Rory Naismith's 'King of the Mercians. Offa' 2026

Yale University Press first edition - 2026

I must admit, I have had a personal link with Offa for nearly 50 years - I walked his Dyke. I sped north from Chepstow, with two friends from Marlborough - alas, both subsequently committed suicide, but this was in no way connected with the experiences on the Dyke. We travelled through beautiful countryside; the English-Welsh borderlands are one of my favourite stretches in Britain. So, when another of Yale's excellent English Monarchs Series came out, my copy arrived straightaway. As I read the book, two thoughts were uppermost in my mind: firstly, I realised how little I knew about Offa and his times. This meant it was virgin and fertile soil for me and I learned much as I went along (how much I will retain, is another matter). Secondly, the author admitted straightaway the major problem with such so-called biographies of these early 'monarchs'. Vanishingly little survives that sheds light on [Offa's] early or private life, and what there is has to be interpreted with significant leaps of faith. It may be possible to attempt a personal biography of Offa's contemporary Charlemagne - indeed, many have - but not of Offa himself...no early medieval ruler is an easy subject for a biography, and Offa is more evasive than most. It recalled my reading of Sarah Foot's biography of Athelstan (2011, also in the excellent Yale University's English Monarch Series) nearly six years ago (see my Blog for 24th December, 2020). I requote her: Athelstan the man remains elusive - stating that structuring a coherent biography of a medieval subject...involves from the outset a greater degree of self-conscious construction and manipulation of material to fit artificial categories than might prove necessary for a better-attested person from a modern age. Thus, the story of both men is constructed around charters, grants of land, other administrative records, minting of coins and diplomatic exchanges with foreign kings and princes.

Notwithstanding the above, Naismith has delivered what Levi Roach the author of a Yale biography - Ǣthelread the Unready (2016, but, strangely, not listed in the English Monarchs Series) - states: in this brilliant piece of historical detective work, Rory Naismith restores Offa to his proper dimensions, revealing a hard-nosed but pious ruler. His first Chapter - A Name to conjure with -  the author suggests Offa is probably the most successful king of what is often called the heptarchy, as he imposed himself as king across all the lands and peoples south of the Humber, with the important exception of the Welsh kingdoms and Wessex. His reign represents the apogee of a long period when Mercia and its kings dominated England south of the Humber. Not only was Offa the leading king in Britain, he was a self-consciously European figure. Naismith then lays out his Sources: historical narratives, such as the Chronicle and the great Anglo-Norman historians, such as William of Malmesbury and Matthew Paris; Alcuin's Letters; Charters; Coins; and other Material Sources - especially the great Dyke.

Chapter 2 looks at Offa's close relatives. A useful family tree perhaps perplexes above all else! One branch has Coenwealh, Cundwealh, Centwine, Cynreow, Cuthberht, Ceolwulf, Cuthred, Coenwulf, Cwenthryth and Cynehelm succeeding each other - apart from poor old Bassa somewhere in the middle. Offa's father was Thingfrith, a great name, only surpassed by Cynethryth, Offa's wife. She stands out as one of the most interesting royal women in the whole Anglo-Saxon period. She appears in twenty-five charters and was at the front and centre in the royal entourage in the 770s and 780s. But her exalted position depended on her roles as wife and mother. After Offa's, and her son Ecgfrith's, deaths, she became abbess of Bedford and Cookham in Berkshire. Family was vital to Offa. His children had advantageous marriages to kings in Wessex and Northumbria.

Chapter 3 examines the Midland part of Offa's kingdom, 'old' Mercia. By the time Offa came to power in 757, Mercia had had over a century of on-off supremacy in middle England. A useful map shows the five dioceses of 'Greater Mercia', which stretched from the Humber to Cookham and St. Albans, from Ely to Hereford and Westbury-on-Trym. Lichfield (for a short time a third Archbishopric in Britain), Leicester, Worcester and Hereford were the main religious centres. One of the minsters was Breedon-on-the-Hill, not far from where I am presently typing this. Greater Mercia remained broadly cohesive until it was destroyed by the Viking great army in the 870s. Chapter 4 turns to the king's relationships with other areas of England. What the author calls 'soft hegemony' is applied to Kent, Sussex and parts of East Anglia. The coinage is used in this argument. Wessex was different: it could be battered and subdued, but remained a foe of a different order: one that was never absorbed in the same way as Kent or East Anglia.

The next three Chapters use charters, coins and manuscripts to study how the kingdom worked, how Offa was perceived and understood by his subjects and asses the cultural and early riches of the minsters and the towns. Offa lived on the move, with no fixed capital. Matters of high government took place wherever he and his entourage were. Another map shows the known meeting places of Offa (usually linked to grants of land). They are in two main clusters - what one would now refer to as the West Midlands and London/Kent/Sussex. The former places are a tangible reminder that the Mercian supremacy was grounded there, whilst the London area underlines the importance that that city had taken on - a new power base. After a review of Offa's relationships with the Welsh (especially relating this to the construction of Offa's Dyke, first attributed to the king in the late 9th century by Alfred the Great's biographer Asser, a Welsh monk); Charlemagne and the Pope in Rome; the final chapters look at the end and aftermath of his reign.

