When Research Means Leaving Well Enough Alone

 My most recent novel is Book 2 of 2 in the Tales of the Iclingas series, which began with Cometh the Hour and the story of Penda, the last pagan king of Mercia and his struggles against the oppression of Mercia by Northumbria.

The Sins of the Father is the follow-up, and focuses on the next generation, in Mercia and in Northumbria, and how the children of the great warlords cope with the legacy left by their fathers. Some try to emulate their father, some try to forge a new path, and some resort to murder just to get noticed…

Penda of Mercia was seemingly unusual at this time for having married only once and, if that’s the case, then he and his only wife had a great number of children. (There are nine of them in my stories, although one is the son of Penda’s wife by a previous marriage, a boy whom Penda adopts as his own. And I made two of the girls twins, to give their poor mother a break from all those pregnancies.)

Tracking them down is not easy because very little was written about Penda himself, beyond his dealings with Northumbria, and even that was written by a Northumbrian (Bede) so is not always favourable, as you might imagine!

So in order to establish who his children were, we have to start elsewhere and join up the dots. We might not be told that they are Penda’s sons and daughters, but sometimes we do know that they were, say, the brother of one of his children, or we hear of a granddaughter of his, and her maternal aunt, and thus we know that aunt was Penda’s daughter, so we work backwards and voila!

I don’t mind wavy lines between those dots when it comes to writing fiction, but some just didn’t match at all. It’s at that point that you have to decide to leave people out of your story, no matter how intriguing they might be…

Osweard

This man was supposedly a brother of Penda’s son Ethelred (again with the backwards info!)  He is mentioned in two charters of AD714 in relation to land granted to a bishop, or rather, how the bishop came by these lands. These charters are unlikely to be genuine and the only other mention of Osweard was in the account of the bishop’s life which essentially repeats the information, saying, ‘A short time later, I acquired another estate with this one from Osweard, the brother of the aforementioned king [Ethelred]’. I think it’s safe to say that the bishop, like so many before him and afterwards, was trying to make a case for land ownership which probably wasn’t as water-tight as he might have wished.

Window in St John's Church, Chester, depicting
Ethelred of Mercia. Accreditation Link

I also think nine children is more than enough, even for a saga that spans two books and three generations, so Osweard didn’t get even a walk-on part. I had some more fun with the next generation though.

Rumwold

There is a curious story concerning a supposed grandson of Penda’s, a certain Saint Rumwold. According to tradition, he was a baby who died at just three days old. The Vita Sancti Rumwoldi, the eleventh-century account of his life, says that he was able to speak at birth, preached on wisdom and the Trinity, and predicted his own death, giving precise instructions regarding where his body was to be laid to rest.

St Rumwold's Well, Buckinghamshire
Accreditation Link

It is said that he was the grandson of Penda and the son of an unnamed king of Northumbria. In which case, he can only have been the son of one of Penda’s daughters married to the Northumbrian line. Except that only one of Penda’s daughters married a Northumbrian, and he was never king of the whole of Northumbria, though he was, briefly, a sub-king of its southern portion. There doesn’t seem to be any corroboration for this tale, so I left the precocious Rumwold out of the story.

Ruffin and Wulflad

There is no doubt that Wulfhere (known in my story as Wulf to his family) was a son of Penda’s. But there’s a  curious seventeenth-century anecdote which tells that, along with his children Werburgh (Werbyra in my novel) and Cenred, he had two sons called Wulfad and Ruffin. These two boys were, according to the story, baptised by St Cedd which so offended their father that he ‘killed them both with his own hands.’ Wulfhere was horribly tormented by what he had done, and ‘could find no ease’ until he went to St Cedd, who absolved him if he would suppress idolatry and establish Christianity throughout Mercia. It also says that the king built many churches and monasteries, among them Peterborough, although it is likely that the monastery there (Medeshamstede) was founded earlier, and by Wulfhere’s elder brother.

