A big ‘thank you’ to all the local cafes, businesses, libraries, community centres, arts centres (amongst others) throughout Renfrewshire, North Ayrshire and Inverclyde who have put up posters advertising the forthcoming book launch. It’s great to see them popping up in all sorts of locations – Tom Vandenberg’s stunning cover art really catches the eye!

And, of course, an extra special ‘thank you’ to the staff at Clyde Muirshiel Regional Park, and to the tireless Claire Paterson in particular.  Their support and enthusiasm throughout has been fantastic!

This weekend I was in Edinburgh,  catching a few shows at the Festival and stumbling across interesting exhibitions in unexpected places… 

What caught my eye in particular was an exhibition entitled ‘Flodden and the Blue Blanket,’ hosted by the Convenery of Trades of Edinburgh.  With the 500th anniverary of the Battle of Flodden fast approaching, it seems an appropriate choice of subject matter, since this ancient institution has in its keeping a treasured artefact which has strong links with Flodden and James IV.  This is the ancient Trades Banner, more commonly known as the ‘Blue Blanket’.

Hanging in a modern display case which provides a sympathetic environment suitable for the object’s long-term survival, the ‘Blue Blanket’ in question is a mere stripling, dating back to the late 17th century.  But it faithfully reproduces a much older banner, thought to have its origins in the early 1480s, when it was presented to the city by King James III and Queen Margaret.

Legend has it that the banner was subsequently carried at Flodden by Edinburgh’s contingent of soldiers, and that following the disastrous Scots defeat, it was plucked from the battlefield and carried home by one of the few survivors of the Scots forces. 

Though centred upon the banner, the exhibition looks in depth at the events leading up to Flodden itself and to the impact this catastrophic event had for the City of Edinburgh in the years that followed.  It also examines the way in which Flodden has been immortalised in myth and literature, as well as art, with a prominent place being given to this dramatic painting by William Brassey Hole, which forms part of the City of Edinburgh collections:-

It’s a fascinating exhibition and well worth a visit.  But you’d better be quick, because it’ll be coming to an end next Saturday (31st August).  The venue is at the Trades Maiden Hospital, 61 Melville Street in Edinburgh.  Entry is free, with opening hours between 10am and 5pm.

For more details, check out the link below:-

http://www.edinburgh-trades.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=192&Itemid=229

Scotland is synonymous with castles.  But the layperson’s interpretation of a ‘castle’ can often be at odds with that of the archaeologist or architectural historian.  Some of the best known ‘castles’ in Scotland aren’t actually proper castles at all.  Instead they’re 18th or 19th century interpretations of what a ‘castle’ should look like, stately homes given a Gothick makeover and a castellated attitude.

During the 1st Scots War of Independence, the typical medieval castle with its curtain wall and moat and corner towers proved problematic to the Scots.  When a castle is captured by an invading army, it can play an important role in bolstering up a hostile force’s war effort.  Castles house troops in a place of comparative safety.  Castles provide a base for raiding the local countryside and terrorising its population.  They are also useful logistically as a means of storing supplies which in turn can be used to fuel an army, and – in medieval warfare – its horses.

This was certainly the case in Scotland.  A number of Scottish castles were taken by Edward I’s invading army and held against the Scots.  Caerlaverock Castle in Dumfries and Galloway is a good example.  Small wonder then that the ‘licence to crenellate’ was only rarely granted in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Instead, Scotland’s barons and nobility favoured the fortified house or ‘tower-house’.  Structures of this kind are dotted all over the place in Scotland, with most of the gentry eventually inhabiting homes of this kind. I can count, for example, at least half a dozen ruined tower houses or tower house sites within a few miles radius of my home in Renfrewshire. Granted, tower houses weren’t much good against an invading army, but they could be a great help when you found yourself engaged in a dispute with your neighbours! 

Perhaps it’s because the local unrest in Scotland went on for so long (arguably because the death of James IV at Flodden caused a terrible power vacuum, with factions loyal to France and England fighting over the spoils) that the tradition of ‘castle’ building went on here for much longer than it did south of the border.

Throughout this long period, tower houses followed a fairly standard plan.  The ground floor invariably consists of one or two barrelled vaulted cellars, often fancifully called ‘dungeons’ but mostly used for the storage of provisions and foodstuffs.  Above the cellars might be the kitchens, though these were often housed in a seperate building because of the risk of fire.  Then came the hall, with its large fireplace.  And on the floor above that, the lord’s chamber, which housed his bed, and which was finctioned as the place where he carried out his private business and meetings. Life at this time had different notions of privacy.  Your bed was private, curtained off from the world.  But your room was not.  Your older sons might live with you, as did your servants.  Sometimes this floor might be subdivided into two, with the other half being occupied by the lady of the house and her maids.  Though often, the distaff side had a floor to themselves, perhaps occupying the attic or garret space.