Alcuin called Offa the glory of Britain (decus Brittaniae). After reading Professor Naismith's well-researched book, I can concur.

Eden Phillpotts' 'A Close Call' 1936

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.64 - 1939?

 I must admit, once or twice I felt a little uncomfortable as I read this 'mystery' novel. Sometimes, it is best not to know too much about an author. Twenty-five year-old John Norton - possessed of talent, but lacking the ambition and endeavour to develop it - is a wastrel artist based at Wellbrook-on-Sea, a fascinating region where mat-grasses cheval the sand-dunes with horrent green, their billows rolling between the sea beaches to southward and the marshes and saltings, amid which Wellbrook river loiters from the north in its wide estuary. Norton, whose weakness had long ago served to stifle such creative talent as he possessed, has recently been handed the very rare experience of a commission. Crafty, cynical and often dissolute, he had courted 18 year-old Sarah Huntsman. She, although knowing his weaknesses, doubted not, that once wedded, she would swiftly lift him to healthier opinions and better self-control. Was it ever thus?

A major problem arises. Her father, Inspector Thomas Huntsman, strongly disapproves of any such union. A widower, Thomas views Norton with more than a little distaste: everything about the youth, including his method of earning a living, was anathema to Huntsman. Moreover, in Sarah's life-long affection and faithful service her father had found happiness and content...it had come as a very painful shock to him that his devoted daughter could find in such a man any object of affection. Unfortunately, Sarah's infatuation for Norton leads to their elopement, a marriage in a registry office and an eventual return to Norton's lodgings at Wellbrook. Huntsman, bitterly shocked, now passes his daughter in the street without visible consciousness of her presence. Months pass. The marriage (inevitably?) crumbles and Sarah plans a divorce; Norton actually concurs as he is 'playing away from home'. Then he goes 'missing'. In fact, he will be found near where he had been engaged in painting for his commission. His body, with all his artist's paraphernalia, is found among the dunes under several feet of sand. The ensuing tale is that of - not so much a who-dunnit - but a finger-pointing at the irascible father-in-law. 

At the very end of the novel, Huntsman (having escaped the noose at the last minute) is walking out one Sunday evening with Sarah; the last line is spoken by her: "Come home, father."

Adelaide Phillpotts (1896-1993)

So far, just a tightly controlled tale by a master story-teller and skilful plot constructor, who had already written 92 novels.  However, forty years after the publication of A Close Call, in 1976, the author's own daughter, Adelaide, was interviewed by James Dayananda for a book he was writing on her father. Adelaide had remained unmarried until the age of 55; in 1951, much against the wishes of her father, she finally got married. Phillpotts not only cut her off but never met her again before his death in 1960, aged ninety-eight. Worse was revealed in the interview. Adelaide stated that their relationship had been incestuous. Her father's 'love' had been obsessive and controlling. He had sexually abused her as far back as when she was seven, and had kept up an intimate relationship until 1929, when he married his second wife. He remained throughout obsessively jealous of any of her relationships with other men. Many of his letters to Adelaide are addressed to My precious love, My sweet love and My dearest love. Two extracts from his letters should suffice:

"Today I had hoped to welcome my precious girl and have my arms around her again." (1914: Adelaide was 18)

"I was not surprised after your first mention of that Jew and his politeness to hear he wanted you. The damned swine saw you were alone. You must not go to a hotel in future where that sort of vermin harbours for he might have been wickeder that he was and have planned to compromise you in some way." (1929: Adelaide was 32).

Enough said. It certainly puts a different light on the all-important relationship between Thomas Huntsman and his daughter Sarah in the novel, although no such impropriety is suggested.

The story charts a fairly straight line after the discovery of Norton's body. Huntsman, well-known locally for his temper and his intense dislike of his son-in-law, is banged up in gaol. Scotland Yard is drafted in and, although his friends and colleagues and, above all, Sarah can't believe he is guilty, all evidence points to him being the murderer (his spade and his pistol are found next to the body and a damning letter, seemingly written by him, is in the dead man's pocket). And so it comes to trial. Chapter XIII Case for the Prosecution, sees Sir Cato Warrender, K.C., a famous advocate, laying out a damning case against Huntsman. It is powerful and, surely, unanswerable. Charles Girtin, advocate for the defence, tries his best. Chapter XIV is, in fact, for a reader in 1936 more fascinating and novel than it is for the reader of today. Building on Freud (and R.L. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), it addresses the psychological 'fact' of the dual consciousness, the 'double life'. The urge from the primitive is ever tempestuous, furious, volcanic, overbearing; but such paroxysms for the time being poison the conscious and for the time being may be said actually to destroy it...Thomas Huntsman has no recollection whatever of the double life into which he was plunged. In other words, he did the murder, but under the influence of his 'other' persona. Well, it didn't wash for the judge or the jury. 

