Finding the Facts by Katherine Pym

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Sir David Kirke

Research is a powerful thing. It opens the eyes and expands the mind... that is, if you find sources that don't conflict with each other. For instance, when writing Pillars of Avalon, we found David Kirke was to be knighted by King Charles I in Scotland. David was an Englishman, not a Scotsman. He resided in London with his wife and family. If he were to be knighted in another country, would he be a knight of Scotland or England? This brought about a lot of digging through the annals of history. Deep faraway history.

King Charles I

King Charles I was in need of money. His kingdom in chaos, Parliament gave him fits when he wanted more taxes, so he dismissed Parliament. Since he was the sovereign and believed in the divine right of kings, he proclaimed to rule alone.

He still needed money, so he started knighting men. Once dubbed, the new knight would register their names (even as the register was notoriously in error), and pay their fees. Many refused to do so. As a result posterity lost sight they had been knighted, even as they signed their documents and letters as John Doe, Knight.

When in Scotland, new knights were mandated to register their names with the Lyon King in Edinburgh. Those knighted in England were to register with Herald's College in London. The fee was extensive, upwards to £108, and pretty hefty for that time.

Since the king was in Scotland, and he did not like David very much, he decided to knight him in a country that did not like the English, and the fact, if he registered his knighthood with the Lyon King, he would be considered a Scottish knight.

Digging into who was knighted and where, I found David's name as one who had been honored in Scotland. Then I found a list of who had been knighted alongside him, but the list did not include David's name.

The Kirke's family crest

This is when a historical story becomes fiction. I could not go to Scotland or England to search the archives, data that may have burned in London during the great fire of 1666. I had to work with what I found, sometimes going back several centuries, sometimes in conflict with other data. I could not verify this but if a reliable source mentioned David as being knighted in Scotland, I went with it. I had him defy the standing process and have his certificate registered in London so that he would be considered an English knight. Even if it did not appear in the register.

So, we have Sir David Kirke and Lady Sara Kirke. His knight bachelor did not extend to his sons, even as Lady Sara requested King Charles II to extend it, but from my records, there is no record of him acknowledging or honoring her request.

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Many thanks to :

Shaw, William Arthur & Burthchaell, George Dames, The Knights of England, Volume 1, a complete record from the earliest time to the present day of the knights of all the orders of chivalry in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of knights bachelors. Printed and Published for the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood, Lord Chamberlain’s Office, St. James’s Palace, Sherratt and Hughes, London 1906

And Wikicommons, Public Domain 

Why I love Writing Historical Fiction

I spoke to my sister-in-law the other day and she couldn't understand how I could write novels that required so much research. I said "I love the research." Digging out those little gems of history and daily life, how people dressed, what they ate. Did women really not wear underpants in the eighteenth century (my preferred time period)? They didn't! Apparently this made it easier for the women to use the necessary (toilet) with all those stiff layers of clothing.
A fact that shocked me: the English washed their clothing in urine. They used urine for its acidic properties. I learned that on a visit to Shakespeare's parents' farm in Stratford-upon-Avon.

When I wrote my first novel, now titled Escape the Revolution, I wrote the story before my research and had to change so much, but found I enjoyed ferreting out the details. In my tavern I had a bar. I discovered there weren't yet drinking bars in 1790, so I had to change it. Pot-boys scooped out ale or beer from barrels in the kitchen and poured the drink into tankards to be served directly to the table. I triple checked these facts.
I still find many famous authors who put bars in their stories long before they appeared in history (the Victorian age).
I love the challenge of getting my details right. Of putting my heroines in a situation where they can't whip out a Smartphone to call for help. They must use their wits. Nothing is simple without modern conveniences.

In the days before the Internet (Yes, young people, there were those days) I utilized the library system for my research. I lived near Washington DC and traveled there to the Library of Congress Reading Room, an excellent resource. I was fortunate to be able to use their comprehensive library.

How fast does a horse travel in one day? (about fifty miles). Marriage rules and restrictions, the calling of the banns. All these things you must take into consideration when writing historical fiction. There were odd customs/fashions for women, such as mouse-fur eyebrows, and when they lost their teeth, a cork ball was stuffed in the cheek to fill out the face. Early in the 18th c. men wore rouge on their lips and cheeks, huge wigs--as did women--and high heeled shoes.

In one novel, Rose's Precarious Quest, I had a character who was a doctor in 1796. I had to request rare books by a Dr. Hunter to gain knowledge from that era. I also came across a fantastic website put out by Colonial Williamsburg on eighteenth century medicine. Domestic Medicine. I learned about the humors of the body (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood) and how they must be regulated to keep one well. The strange, often deadly remedies (as in mercury and white lead) used to heal the sick. However, the poisonous Foxglove plant was turned into Digitalis to successfully treat heart disease.

For my Canadian Historical Brides story, On a Stormy Primeval Shore, I had to research the province of New Brunswick. I must applaud my wonderful research assistant, Nancy Bell, who found me reproductions of historical documents on the internet.
 I learned so much about who settled this territory, who the native tribes were, the Acadians, Germans, Scots, English and the Loyalist Americans who fled the American Revolution. The struggles these people went through in a harsh climate.