Earlier tower houses had a stair built into the thickness of the wall (which might be a couple of metres thick), giving a plain square structure.  Later on, the stair was built in a round tower at one corner, resulting in an ‘L’-shaped structure.  And sometimes there were stair towers at opposing corners, giving a ‘Z’ plan.  The ‘Z’ plans are very late, dating to the late 16th or even the early 17th century, built at a time when castle-building had long since been abandoned in England.  These days, the towers mostly stand alone, but originally they would have formed the heart of a group of buildings.  Ancillary structures like stables, kitchens, stores and the like would have clustered around a central courtyard, all enclosed within a defensive barmkin wall. 

Most of the domestic scenes in ‘Fire and Sword’ are played out inside tower houses.  These structures weren’t exactly spacious, or even particularly comfortable, but at the time, they served their purpose.  They provided a place of safety in a world that could at times be dangerous and uncertain, and they could be homely places, too, their walls panelled with timber or lined with colourful woven hangings and tapestries.  Sometimes even the plaster was painted with colourful designs, some of which still survive at Huntingtower in Perthshire.

I’ll be introducing you to a wide variety of castles and tower houses in this blog.  Not just those individuals which feature in ‘Fire and Sword’ but a whole lot more.  There are some lovely examples still surviving out there.  There’s even an isolated example of a circular tower house at Orchardton in Dumfries and Galloway.  A good few are open to the public, and some still survive as inhabited dwellings, giving us an insight into how they might have felt as living, breathing spaces in the heydays.

With the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Flodden approaching, it’s hardly surprising that the reign of King James IV is becoming just a little more newsworthy.

Issue 65 of the Historical Novels Review (August 2013) has just featured an interesting article entitled ‘After Flodden: Rosemary Goring Talks With Margaret Skea’.   In this article, Skea reflects on the fact that an anniversary of this magnitude might, it could be thought, spawn a plethora of new fiction connected with the event.  Instead, she points out that a web-trawl of Amazon has revealed virtually nothing, the exceptions being two self-published novels and the recently published ‘After Flodden’ by Rosemary Goring (Birlinn Books, 2013).

Margaret Skea (herself an author of an acclaimed novel entitled ‘Turn of the Tide’, which has at its core the Montgomerie-Cunninghame feud in Ayrshire), reflects upon this paucity of new titles, and highlights a suggestion made by Goring: ‘maybe it’s almost too tragic.  It need never have happened, but because of one bad decision, Scotland was changed forever, politically and psychologically.  In Scotland, even now, some people would rather not think about it.’

 It’s an interesting observation.  But it misses the point a little.  As far as publishing in Scotland are concerned, both Skea and Goring are in with the bricks and mortar.  They’ve gone ‘through the system’: they’re settled with Scottish publishers, they’re published, full stop.  They forget the difficulties involved for those on the outside looking in.  What writers are writing, and what publishers are actually publishing, are two entirely different beasts.

When I first started work on ‘Fire and Sword’, way back in the 1990s, I rapidly became aware that almost every single male character that I’d encountered in my work had just 25 years to live.  Their fate was sealed.  Each and every one of them (bar one, whose Identity will remain concealed!) was destined to die with their king at Flodden.

Of course that has an impact on a writer.  And when I realised that what I’d embarked upon was the first part of what was clearly destined to be a long-running series, I rather foolishly imagined that come 2013, I’d have a string of books under my belt, chronicling the lives of John Sempill and his contemporaries and culminating in that last stand-off with the Earl of Surrey and his 2nd Division English army on the killing fields at Branxton.

It was a naive assumption, I suppose.  It was much more of a struggle to get ‘Fire and Sword’ published than I’d ever thought possible.  In the early days, I’d just assumed that the Scottish publishing houses would be interesting in helping to promote Scottish history, and while my manuscript could have been much stronger, most of the time, the response came along the following lines:  ‘Nice try, but your subject matter isn’t commercial.  The only things that sell are the Scots Wars of Independence and Mary Queen of Scots, and even those have been done to death.  So just forget it, why don’t you, and stop wasting our time’. 

Or words to that effect.

Perusing the bookshelves in your average Scottish bookshop suggests that this attitude hasn’t entirely faded.  The Scots Wars of Independence are still popular, Mary Queen of Scots still has her followers.  What’s more remarkable is that Margaret Skea and Rosemary Goring have both bucked the trend and made it to publication despite having written books that are set in periods of history that just aren’t mainstream.

