh Castle after it had been taken over by the Cromwellian forces. Both are wrong. Tranter was very knowledgeable about Scottish history. He must have known these facts were wrong, but maybe thought that changing things round a bit made for a tighter fiction e.g. allowing for a daring raid on Edinburgh Castle to get the regalia away to Dunnottar. But that raid isn't so daring because it passes off without much tension. So the book ends up being neither good history nor, for that and other reasons, good fiction. Hm.
Sunday, 30 October 2011
Sunday, 9 October 2011
Weaponry
My story involves war, 17th century warfare. I went first to the internet to look up information about the two main weapons ordinary foot soldiers of the period would have used: the musket and the pike. The flintlock musket wasn't generally used before the 18th century, so my focus was on the matchlock. There are plenty of sites, British and American, with videos, which show how these muskets were fired. In addition to your weapon you carried your powder in a bandolier across your chest or in a powder horn attached to a belt at your waist. First, you would ram a powder charge into the long muzzle of your gun, followed by a lead bullet. Then you would tip a further pinch of powder into the firing plate and set it alight by a piece of cordlike material that you had to keep smouldering during a battle. Lots of things could go wrong. Use too much powder and your weapon could explode. If it rained you would not be able to keep your powder dry or your matchlight lit, so your musket would be useless as a firing mechanism. Reloading could be slow, although, all things being well, skilled musketeers could fire several rounds a minute. The most effective musketry came from the Scandinavian (Gustavus Adolphus) model of soldiers lined three deep, the first kneeling, the second stooping, the third standing. Alternatively rows of musketeers six deep would fire in sequence, thus allowing each row time to reprime their weapons.
Historic Scotland holds re-enactments of battles past throughout the year. One wet Sunday in August I went down to Dirleton Castle in East Lothian to meet a Scottish soldier of the period, who demonstrated the musket firing in a dark damp vault out of the unrelenting rain. I could never fire a musket at all, let alone with any degree of accuracy, but it was useful to handle one and to feel the weight. For men marching a great distance carrying one would have been quite a heavy load. The soldier said that often on campaign they would have waggons carrying the weapons. I also learned that in a battle the closer you came to your adversaries the order would be given to 'Club muskets', at which point you stopped attempting to fire it and would turn it round so that you could club your enemy with the butt, and as it was reinforced with brass you could deliver a pretty lethal dunt.
Now the pikes were something else, anything from 12 to 18 feet long with a heavy iron point at the end. In battle a pikeman's life expectancy was about 12 minutes, half of that being a matter of getting ready. You aimed your pike first at the eyes of your adversary. Failing that you aimed for the mouth. Otherwise you aimed for the nearest most vulnerable part of him you could find. Once the pike had penetrated you gave it a twist and a drag, leaving your unfortunate victim a bleeding eviscerated wreck. When groups of pikemen clashed together they struggled in a formation known as 'push of pike', a sort of porcupine scrum, till one side or the other gained the advantage.
Is any of this more destructive than a Kalashnikov or stepping on a land mine? It's certainly more up close and personal and soldiers died in their hundreds and thousands during the wars of the period. There was no heroic return of the coffins that we have seen in our recent and current wars, where every death is mourned as an individual tragedy. Often ordinary families did not know what happened to their menfolk who went a-soldiering. They just never came home, and after a time, years probably, would simply be presumed dead. In a kirk session record for Colinton Church in the early 1650s a couple were summoned to account for their adultery. It transpired that they were very attached and intended to marry if they could, but the woman's husband had fought at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 and since he had left home nothing further had been heard from him or of him. It was not known whether he had been killed in the battle or captured and taken south as a prisoner and might be still alive, although it was unlikely.
Historic Scotland holds re-enactments of battles past throughout the year. One wet Sunday in August I went down to Dirleton Castle in East Lothian to meet a Scottish soldier of the period, who demonstrated the musket firing in a dark damp vault out of the unrelenting rain. I could never fire a musket at all, let alone with any degree of accuracy, but it was useful to handle one and to feel the weight. For men marching a great distance carrying one would have been quite a heavy load. The soldier said that often on campaign they would have waggons carrying the weapons. I also learned that in a battle the closer you came to your adversaries the order would be given to 'Club muskets', at which point you stopped attempting to fire it and would turn it round so that you could club your enemy with the butt, and as it was reinforced with brass you could deliver a pretty lethal dunt.
