Squire’s Hazard, the
Fifth Meonbridge Chronicle
How
do you overcome the loathing, lust and bitterness threatening you and your
family’s honour?
It’s 1363,
and in Steyning Castle, Sussex, Dickon de Bohun is enjoying life as a squire in
the household of Earl Raoul de Fougère. Or he would be, if it weren’t for Edwin
de Courtenay, who’s making his life a misery with his bullying, threatening to
expose the truth about Dickon’s birth.
At home
in Meonbridge for Christmas, Dickon notices how grown-up his childhood
playmate, Libby Fletcher, has become since he last saw her and feels the
stirrings of desire. Libby, seeing how different he is too, falls instantly in
love. But as a servant to Dickon’s grandmother, Lady Margaret de Bohun, she
could surely never be his wife.
Margery
Tyler, Libby’s aunt, meeting her niece by chance, learns of her passion for
young Dickon. Their conversation rekindles Margery’s long-held rancour against
the de Bohuns, whom she blames for all the ills that befell her family, including
her own servitude. For years she’s hidden her hunger for revenge, but she can
no longer keep her hostility in check.
As the
future Lord of Meonbridge, Dickon knows he must rise above de Courtenay’s
loathing and intimidation and get the better of him. And, surely, he must
master his lust for Libby, so his own mother’s shocking history is not
repeated? Of Margery’s bitterness, however, he has yet to learn…
Beset by
the hazards triggered by such powerful and dangerous emotions, can Dickon
summon up the courage and resolve to overcome them?
Secrets, hatred and betrayal, but also love
and courage –
Squire’s Hazard, the fifth MEONBRIDGE CHRONICLE
I love gardens – and gardening. I also enjoy reading about medieval gardens. It was inevitable really that they would have an important place in my novels. I have an as-yet unpublished novel (The Nature of Things), in which the garden is used both as a vital element in the lives of my principal characters and also as an affirmative metaphor for the hope that can come out of even desperate struggle and tragedy – a symbol of the continuity of life.
But, in the Meonbridge Chronicles, gardens are the stuff of
everyday, both for the lady of the manor and her more humble tenants. In the
Middle Ages, nearly everyone had a garden of some sort – especially those who
lived in the countryside, as of course most people then did. Those on the very
bottom rung of society might have very little or no land alongside their tiny
cottage, and there are a few such folk in Meonbridge. But most do have some
land attached to their tenant cot, and they use it to grow food, and perhaps
keep a few animals – hens, geese, maybe a pig.
These peasant plots are a vital source of food. My character
Alice atte Wode is a reasonably prosperous peasant, the widow of the village
reeve, and mother of its current bailiff. She has a large garden plot and grows
lots of onions and leeks, cabbages, “worts” or “porray” of many kinds and
turnips, all essential ingredients for the daily pottage. Beans and peas, also
pottage ingredients, eaten fresh or dried for use throughout the year, might be
grown in the garden too but more often as a field crop.
She also has an orchard, with several trees – probably apples
and pears, and perhaps medlars and cherries. Even a smaller plot might have at
least one or two fruit trees. Susanna,
of somewhat lower standing, has a small area of orchard at the far end of the
main garden:
…There was a bench under the fruit trees where they might
sit. … The pear tree …
was covered with white blossom, and its branches hung low around them. They
pulled the blossom to their noses and sniffed in the sweet, fruity scent. Chapter
6
Herbs were also grown, and I think most peasant housewives would have understood both the value of herbs as taste-bringers to their food, as well as their properties as simple everyday remedies. A medieval gardening book (see * below) says:
“A syrup of violets is
a good remedy against the pleurisy and cough, and also fevers or agues, especially
in young children. Apply the petals of Saint Mary’s Gold (marigold) to painful
stings to soothe them… Wormwood is a bitter herb…that cures the stomach ache
and a constipation of the bowel… It also repels fleas…”
On many peasant patches, a few flowers might be grown, amongst
or around the vegetables and herbs, in the manner of what we call “cottage
gardens” now.
