The Wistful and the Good, Historical Note
The Wistful and the Good contains historical errors. Some I am aware of, some, doubtless, will be painfully obvious to scholars of the period, but most of them will remain unknown or at least unprovable.
The Anglo-Saxon period lasted over 600 years and yet we have less data about it than we do about a single modern day. How the daughter of an ordinary thegn would have lived and thought and hoped and strived, we can really only guess at. The written records we have relate mostly to royal and monastic houses. The archeology is full of hints and suggestions, and a great deal of wonderful jewelry and art, but little to suggest the specifics of the life of what we might best describe as a middle-class young woman.
An enormous amount of Anglo-Saxon scholarship has been done and is being done, but it yields little in the way of consecutive historical narrative such as we would associate with other periods of history. Rather, through the interpretation of scattered documents, excavations, and placename studies, combined with analogies to other times and places, certain patterns of life and practice emerge, though tentatively at best. Reading histories of the period, one often gets the impression that one is reading a book made entirely of footnotes, since most books devote most of their text to discussing specific sources and their possible interpretations, rather than constructing what we might usually think of as an historical narrative.
Even where we do have written records, the meaning of terms is often hard to pin down. A “hide” of land seems to mean different things at different times and places. What “peaceweaver” meant does not seem entirely clear between the sources in which I have encountered it. I have interpreted it to suit my dramatic purposes.
For a novelist, this is in part frustrating and in part liberating. To assemble a whole picture of the life and thought of my characters, I have had to borrow elements from different times and places, select from various interpretations what best suits my dramatic purposes, and fill in the gaps with things borrowed from later times (the tugging of forelocks as a sign of respect, for instance).
Other than Twyford, I have chosen to use modern names and spellings for places. Many of these names originate from the period, and it is simply easier for the reader who cares to look them up on a map. Twyford, of which the sources record the synod that Brother Alun mentions and not much else, is commonly, if not certainly, identified with the current village of Alnmouth. I have taken certain liberties with the geography of the village. Elswyth’s cliff is a hill, and today is separated from the beach by a golf course. The Anglo-Saxons did not play golf, so I have removed it and made the cliff steeper. Cliffs such as I describe do exist along that coast.
We don’t know how the Viking raiders knew how rich a target Lindisfarne was. It seems reasonable to suppose that there was trade going on before the attack, and that such traders would have found themselves unpopular afterward.
The source and meaning of the word Viking are uncertain. I have chosen the interpretation that viking was a verb and that vikingr (plural vikingar) was a word for pirate, not because I think it most likely, but because it suits the story best. The term does not actually seem to have been in use at the time the story is set. They would probably have said something like Northmen. But vikingr is too good a word to waste.
Brother Alun’s statement that marriage is a civil matter may come as a surprise, but the church did not come to regard marriage as a sacrament until sometime in the twelfth century. Weddings were not church affairs, though of the marriage customs of the minor nobility of the eighth century we know pretty much nothing. It does seem that the requirements of marriage were pretty simple. If a couple said they were married and slept together, they were married. Arranged marriages were no doubt common, but by law a woman could not be forced to marry against her will. Marriage between classes, however, seems to have been discouraged (as it usually is). Christian women did marry pagan kings, which sometimes led to the conversion of their husbands, and therefore of their people.
There was no parish system in the church in Britain at that time. Its religious foundations appear to have all been monastic in structure and there are records of complaints about the bishops and secular clergy failing to visit and instruct their flocks, so Twyford’s lack of a church and rare visits from clergy is plausible.
The Anglo-Saxons were not a backward or illiterate society, though how far their culture extended beyond monasteries and royal courts is hard to tell. They were still very much a warrior culture though. The extent to which Christianity had affected the kinship structures of the earlier pagan warrior culture is hard to know for any particular time and place. Similarly, how completely Christianity had replaced earlier religious ideas and practices will have differed over the period. I have painted a picture of these things to suit my dramatic purposes, not to attempt to fix them accurately for the time and place of my story.
We think of the wimple as religious dress today, but they are common in the depictions of women that have come down to us from the period.
I know of no such edition of The City of God as described in the story. (This one was destroyed by fire, so of course it has not come down to us.) Whether such an edition would be worth a jarl’s ransom, I have no idea.
Whitney’s condition is pure literary invention, and mildly symbolic in its intention. It should not be identified with any real condition.
All of the above is based on what I remember from my reading over the period in which this book was conceived and written. It should not be mistaken for scholarship or cited as fact. I am a novelist. History is a plaything, nothing more.
One final plea to write a review or at least give a rating of The Wistful and the Good on Amazon and/or Goodreads. It helps a lot. Thanks!