Detail of a 14th-Century Charter transcription of an Anglo-Saxon
Charter which purports to show Wulfhere's founding of Medeshamstede
Public Domain Image

That’s not the only problem I have with this story though. Little Werbyra became an abbess and saint, Wulfhere himself was a Christian, and it seems highly unlikely that he would have killed two of his sons because they’d been baptised. Since this was a period when couples could separate to take up the religious life, you’d think his wife would have left him if he'd murdered two of her children, or even step-children, yet she didn’t. When Wulfhere discovered that another king had apostatized and gone back to his heathen ways, Bede tells us that Wulfhere sent a bishop to ‘correct their error.’ Improbable then, that he would kill any Christian children of his own. It could, of course, have happened before his own conversion to Christianity, but it all seems very unlikely to me. I left them out of the book because the murder of two children by their father the king would have taken my story in an entirely different direction…

St Werburgh's Pilgimage Badge
Public Domain Image

Sometimes, when doing historical detective work, it’s best to leave the bodies right where you find them, and walk away!

About The Sins of the Father

A father’s legacy can be a blessing or a curse…

AD658: The sons of Penda of Mercia have come of age. Ethelred, the youngest, recalls little of past wars while Wulf is determined to emulate their father, whose quest to avenge his betrayed kinswomen drew him to battle three successive Northumbrian kings.

Ecgfrith of Northumbria is more hostile towards the Mercians than his father was. His sister Ositha, thwarted in her marriage plans, seeks to make her mark in other ways, but can she, when called upon, do her brother’s murderous bidding?

Ethelred finds love with a woman who is not involved in the feud, but fate intervenes. Wulf’s actions against Northumbria mean Ethelred must choose duty over love, until he, like his father before him, has cause to avenge the women closest to him. Battle must once more be joined, but the price of victory will be high.

Can Ethelred stay true to his father’s values, end the feud, keep Mercia free, and find the path back to love?

[A version of this article first appeared on author Charlene Newcomb's blog in 2021]

Digging for Stories

Where do stories come from?

"An English civil war flag, captured by royalist Bernard Brocas to prove that his love for the daughter of parliamentarian Lord Sandys had not altered his loyalty to the king, is to be auctioned in April (2005). Taunted by the loyalist faction, Brocas swore an oath that he would give proof of his allegiance by winning a standard in the field. His chance came at the first battle of Newbury in September 1643. He captured a green silk damask banner with the motto "Constanter et Fiderliter" (Steadily and faithfully), but was later found dead beside the banner. Bonhams, which is handling the sale on behalf of a family descendant, expects the flag to fetch up to £5,000."

image - the telegraph

Well, there was a story waiting to be written - a tragic love story set against the backdrop of the civil war. I kept the cutting, intending to write the book, but I got distracted by other tales, other characters who clamoured for my attention.

Years ago, as an undergraduate with more summer holiday than ideas to occupy my time, I watched a documentary about the Ashburnham estate in Sussex. It wasn't a particularly inspiring story and I can't remember the main thread of the examination, but when the narrator told how one of the family commissioned the family crypt to be built, and that the last of the family line took the last available space in that crypt, my interested was ignited. I scribbled notes, I was going to write a book ...

A drawing by John Preston Neale of Ashburnham Place in 1828 showing the lake in front

... I didn't. I got a job, got married, had three children and changed career path.

But then one day I found the time to write. And it was another one-liner that came back to me. My wonderful tutor, Ann Williams, was talking about the background to the module for that term, which was 10th century Wessex. She talked about the preceding years, explaining what had led to the supremacy of Wessex and she spoke about Ethelred of Mercia. "No-one knows where he came from," she said. And I was captivated. I was going to write a book ...

... And I did. Although it turned out to be not the story of Ethelred so much as that of his wife, Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians.

Still I can't resist filing away little snippets; press cuttings, single sentences, anything that might one day make a fine story or novel.

Recently I was reading a book about myths and legends, and all things ghostly, and discovered that in 1820 the skeletal remains of a lady were found bricked up within one of the walls of the Captain's Tower of Carlisle Castle. "Three valuable rings remained on her fingers and she was still partially clothed in scraps of a tartan dress. It is unknown who she is, but evidence indicated that when she was walled up, she was still alive."

Even a friend of a friend's facebook lament:

"I apologise for last night. The lady you spoke to had one too many Calpols and was feeling ill at ease. I would text you but she felt the need to delete everything on my phone." Although in this case, I wonder if we don't already have the story in those 36 words. 

Sometimes novels start with a plot, a situation, a story to be told. At other times, they begin with a brief revelation, a tiny snapshot of another life that draws the novelist, particularly the historical novelist, down a path of discovery, collecting more and more pictures and vignettes until the whole album is ready to be laid open for other people to look at.

I'd love to hear from people who've been similarly pricked, provoked, or persuaded to write, from a single episode, sentence or fact. Please leave comments below: