Betrayal of Mercia – MJ Porter

It’s happy release day to Betrayal of Mercia, so I’m sharing a post about the maps in the book (and the maps)

Here’s the blurb

A King in crisis, a Queen on trial, a Kingdom’s survival hangs in the balance.

Londonia, AD835
The deadly conspiracy against the children of Ealdorman Coenwulf is to be resolved. Those involved have been unmasked and arrested. But will justice prevail?

While the court convenes to determine the conspirator’s fate, King Wiglaf’s position is precarious. His wife, Queen Cynethryth, has been implicated in the plot and while Wiglaf must remain impartial, enemies of the Mercia still conspire to prevent the full truth from ever being known.

As Merica weeps from the betrayal of those close to the King, the greedy eyes of Lord Æthelwulf, King Ecgberht of Wessex’s son, pivot once more towards Mercia. He will stop at nothing to accomplish his goal of ending Mercia’s ruling bloodline.

Mercia once more stands poised to be invaded, but this time not by the Viking raiders they so fear.

Can Icel and his fellow warriors’ triumph as Mercia once more faces betrayal from within?

An action packed, thrilling historical adventure perfect for the fans of Bernard Cornwell and Matthew Harffy

Image showing the cover for Betrayal of Mercia with a sword in the background

Here’s the purchase link (ebook, paperback, hardback and audio)

books2read.com/BetrayalofMercia

Maps

Throughout the series I’ve taken young Icel to some interesting locations, and that means I’ve had to make use of many maps which are recreations of the era, because, alas, we have none from the period. Both maps I’ve had made are relevant to Betrayal of Mercia which largely takes place in London, or Londonia, or Londinium and Lundenwic.

The map of Lundenwic and Londinium, shortened in the books to Londonia, a term more accurately applied to the eighth century and not the ninth, is much simplified and largely shows locations relevant to me and which I need to remember when writing the books. Although, I must confess, I did forget about it in the drafting process and when I found it, I was relieved to discover I hadn’t made THAT many mistakes.

The most important elements to understand are that ‘London’ as we know it didn’t exist at this time. Instead, there were two very distinctive settlements, and they were seperated by the River Fleet, one of London’s ‘lost’ rivers because it’s now subterranean. I think, for me, not being very familiar with London as it is today actually helped. Rather than trying to orientate myself as to what’s there now, I can work the other way round. I sort of know what was and wasn’t there in the ninth century, and then I can try and work out what’s there now:) Honestly, it makes sense to me.

It also helps to remember that despite London now being the capital of England, it wasn’t in the ninth century. Far from it, in fact. There are many good books on London in it’s earliest manifestations. If you’re interested, they are very worth checking out.

Map of Lundenwic and Londonium in the ninth century,

I also have a map of England at this time. This is to help readers (and me) try and get an idea of what settlements were and weren’t there at the time. As I’ve learned, it can be far too easy to just assume the longevity of a location, and then discover it wasn’t there at all, was bigger or even, much smaller than it is now. One of those locations is Wall, close to Lichfield, which was very important during the Roman occupation of Britain, but is now little more than ruins. And it’s far from alone in that.

I’ll also be sharing more posts, including one on Mercia’s ‘Bad Queens,’ and one on Crime and Punishment in Saxon England.

Not started the series yet? Check out the series page on my blog.

Check out the blog tour for Betrayal of Mercia

A huge thank you to all the book bloggers and Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for organising.

It’s happy release day to Betrayal of Mercia, so I’m sharing a post about Crime and Punishment in Saxon England

Here’s the blurb

A King in crisis, a Queen on trial, a Kingdom’s survival hangs in the balance.

Londonia, AD835
The deadly conspiracy against the children of Ealdorman Coenwulf is to be resolved. Those involved have been unmasked and arrested. But will justice prevail?

Mercia once more stands poised to be invaded, but this time not by the Viking raiders they so fear.

Can Icel and his fellow warriors’ triumph as Mercia once more faces betrayal from within?

An action packed, thrilling historical adventure perfect for the fans of Bernard Cornwell and Matthew Harffy

Here’s the purchase link (ebook, paperback, hardback and audio)

books2read.com/BetrayalofMercia

Crime and Punishment in Saxon England

In Betrayal of Mercia, the seventh book in the Eagle of Mercia Chronicles featuring young Icel, I’ve done something that I don’t ‘think’ anyone else has done before. I’ve staged a criminal trial, making Betrayal part court-room drama and part action-thriller (you know Icel is always going to end up in a fight at some point). However, there are odd things about Saxon England that we have no information about – one of them is how often people actually went to church once Christianised, another is exactly how the law was enacted.