Perhaps this is a sign that attitudes are changing north of the border.  It’s clear that over the past ten years, historical fiction as a genre has been growing ever more popular across the board.  Perhaps, then, historical fiction is finally getting the recognition it deserves.  You’d have thought that in recent years that Scotland could have produced her own versions of Phillipa Gregory or Elizabeth Chadwick or Ken Follett or even Hilary Mantel.  But this just hasn’t happened.

So is it the writers who have neglected the anniversary of Flodden?  Or is it just that the atmosphere hasn’t been right to encourage such novels to emerge?  New writers have not been nurtured or encouraged, those who do make it to the next level are the exception, not the rule.

I became resigned to the fact that I couldn’t write my Flodden book in time for the 500th anniversary several years ago.  I suppose ‘Fire and Sword’ has now become my Flodden book, in a way.  Releasing it now makes me feel as if it has become my own personal tribute to those who died there. Perhaps it’s a positive thing, that it captures them in the prime of their lives, rather than at the desperate moment of their deaths. 

On the 9th September, I’m planning to visit Branxton.  I’ll pay my respects there, to the men with whom I’ve spent so much time with as I’ve painstakingly tried to recreate their characters.  They’ve allowed me to enter their world, and encouraged me to learn their private business, an undertaking which has been exciting on a number of levels, both as a writer, and as an archaeologist. 

Bearing this in mind, it seems to me that acknowledging their sacrifice on the field of Flodden at the 500th anniversary of the event seems like the very least I can do in the circumstances.

My handbook throughout the writing of ‘Fire and Sword’ was Norman Macdougall’s masterly portrait of King James IV, published by Tuckwell Press.  The process which underpinned the writing of my novel involved the threading together of local and national historical accounts, before creatively filling in the gaps: if it hadn’t been for the way in which Macdougall brought James and his reign to life, I don’t think it would have been possible to create a convincing piece of historical fiction set in and around the Scottish court at this time.

During the years I toiled over the novel, my working life as an archaeologist brought some unexpected benefits.  I found myself employed at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) for a year, and to my delight, one of my bosses put me in touch with Norman Macdougall, then a professor at Saint Andrews University.  I remember having a wonderful telephone conversation with Prof. Macdougall about James IV, Hugh Montgomerie and French horns – like myself, Prof. Macdougall played the French horn and we’d both had lessons from the same internationally renowned French horn player, the inimitable (and sadly missed) Ifor James. 

An added bonus occured when Prof. Macdougall then gave me an opportunity to get in touch with one of his former research students, Dr Steve Boardman, who is now a respected academic in his own right. Dr Boardman’s Ph.D. thesis on the politics of the feud in late medieval Scotland dealt in detail with the Montgomerie-Cunninghame feud and helped me try and get to grips with one of the underlying issues which underpinned the novel: just why did Hugh Montgomerie consider it appropriate to wipe out his political opposition at every opportunity, and by means which can hardly be described as subtle, even by the standards of the time? 

Such dialogues with the leading academics of the field were wonderful, of course.  Everything a wanna-be historical novelist could hope for, and more.  But one thing always eluded me.  You see, Norman Macdougall had written another authoritative textbook on the reign of James III.  But at the time I was carrying out the initial research for my novel, both ‘James IV’ and ‘James III’ were out of print and were already being displayed in the bargain basement shelves of the local academic bookstores.  Unfortunately, I was an out-of-work archaeologist at this time and virtually penniless.  While I successfully tracked down the biographies of James IV and James V (another Tuckwell book in the same series, though by a different author), despite searching high and low for ‘James III’, I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Through the intervening years, I’ve checked out numerous second hand book shops and looked online for copies.  The few I’ve seen have invariably been stranded in the hands of tyrannical book speculators with ridiculous price tags attached.  Like £500, or $700.  Hey, even if I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t bow to these people by giving in to their demands.  I see it as holding knowledge to ransom.  It’s immoral.  It’s outrageous.  It’s just plain wrong.

A couple of years ago, I gave up looking.  But now I’ve discovered that at long last ‘James III’ by Norman Macdougall has been reissued.  I’ve bought it, of course.  Soon this not-very-picturesque cover will be making its long-awaited appearance in my library and I can’t wait to see it!

And then there will be much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, once find out just how much information and detail I’ve been missing out on in the intervening years!

I’m very excited to announce that the book launch is planned!

I will be signing copies and reading from Fire and Sword on Friday 27 September 2013 – 7pm to 8:30pm.

The launch will be at the perfect venue for a book about the Sempill family   – the  Castle Semple Centre, Lochwinnoch, Renfrewshire PA12 4EA

Hope you can make it!

Picture on the left is the official poster for the event, please do feel free to share it with anyone who may be interested.