How to Write a Medieval Novel: Eat Like a King

One of the tricks of convincing fiction of any period is to get all the little details right.  Top of the most neglected things in writing is things like toilets, food, and personal hygiene. 

While it’s probably hard to bring across medieval smells, and as many of these smells would seem ‘normal’ do you want to be drawing attention to them all the time?  Probably not, but one thing that’s good and fairly easy to get in is food and the delights of the table.  

Stews and kebabs are a simple, and timeless way of cooking meat.  Here a scene from the Bayeux Tapestry

Our modern dinner table with metal knives, forks spoons and china plates are a surprisingly modern invention, but what would a medieval table look like?  This of course depends on when exactly you’re setting your story, and there are some important moments to think of.  Most people ate with a spoon, knife and fingers.  Forks didn’t come into fashion until Richard II, who was also supposed to have brought in the handkerchief, and who also inspired the first English cookbook: Curye onInglysch, which covers dishes like Malaches, Raphioles, Crustardes of flessh. 

Want to try these meals?  Well, there are a number of places where you can pick up medieval recipes for all kinds of dishes: from the royal to the everyday.  While there are a number of places that allow you to dress up and feast in right royal medieval style, it’s takes a little more work to eat like a peasant.  

Peasant food is of course a tad more timeless.  But it’s not hard to make rye bread, sour dour bread, flat breads.  Or even sample curds and whey, and many other staples that we no longer eat.   

Until about 150 years ago, most people in England used wooden bowls and plates for eating.  Wood turning was one of the ubiquitous industries you would find throughout Europe – and, like parish and shire boundaries - these wood turning workshops have changed little in the last 1000 years.  The last wood turner, George Lailey, died within living memory, in 1958.

A simple peasant meal: circa 2012

I’ve blogged about this before, but its worth repeating a little here: of how Lailey’s hut was almost exactly like Anglo Saxon grubenhaus.  As Morton said,

'[he] turns bowls exactly as they did in the days of Alfred the Great... to say that eight hundred years seemed to have stopped at the door conveys nothing. The room was an Anglo-Saxon workshop! The floor was deep in soft elm shavings, and across the hut was bent a young alder sapling connected to a primitive lathe by a leather thong.'

While he was the turner, like many other arts, this one has been revived.   I managed to get a bowl and a plate from RobinWood, 2009’s Artisan of the Year.  Add in a horn spoon, some pottage or curds, and you have a real life re-enactment.   

Mine’s about 5 years old.  It gets used every day for lunch, and while I bake my bread in an oven, not by the side of the fire, it’s fairly easy to replicate many ways of cooking.    

How to Write a Medieval Novel: a practical guide no. 2

So! you're characters are riding through the countryside, or they come out of their doorways - and.... what do they see? Good stories, where ever they're set need worlds that are believable and often it's the variety and authenticity of the little details that really lift historical fiction, and give the reader the illusion that they've immersed themselves in a real world in all its facets: with farmers, clerics, travellers, pilgrims, knights or huscarls all mingling in a way that feels real. Of course no one has been to the Middle Ages, so how do you bring this level of detail to your story? The written sources tend to be a little bland on these little everyday details for almost any period because chroniclers don't see much noteworthy in the 'everyday.' There are a few places where you can find these details. Aelfric's Colloquys are a good example. Fancy catching a whale today lads?! Check out Ann E. Watkin's translation here But luckily the monks who illustrated thier texts seem to have had a penchant for putting the everyday in the margins of the holy, profound, sacred and heroic texts they were illustrating.

Have you liked Shieldwall yet?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shieldwall-Justin-Hill/dp/0349123373/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1315579893&sr=1-2

How to write a Medieval Novel: a practical guide no. 1

The Dark Ages?! Not at all. As I'm doing all this again, I thought I would list the things I've found useful in creating a convincing medieval setting.

