A Conspiracy of Wolves

In 1374, King Edward III was in failing health, as was his heir, Prince Edward, who suffered a debilitating illness – a perilous situation for the realm. The crown depended on the Northern nobles, particularly Percy and Neville, to keep an eye on the border with Scotland, but in the circumstances such dependence could be construed as weakness. Prince Edward would want spies in the North, especially now with a Neville at the head of the Northern Church, and who better than Owen Archer, who had served the previous Archbishop of York for a decade. In the years since writing A Vigil of Spies I have delved into the history of Edward III, his family, and his court. Where I once thought of Thoresby’s recommending Owen to Princess Joan as a compliment, I now realize he was throwing his captain and steward into the lion’s den. Prince Edward was not a man to tolerate rejection. Owen would know that the prince’s offer was a command.

So you see, when he lost Thoresby, Owen gained two antagonists – Prince Edward and Archbishop Neville. But I anchored him in York by using the tension of the times to motivate the city to seek Owen’s help in keeping the peace as the series moves forward.

Speaking of keeping the peace, the inspiration for Bartolf Swann, coroner of Galtres, came from Sara M. Butler’s book Forensic Medicine and Death Investigations in Medieval England (Routledge 2015). Ever on the lookout for the telling detail that distinguishes the past from the present, I was struck by the medieval emphasis on the communal interests in the juries’ considerations. Although the coroner was an official ostensibly seeing to the crown’s best interests in criminal investigations surrounding sudden and unnatural deaths (including suspicious and accidental deaths as well as homicides), the coroners’ juries made their recommendations based on what was best for the community, predicated on what they understood as truth. Paraphrasing Butler’s comments in an interview on my blog, the jury was not so interested in the details about the crime itself as they were with the character of the perpetrator. Did they feel remorse? Were they repentant? If they were acquitted would their return to the community restore peace and harmony, or would they commit more crimes?[4] Of course, being a crime writer, I was interested in the ways in which this process might be exploited by the more powerful members of the community.

I gave Bartolf the position of coroner of the forest of Galtres, which is just north of the city walls. The royal forests were established to provide good sport for the king, and a complex institution of laws and officials protected the animals and their habitat. The word ‘forest’ can be confusing in this context, because within the boundaries of the royal forests were villages, manors, towns, even castles such as Sheriff Hutton in Galtres. What distinguished these properties was their placement in the jurisdiction of a particular body of law, forest law. (Though there are exceptions.) Tales of Robin Hood made familiar the strict poaching laws in royal forests. Slightly less well know is the law that dogs inhabiting the forests larger than, say, lap dogs were to have three claws removed from their forefeet to prevent their attacking deer. This rendered them ‘lawful’, from which we get the term ‘lawing’. Technically, only the nails were to be removed, but the process inevitably took off a portion of the toes as well, and sometimes the pads, maiming the dogs. A horrific practice. The dogs were to be checked every three years by officials known as regarders. As with the poaching laws, loopholes and opportunities for corruption abounded.

And what of wolves? Magda Digby asks – or rather prompts Owen: What do folk see when they see a wolf, Bird-eye? The animal? Think again. Down through time the wolf has become symbolic of our fears as we walk through the night glancing back over our shoulders. Although it is generally believed that wolves were hunted to extinction by the end of the Middle Ages, the exact dates are still debated. In his book Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages, Aleksander Pluskowski cites ‘a marked decrease in the number of documented wolf hunts in the fourteenth century and the last reliable reference to wolf trapping in England is dated to 1394-6, from Whitby Abbey in East Yorkshire.’[5] Officials boasted of wolf-free territories, but folk still feared them, especially in hard winters. We still do.

Acknowledgments

My deepest gratitude to Louise Hampson, Joyce Gibb, Mary Morse, and Jennifer Weltz for thoughtful readings and insightful suggestions.