Now the pikes were something else, anything from 12 to 18 feet long with a heavy iron point at the end. In battle a pikeman's life expectancy was about 12 minutes, half of that being a matter of getting ready. You aimed your pike first at the eyes of your adversary. Failing that you aimed for the mouth. Otherwise you aimed for the nearest most vulnerable part of him you could find. Once the pike had penetrated you gave it a twist and a drag, leaving your unfortunate victim a bleeding eviscerated wreck. When groups of pikemen clashed together they struggled in a formation known as 'push of pike', a sort of porcupine scrum, till one side or the other gained the advantage.
Is any of this more destructive than a Kalashnikov or stepping on a land mine? It's certainly more up close and personal and soldiers died in their hundreds and thousands during the wars of the period. There was no heroic return of the coffins that we have seen in our recent and current wars, where every death is mourned as an individual tragedy. Often ordinary families did not know what happened to their menfolk who went a-soldiering. They just never came home, and after a time, years probably, would simply be presumed dead. In a kirk session record for Colinton Church in the early 1650s a couple were summoned to account for their adultery. It transpired that they were very attached and intended to marry if they could, but the woman's husband had fought at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 and since he had left home nothing further had been heard from him or of him. It was not known whether he had been killed in the battle or captured and taken south as a prisoner and might be still alive, although it was unlikely.
Monday, 3 October 2011
A Warning
A friend of mine told me a story about the famous writer Georgette Heyer, very prolific and popular in her day, especially with her Regency novels. Despite their success, apparently her real interest was in the medieval period and she planned three novels to be set at this time and embarked on years of extremely detailed research to ensure that she would get the historical details correct. She died before completing more than one of these projected novels and that one was published, as far as I can gather, posthumously. My friend's view was that the novel, in spite of all her careful work, was unreadable.
I went to Amazon and checked through their list of her novels and came across what I think must be that novel. It's called My Lord John. It's set in the 14th century and deals with the children of Henry IV, especially Henry V's younger brother, John. I read both her husband's introduction to the novel, where he describes all the research she undertook, and the first two or three pages of the novel itself. I can see what my friend meant. I would not on the basis of these pages be encouraged to read on, which might be unfair because she was a highly experienced writer and sometimes an ability to write a page-turner does not necessarily equate with a particularly good writing style. But it seemed to me that she had fallen into the trap of trying to write the novel in a style that might reflect the speech and language of the time. According to her husband she had immersed herself in the writings of the period, and there is a flavour of this in what I read. It does not entice.
So the language of a historical novel is a tricky area. You don't want to write impenetrable dialogue. At the same time you can't quite employ contemporary informality and slang. You have to pitch it somewhere in between. Since my novel is set in Scotland in the 17th century all my Scottish characters, educated as well as uneducated, would have spoken Scots, and the less educated would have used local dialect forms that I would not be able to access, let alone understand. But even if I were to cast all my dialogue in an educated form of Scots it would be considered unreadable. So I have to find a compromise, using different registers for different occasions. English would predominate, but there would definitely be situations where I would happily use a form of Scots that I would hope would not be too difficult to understand.
I went to Amazon and checked through their list of her novels and came across what I think must be that novel. It's called My Lord John. It's set in the 14th century and deals with the children of Henry IV, especially Henry V's younger brother, John. I read both her husband's introduction to the novel, where he describes all the research she undertook, and the first two or three pages of the novel itself. I can see what my friend meant. I would not on the basis of these pages be encouraged to read on, which might be unfair because she was a highly experienced writer and sometimes an ability to write a page-turner does not necessarily equate with a particularly good writing style. But it seemed to me that she had fallen into the trap of trying to write the novel in a style that might reflect the speech and language of the time. According to her husband she had immersed herself in the writings of the period, and there is a flavour of this in what I read. It does not entice.
So the language of a historical novel is a tricky area. You don't want to write impenetrable dialogue. At the same time you can't quite employ contemporary informality and slang. You have to pitch it somewhere in between. Since my novel is set in Scotland in the 17th century all my Scottish characters, educated as well as uneducated, would have spoken Scots, and the less educated would have used local dialect forms that I would not be able to access, let alone understand. But even if I were to cast all my dialogue in an educated form of Scots it would be considered unreadable. So I have to find a compromise, using different registers for different occasions. English would predominate, but there would definitely be situations where I would happily use a form of Scots that I would hope would not be too difficult to understand.
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