1. The literature. Duh! In some ways there's nothing better than what contemporaries wrote about the world they lived in. For an Anglo Saxon setting this left me a little stumped, as anyone who's read any Anglo Saxon poetry, knows that the Anglo Saxons lived in a permanent winter, amidst ruins, and lamenting the fate that led them to exile/lordlessness etc. I was left a little stumped, because I couldn't have a novel set in a permanent midwinter. But then I came across this book, The Lost Literature of Medieval England, in the corner of Lingnan University library, which had last been taken out in 1962. A fabulous read, it also introduced me to the corpus of Anglo Saxon literature written in Latin, which composes of hagiographies, which are the opposite of the poetry, in that they chronicle how saints turned cold wilderness into flowering fields full of birds and bounty. Bingo! I now had contemporary sources chronicling both their of summer and winter. But of course it's not so straightforward, as writers often wrote because they had ulterior motives. Richard Fletcher is very good in The Barbarian Conversions, in teasing the religious accounts of conversions, where Saint A turned up at pagan site Z, chopped down their sacred oak, and then the people were amazed and accepted Christ. He asks the kind of questions any serious writer should ask: what exactly did that mean? How well did people understand what they were accepting. How much did older beliefs survive and continue in different forms. I find it's always good to remember that just because people lived in a less enlightened age, they were not necessarily any more or less daft than people now. And in many ways their concerns might prove surprisingly similar to worries now. Take the Anglo Saxon charms, for example. Often they say put a poultice on and say a certain prayer or charm three times. Now the simple reading would be that they believed in the power of mystical charms. Or - and perhaps a more practical and interesting explanation is that the repeating the charm five times took a certain and appropriate amount of time. Something of an ancient egg charmer.

Edmund Said, Orientalism, and how writing has changed now writers use computers not paper

I was never a big fan of Edward Said's Orientalism, and the limited way it seemed to focus views of the east, but found this podcast very interesting. Great Lives, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01gvn2k

Straight after that I stumbled across this BBC documentary, which was also fascinating. Do writers write differently on paper? Fay Weldon thinks so. From April 2011. subscribe to the podcast http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/r4choice Tales from the Digital Archive

Shieldwall: Top of the Paperbacks, Sunday Times April 22nd

Shieldwall picked as of the week's paperbacks:

'In the early 11th century, England is close to anarchy.... When Ethelred dies and the raiders from the north arrive, Edmund and Godwin become the standard-bearers of native resistance. With supple, intelligent prose, Hill not only succeeds in bringing this distant world to life but, in Godwin, has created a complex character whose struggles to be true to his ideas of duty and friendship are entirely convincing.'


Nick Rennison

Literary Festivals: the magic ingredients

Gatherings of writers can be odd events where egos and insecutirites make a toxic mix. But at their best they are creative and compelling meetings of minds and ideas.
How to nuture this mix?
Literary festivals have been on my mind recently, having just been to a few, and as we start to look forward to the 2012 Hong Kong International Literary Festival.
One question is who or what is the festival for? If it is for the audience then I think that they feel a little flat for the writers. They turn up and meet an audience, say the same old things about a book they finished possible one or two years before, at best, and then they 'come down' with a slice of cake and a cup of tea: and then head home.
If that's what you're offering the writers, then I think you're missing out. And certainly writers will pass on the lack of enthusiasm they have for that event.
One simple way festivals seem to approach this is in the name. Literary festivals tend towards the static interaction; 'writer's festivals' tend towards something more interactive and stimulating. This can be workshops; more informal gatherings; literary walks; and of course - hanging out in the pub with writers - which is probably the favourite part for most writers where their audience can talk back to them.
You see - writ

ing is a really odd art form - where, uniquely, the artist never meets their audience, and perhaps the creation is divided from the experience of that art by years or decades, and thousands of miles.
I sit alone in a room and write, and then after an unknown period of time and space, another person sits alone in a room and reads my books. And most of the time I have no idea what they liked or didn't like about the book. Or what questions and responses they had etc.


So what does make a literary festival?
Centralised locations: where people can hang out between and after events. Where there is a buzz, a unique place where story and the written word are for once taken out of the normal world and celebrated. This can be the tent square of Edinburgh or the bar/restaurent of the Beijing Bookworm.
The audience speaks back: breaking down the barriers, so that writers are not just talking to audiences. In Chengdu, for example, I visited a school for disadvantaged children, many of whom had lost parents in the earthquake. And although I was there to talk about writing and my experiences in China, it is impossible to talk to young adults who have come so far in their lives, and not be affected. That's an audience a writer does not forget.
Stimulating: everywhere that has a festival has something special about it. This should be brought into the festival. An obvious example is the Ubud Literary Festival in Bali, where the culture is brought into the festival in food, music and setting. But it's almost unimportant - as long as there is a conversation between place, writers and people.
Authors: interesting authors are a must. That's a duh!
And Audiences: harder to control of course, but places with interesting audiences make for much more stimulating places to visit. Because, we come back to the point, I think: that good literary festivals should be a conversation between writer, audience and place. And not a one way conversation.