But, in the larger plots of wealthier gardeners – such as that
of Meonbridge’s “lord” of the manor, Lady Margaret de Bohun – there would be a
“vegetable garden” (a potager), a “herb garden”, a “flower garden”, and an
orchard, divided into “rooms” as we would now say… Keeping flowers and
vegetables separate was apparently an ideal, according to the gardening book:
“Have two gardens, one
for flowers and one for porray… Not that the flower garden can have no herbs
and the potager no flowers, but keep them separate for the most part, else your
flowers may be affronted if you intermingle them with onions and leeks…” *
Her ladyship’s passion for gardening is significant in the
storyline of Squire’s Hazard. Her enormous garden is certainly divided
into “rooms”:
…they entered the great potager, burgeoning with vegetables
on every side: onion spikes, great spheres of cabbage and the frothy tops of
carrots. Passing the gate that led to the herbier and flower gardens, they
continued along the grassy path towards the orchard. Chapter
26
But, sadly for her, Margaret has given up working in the
potager, simply because her body is “less forgiving than it once was”. She’s
decided to leave the labour of growing vegetables to her team of gardeners but
refuses to give up the pleasure of being amongst her flowers.
It was such a beautiful morning; Margaret could not resist
putting on her hessian apron and heavy gloves and going down to her rose
garden. The snowdrops were long gone but violets and primroses should still be
abundant, carpeting the ground beneath the still bare-stemmed roses. The blue
irises she loved so much would also be pushing through and might even be in
bloom. …
Collecting her tools and wheelbarrow from the little wooden
shed just inside the entrance to the gardens from the bailey, she trudged
happily along the paths that criss-crossed the grand potager and herbier to the
flowery gardens beyond. The gardeners had made a good start on tilling the soil
in readiness for the cabbages and colewort, turnips, beets and fennel. The
onions they had sown last month were already nudging through. Chapter 9
Margaret’s
rose garden is in a special area of her flower garden:
…one of her favourite parts, her “inner sanctum”… Chapter
9
This inner sanctum is based upon the concept of the
“paradise garden”, which alludes to the
hortus conclusus, meaning “enclosed garden”. The medieval idea of the
enclosed garden is related to the worship of the Virgin Mary, and is mentioned in
medieval poetry and depicted in painting and manuscript illuminations from
about the middle of the fourteenth century. It became popular as a theme in
garden design. I’m not ascribing any religious sentiment to Margaret’s garden,
but rather using it to illustrate that wealthier people could afford to make
gardens that are essentially for pleasure.
“Pleasure gardens are
devised for the satisfaction of both sight and smell…so, around the lawn should
be planted every sweet-smelling herb, such as rue and sage and basil, and all
sorts of flowers, such as violet and columbine, lily, rose and iris.”
“In the middle of the
garden there should be a meadow, the grass deep green, spangled with a thousand
different flowers, violets and periwinkles, primroses and daisies… And also,
perhaps, a clear fountain in a stone basin in the centre of the lawn, for the
pureness of the water gives great refreshment...” *
Some gardens became quite elaborate and I’ve allowed
Margaret such a flight of fancy, giving her little enclosed garden a sense of
mystery and privacy:
…a circular tunnel trellis, profuse in summer with a heady
mix of honeysuckle and roses, with a little enclosed herbier half way round
with a fountain and a seat. Chapter 9
The
honeysuckle and roses of course have to be kept in check:
Starting inside the tunnel, she secured a dozen shoots to the
willow trellis. But several whippy shoots were growing on the outside and out
of reach, and she walked round onto the burgeoning bed. She edged carefully
between the thorny rose stems and the sturdy leaves of sprouting irises and
mats of pale yellow primroses, but she soon wished she had left the errant
honeysuckle to its own devices. For her skirts kept snagging on the spiky
thorns and it was tricky to avoid crushing the iris tubers underfoot, as she
tried to disentangle the fabric. Chapter
9
I won’t spoil the story, but those “whippy shoots” and
“thorny stems” give poor Lady Margaret considerable bother…
Tacuinum Sanitatis, Roses. Public
domain, via Wikimedia Commons
* The gardening
book extracts come mainly from the words of medieval friar and scientist, Albertus
Magnus, in his De vegetabilis et plantis, translations of which I found in
John Harvey’s Mediaeval Gardens.
CAROLYN
HUGHES has lived most of her life in Hampshire. With a first degree in Classics
and English, she started working life as a computer programmer, then a very new
profession. But it was technical authoring that later proved her vocation, as
she wrote and edited material, some fascinating, some dull, for an array of
different clients, including banks, an international hotel group and medical
instruments manufacturers.
Having
written creatively for most of her adult life, it was not until her children
flew the nest several years ago that writing historical fiction took centre
stage, alongside gaining a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Portsmouth
University and a PhD from the University of Southampton.
Facebook: CarolynHughesAuthor
Twitter: @writingcalliope
Website: www.carolynhughesauthor.com
Goodreads: http://bit.ly/2hs2rrX
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