Feisty Females tells the stories of some of Lincolnshire's most fascinating medieval women including Nicholaa de la Haye, Alice de Lacy and Gwenllian, the last Princess of Wales.
Who hasn’t taken a sneaky peak at Rightmove sold prices? After all, it’s always interesting to know what your neighbours are selling their houses for, isn’t it? In my most recent commission, I was given the opportunity to look at a 15th century land registry- The Great Cowcher Book - held by The National Archives, second only in importance to the Domesday Book.
Commissioned by Henry IV in around 1402 The Great Cowcher collates the deeds for all of the properties in the Duchy of Lancaster into two volumes. The 2,443 charters and over 700 folios contain several thousand entries in Latin or medieval French.
Each entry has some, or all, of the following: a buyer, a seller, a property or piece of land, a regnal year, witnesses and conditions of sale. More than a thousand entries relate to the Honor of Bolingbroke in Lincolnshire, the focus of my short story collection. The book also provides details of disputes.
First folio of the Bolingbroke account. DL 42/2, fol. 231r.
(Property of His Majesty The King in Right of His Duchy of Lancaster,
reproduced by permission of the Chancellor
and Council of the Duchy of Lancaster.)
The commission was to write a creative response to this unique material. Very few of the entries relate to female landowners with Hawise de Quincy, first Countess of Lincoln, to whom 40 entries pertain, being the exception. I knew immediately that it was these women upon whom I wanted to focus in Feisty Females giving voice to often silent medieval women. So often His tory is just that, and even quite powerful women are on the periphery.
Feisty Females includes women as well known as the indomitable Nicholaa de la Haye, castellan of Lincoln Castle and the first female Sheriff of Lincolnshire; Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt and mother of Henry IV; the long-suffering Alice de Lacy, Countess of Lincoln as well, of course, as Hawise herself. These were joined, rather surprisingly by Gwenllian, the last Princess of Wales, who was enclosed for her whole life in a remote religious community in Lincolnshire, namely Sempringham Priory.
A highlight was bringing these fascinating females, and their stories, to the fore. As a writer I particularly enjoyed deciding on the lens through which each story should be told. So, for example, with Gwenllian’s story I entwined two first person narratives from Gwenllian herself, and a new mother superior who gradually came to learn of Gwenllian’s identity resulting in a crisis of conscience and the possibility for Gwenllian to make a lifechanging decision.
Alice de Lacy’s life story was so tumultuous it would have been ridiculed by my readers as too fanciful. She was kidnapped twice (a hunchback was mentioned in some accounts) , raped, forced to marry her assailant and imprisoned by the king who insisted on a huge payment of £20,000 before reinstating her right to marry. The Despensers threatened to burn her alive. He first husband was executed for treason and her second died after barely a decade of wedded bliss. Her third died shortly after her forced marriage.
What should I include and how could I do her justice? After all, I was writing a short story, not a novel. Having researched Alice’s life at length, the key factor which struck me was that all of her problems stemmed from being an heiress which, if history is to be believed, only came to pass because of the bizarre deaths of her two brothers in childhood accidents, Edmund falling down a well and John falling off the parapet of a castle six months later.
“We can only hold her for 36 hours. Murder? Manslaughter? Or a game gone horribly wrong? That’s what I’m here to discover.”
These are the opening words of Alice’s story, spoken by Detective Constable Gina Gillard as she begins her interrogation of Alice. But can she get at the truth or will Alice walk free? And who is in the adjacent cell washing her hands over and over with hand sanitiser and taking Diazepam?
Whilst almost all of the tales are character driven, in the case of Matilda’s Story, it was the situation that presented itself before the character. I had been to a talk on leprosy in the Middle Ages and was fascinated. One of the entries in The Great Cowcher related to a hospital on the highway on the edge of Spalding, a Lincolnshire town, which was very likely to have been a malandry, ie a leper hospital and a Cistercian record book on the treatment of lepers provided the rest.
“It was the day after Candlemas that we held my brother’s funeral. There was just one problem: he wasn’t dead.” So says Matilda as she stands by her brother’s grave, desperately wanting to reach out to him.
Historical fiction is the hybrid child of two warring parents, historical fact and pure invention.
Feisty Females is a mix of precise historical fact and verbatim quotes nudging shoulders with completely imagined scenes and conversations. Thus, fact and fiction are combined in order to create ‘friction’, which is, as any writer knows, at the heart of any good narrative.
Rosanna McGlone
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About the Author
Rosanna McGlone is a writer and journalist. Her book, The Process of Poetry -which explores the development of early drafts of poems by some of the country’s leading poets- was number 1 on Amazon and featured on Radio 4’s Front Row. The sequel, The Making of a Poem, focuses on the work of Australian foremost poets. She has written more than 100 features for the national press, including: The Guardian, The Independent, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian. Rosanna has written memoirs; community plays and collected oral histories.
Feisty Females, her first work of historical fiction will be launched at The Boston History Book Festival. To find out more follow her
@rosannamcglone.bsky.social