This might seem like an odd thing to say. Everyone knows there are surviving law codes from the era, especially from the eleventh century, with the inspiring names of Æthelred I or Cnut II, and indeed, the earliest law code dates back to Ine, in the seventh century, from which we can glean such titles as Wealas or foreigner, but applied to the Welsh, who had different wergild payments and punishment from the Saxons. But, there has long been an argument about how much these law codes reflect practise as opposed to an ideal. And some of the elements we ‘think we know’ turn out to be on much less steady ground. And, at the heart of all this is a problem with our current perceptions of ‘right,’ ‘wrong,’ and ‘justice.’ We ‘appear’ to look at these elements of our current legal system in a way very different to the era.

When studying what records we do have, we’re greeted with some interesting terms. ‘Thereafter there would be no friendship,’ appears in a charter detailing a land dispute in the later tenth century – between Wynflæd and Leofwine (S1454 from 990 to 992). In this, despite whoever was in the wrong or the right, the decision was made which was something of a compromise – both injured parties had to make concessions. No one truly ‘won’, even though Wynflæd had many who would speak on her behalf, including the king’s mother, and the Archbishop of York, and had appealed directly to the king, Æthelred II, for assistance, only for Leofwine to refuse to attend his summons saying that royal appeals couldn’t precede a regional judgement on the matter.

In the famous case of Lady Eadgifu of Wessex (recorded in charter S1211), the mother of Kings Edmund and Eadwig (who features in the Brunanburh series), her landholdings at Cooling required the intervention of her husband, stepson, son and grandson, in a long-running debacle which was never really resolved until her grandson intervened close to the end of her life. Even though she appears to have held the ‘landboc’ – the title deed for the land – and was a highly regarded member of the royal family, this wasn’t enough to stop counterclaims. In the end, she assigned the land to the Christ Church religious community, and that way, no one actually benefitted apart from the church.

These cases both refer to land disputes, which are one of the larger areas of document survival, along with wills. But what about crimes visited against the king’s mund (both his physical person and his physical kingdom)? Here, we’re again confronted with little knowledge. We know of ealdormen being banished (under Æthelred II) and this attests to another element of the practise of law which is perhaps surprising. There does seem to have been an aversion to capital punishment (as Rabin details in his book mentioned below). And there was also a concern that the right sentence was handed to individuals – it was as bad to incorrectly punish as it was to have committed the crime.

In trying to stage a trial set in the Saxon period (which I now realise was a bit bonkers), I’ve relied heavily on a very short book, Crime and Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England by Andrew Rabin, and also his translations of the Old English Legal Writings by (Archbishop) Wulfstan (from the 1000s), from which I’ve determined how many oath-helpers people must have based on the Mercian Wergild listed within the source documents. This suggests the value placed on individuals – the king, of course, being at the top. Each individual had a wergild value and equally, each individual had a required value for the number of oath-helpers who would stand as surety for them if asked to detail what they had ‘seen and heard’ in a trial situation. The implication being that those who needed the least oath-helpers were more trustworthy than those who needed many – so a king might need no one, after all, he was the king, whereas a warrior might need a few, and a ‘normal’ person might need many.

This feels like a very different world to the one we ‘know,’ where transgressions are punished by custodial sentences and fines and where the burden of proof rests on the shoulders of those prosecuting the alleged offenders.

It has certainly been an interesting experiment, and one I hope readers will enjoy, and more importantly, one which I’ve managed to convey largely ‘correctly.’

I’ll also be sharing more posts, including one on Mercia’s ‘Bad Queens,’ and one on the maps in the books.

Not started the series yet? Check out the series page on my blog.

Check out the blog tour for Betrayal of Mercia

A huge thank you to all the book bloggers and Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for organising.

It’s happy release day to Betrayal of Mercia, so I’m sharing a post about Mercia’s alleged ‘Bad Queens.’

Here’s the blurb

A King in crisis, a Queen on trial, a Kingdom’s survival hangs in the balance.

Londonia, AD835
The deadly conspiracy against the children of Ealdorman Coenwulf is to be resolved. Those involved have been unmasked and arrested. But will justice prevail?

Mercia once more stands poised to be invaded, but this time not by the Viking raiders they so fear.

Can Icel and his fellow warriors’ triumph as Mercia once more faces betrayal from within?