It's a good thing I love all these details, the thrill of research. However, it makes me a picky reader when I catch the historical mistakes made by other authors.

To purchase this book and my previous novels  Amazon and All Markets

For more information on me and my books, please visit my website: www.dianescottlewis.org

 

Diane Scott Lewis grew up in California, traveled the world with the navy, edited for magazines and an on-line publisher. She lives with her husband in Pennsylvania.

Why Historical Fiction? by Victoria Chatham

AVAILABLE HERE

I freely admit to not having started off as a history buff. I found it the most boring subject when I was at school and never could remember dates, or the succession of kings or who ruled what country in Europe. It didn’t matter to me at all as the subject had no relevance to my life at the time.

It wasn’t until the early 80s when I read Sharon Kay Penman’s novel The Sunne in Splendour that I had a shift in interest. In this book, Richard III and the Wars of the Roses came to life for me in a very profound way. From reading anything that caught my interest from Danielle Steele to Louis L’Amour and anything and everything in between, I started raiding my local library’s history section. I read Anya Seton, Jean Plaidy, Umberto Eco, loved Wilbur Smith and later Ken Follett. I read all the Mazo de la Roche Jalna series pretty well back to back. Those books documented a slice of life and social history as did R.F. Delderfield’s A Horseman Riding By series or H.E. Bates’ Darling Buds of May which was made into a successful TV series.

I returned several times to the books of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, reading them from a totally different aspect. Austen was a must-read at school and, at that age, I had no idea what a treasure trove of minutiae they were. The same applies to Heyer. The first of her

books I ever read was Frederica (which I consider her best) but then I collected and read all her Regency romances without ever considering that they were, in fact, history books. A stylized history, maybe, but history nonetheless. Second readings of many of her titles gave me a whole new appreciation of the Regency era (1811 – 1820) beyond ladies' dresses and gentlemen’s sporting preferences.  

I started digging around in non-fiction history books, checking for myself anything I queried whether it was a style of dress or manner of speech and found I loved the research. At that time in my life I had no more thought of writing a book, historical or otherwise. But, in those odd and forgotten facts I came across snippets of past lives that really fascinated me. How other people lived, loved, and the events that surrounded them came to life in an amazing way. It was those people I wanted to write about and now I do.

Victoria Chatham

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Research by Juliet Waldron

Researching—that’s a part of this writing activity that’s fascinating to me in the 60’s full Spockian sense. :)

However, research, particularly at this early stage, can also be the thing which brings your story to a screeching halt just about the time the characters are beginning to speak. This is frustrating when it happens,  but how can you create believable dialogue if you don’t fully understand the context—the who, what, where, when--within which these characters ought to be?

Once you start digging into what you don’t know, there’s a pause in writing. You’ve got to haul out a book, or go hunting around online—enter the jungle of clicking around and hope you don’t pick up some electronic disease during your  search for knowledge.

Only after you have satisfied that “need to know” can you get back to the story again, now, hopefully armed with some better understanding. You can only hope that those characters, just now taking ghostly shape, will successfully shrug on this new mantle, this new layer of detail, and begin to speak through you more clearly.

There’s always a sense, for me, when I start a historical novel, I’ve got to enter another reality, get inside that skin of a place, a period. For this story, I’m venturing out of the European world and trying to find the entrance into that of another Tribe, as well as the business of reaching back in time. The early 50’s coincides with my own childhood, and it is occurring to me that here’s small bit of time experience I share with my characters. Nevertheless, the distance between my “Stone House” childhood and that of Sascho and Yaotl of the NWT Tlicho is wide.

In other historical novels I’ve written, I’ve thought a lot about the context, the time, the place, the material culture, the tools and technology, surrounding my characters. As mentioned above, Fly Away Snow Goose has an extra dimension of difference for me, in that I’m challenged to enter a culture with which I’m really not familiar.

The Iroquois, whose world I tried to enter in the course of writing Genesee, were a much more settled people. The Athabascans of NWT in the early 1950’s--in all their divisions and tribes --are a people whose world remained migratory, much like the world of the last ice age. Many families still seasonally followed the animals who give them everything—food, clothing, shelter, and tools—the caribou.

To help me understand, I’m turning to ethnographic studies of the kind where the social scientist becomes first of all, an apprentice to his subjects. And in the course of doing this research, and trying to dig in emotionally, I’m sometimes brought up against my own culture’s prejudices and preconceptions.

By the 1950’s where this story is set, the lifeways of the people of this fragile land were in flux, due to government policies dictated by a colonizing culture which enforced its will in many ways. The residential schools, designed to “kill the Indian” in the child, were Canadian law. Increasing numbers of whites and their agents, powerful, faceless mining corporations, were entering their land, violating treaty rights, taking possession, and leaving pollution behind. These unfamiliar entities claimed to own the ancient places and pathways of the De’ that the Tlicho and their neighbors had walked for the last 10,000 years.  It’s against the background of these upheavals that this story will be told.

For these brave children, it’s about resistance, about language and belief, but even more, it’s a way of seeing the world—not as “mine” or “yours”—but as a web of interdependent relationships. I could stumble around forever trying to get this right, but instead I’ll quote Chief Seattle, Leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish 1st Nations.

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together; all things connect.”