An action packed, thrilling historical adventure perfect for the fans of Bernard Cornwell and Matthew Harffy

Here’s the purchase link (ebook, paperback, large print, hardback and audio)

books2read.com/BetrayalofMercia

Mercia’s ‘Bad Queens’

There is a scene in Betrayal of Mercia where our favourite healer, Wynflæd, speaks to young Icel about her experiences of ‘bad queens,’ referencing three women in almost living memory deemed as ‘bad’, certainly many years after their deaths, if not quite by the 830s, when the scene takes place. These women were the wife of King Offa, his daughter, Eadburh, and the daughter of King Coenwulf (796-821), Cwenthryth. Indeed, this collection of bad queens, especially the sister of Queen Cynethryth, have been cited as the reason why Wessex was so slow to adopt the term. But, was everything as it appears, or are these reputations a later tradition?

The daughter of King Offa (757-796), Eadburh was married to the king of the West Saxons, Beorhtric. In the words of the later Asser, who wrote at the end of the 890s, she’s accused of poisoning her husband to death while trying to actually poison one of his disloyal followers. Interestingly, the man who became king after Beorhtric was King Ecgberht of Wessex, who features in the Icel stories, and in turn, it was his grandson who commissioned Asser to write his life which tarnishes the reputation of Eadburh.

Cynethryth, the wife of King Offa, was a powerful woman in her own right, and the only preconquest queen known to have minted coin showing her own name. In later centuries, her name became associated with the murder of a king of the East Angles, and she was involved in a long-running land dispute with the archbishop of Canterbury.

A penny depicting Cynethryth, the wife of King Offa — Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

Cwenthryth, the daughter of King Coenwulf, became associated with the murder of her brother, Cynehelm/Kenelm. The later, Anglo-Norman histories inform that.

‘At Winchcombe you will read of the secret martyrdom of Kenelm. He was the son of Cenwulf, [Coenwulf] the Mercia king, who died in the year of grace 819, having reigned for twenty-four years. The martyrdom of his son Kenelm was revealed from heaven to Pope Silvester II at Rome.’p691 Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, The History of the English People

While The Chronicle of John of Worcester extends this recording for the year, ‘[819] St Cenwulf, king of the Mercians, after a life devoted to good deeds, passed over to the eternal blessedness which is in heaven, and left his 7-year-old son St Kenelm heir of his realm. But when a few months had passed, by the treachery of his own sister Cwenthryth, whose cruel spirit had been roused by an awful lust for power, he was secretly done to death with cruel outrage by Æscberht, his most bloodthirsty tutor, in the shade of a thorn tree in a deserted wood.’ P239-241

Winchcombe Nunnery was founded by Cwenthryth’s father, and the family were therefore invested in the religious establishment, although whether enough to kill one of their own to have him venerated as a saint, does seem doubtful. The identity of St Kenelm is very much contested, although it is believed that Cynehelm did live, and died before his father, which led to Coelwulf, the first of his name, and Coenwulf’s brother, becoming King of Mercia when his brother died..

This is the scene from Betrayal, where Wynflæd shares the gory knowledge she knows, and perhaps, hints at her approval for such strong-minded women that they could become associated with such dark deeds.

‘Mercia hasn’t fared well with the women wed to their kings.’ A soft cackle. ‘Or the children born between a king and a queen. Wigmund’s merely the most current of many disappointments. Lord Coenwulf there, his father became king because his brother’s daughter killed her brother.’

‘I thought that was a lie,’ I countered.

‘That’s how King Coenwulf had it reported. It was all true though. I didn’t witness it, but I know of others who did.’

‘What, watched her kill her brother?’

‘No, witnessed the king speak of it, to a select few. And before her, Offa’s wife also had blood on her hands, as did Offa’s sister.’

I shuddered at the thought. ‘Why?’

‘A woman must live by her wits, and safeguard her future, for fear she’ll be locked up tight in a nunnery, with no means of engaging with the world at large. Think of Lady Cynehild.’ Wynflæd met my searching gaze then. ‘She remarried, and meddled where she shouldn’t have done. Admittedly, she stopped far short of murdering anyone.’

‘So, the king should have expected this then?’ I was astounded.

‘Maybe. He married her.’ Wynflæd cackled softly. ‘A man may wed a woman for her title, and lands. A woman may divorce a man. But better to have him dead, and then take his place. A grieving woman will have the sympathy of others. A widow has more freedom than a wife.’

‘You almost sound like you approve.’

‘I do not,’ she countered, but her eyes glittered.

Wynflæd is a stalwart of the series, and I was recently inspired to write a short story from her point of view regarding Mercia’s alleged ‘bad queens.’ If you’d like to read it, sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send you a link to download the story. And, you automatically receive a free short story collection as well.

I’ll also be sharing more posts, including one on Saxon Crime and Punishment and one on the maps in the books.

Check out the blog tour for Betrayal of Mercia

A huge thank you to all the book bloggers and Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for organising. Some of these amazing people have been with Young Icel throughout the entire series, and I am so grateful they are so keen to read, they sign up for the blog tour:)