And then comes the clever denouement. Without spoiling anything for a future reader, Huntsman is cleared. AND I had guessed quite early on in the novel who the actual murderer could be. The author played fair. The individual was not sprung on the reader from nowhere. So, in summary: another well-written tale by a master craftsman; but I wish I hadn't known about the latter's own beyond-the-pale behaviour.

Dave Postles' 'Worlds of Framework Knitters in Leicestershire c.1600-c.1850' 2026

 

The author first paperback edition - 2026 

I recall Dave Postles working in Leicester University’s Local History unit in Salisbury Road, when I did my M.A. in the mid-1990s. He was even then highly regarded as a dedicated local historian of the County, always beavering away on projects. This thoroughly researched monograph on a topic that has always captured his interest, is a very useful addition to our knowledge of one of the staple industries of both Leicester City and its adjacent county. 

Chapter 2 ‘The Longest Journey: industrialization and its precedents Prior to the development of framework knitting, handloom weavers were working throughout Leicestershire. Postles suggests a ‘sort of path dependence: from early pastoral conversion to sheep husbandry and long staple wool in the area, through handloom-weaving, to the transition to mechanical knitting of woollen stockings’. He concentrates on Shepshed, where, between 1636 and 1647, a dozen weavers – traced through local records - operated in the parish. 

Framework knitting was introduced into Shepshed by 1710. The earlier concentration of handloom weaving was a precursor to the framework knitting, but the two ‘industries’ overlapped for a considerable period of time. Postles is able to give a fluent account of these developments through a detailed examination of probate materials: inventories, wills and testaments. He has inspected all probate documents between 1712 and 1729 – critical years, as weaving was being displaced by framework knitters. From c.1700 to the mid-19th century, weaving continued but in an attenuated degree and gradually petered out. Postles also uses probate evidence from weavers in Hinckley; and, for example, the inventory of George Worsley of Loughborough in 1636. He charts hosiery production down the Soar Valley north of Leicester and between Hinckley and Leicester. What becomes apparent is that, although there were some very successful weavers, the rural weavers in the areas studied were predominantly poor. This contrasted with the weavers in the borough of Leicester, who not only supplied the local urban market, but those further afield. The most successful weavers invested in real estate during the 18th century. 

The author then concentrates on the development of framework knitting, traditionally introduced into the county in Hinckley in 1640. By the early 18th century, it had spread, in particular, to Shepshed and Loughborough. In the former town, the industry became intense. A chart shows 237 nuclear families engaged in hosiery, 1813-22, in Shepshed, compared with 130 families in Loughborough. Hinckley town was still well out in front with 341 families thus engaged. Postles does point out a problem with probate inventories, as they omitted any interest in real estate, land and buildings. The final section of the chapter concentrates on hosiers and frame smiths. There were two main categories of Hosiers: the urban, commercial hosiers and ‘the bag hosiers who acted as middlemen between the commercial hosiers and the knitters’. Like the successful framework knitters, hosiers diverted some of their capital into acquiring real estate - John Parker, a hosier in Barwell, invested in seven messuages in Hog Lane in Hinckley in the 1850s. Postles concludes this major chapter by reiterating that the transition from handloom weaving to framework knitting was during the early 18th century. However, framework knitting was path-dependent on the concentration of handloom weaving. ‘Stocking-making on frames developed only where there had existed an agglomeration of weavers in the 17th and early 18th centuries’. 

Chapter 3 ‘Human Capital and Industrialization: Leicestershire’s hosiery industry, 1754-1870’, concentrates on four occupational groups at the lower end of the socio-economic scale: male and female framework knitters, labourers and female servants. There is a detailed appraisal of framework knitting in Hinckley. Chapter 4 ‘Mothers of circumstance and illegitimacy in the early nineteenth century’, which is reproduced from the Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and History Society 93 (2019), discusses research into the demographic impacts of bastardy. Two further chapters are devoted to a re-investigation of local industrial society in Shepshed, focusing on 1891 and extrapolating from that year’s census returns; and a list of Landholding in Shepshed in 1823. Postles argues that ‘the industrial organization of Shepshed followed on from a cumulative process which enabled transition from domestic production through frame shops to factory production. The entrepreneurs were local and endogenous’. 

 Postles’ Conclusion draws together his findings. He has shown how Leicestershire’s framework-knitting industry progressed from a domestic set-up to a factory-based enterprise, ‘from proto-industry, often located in the countryside, to industrialism in larger units based in urban centres. Framework knitters and stockingers were usually at the lower end of the economic scale, with small investments and frugal lives, although few seem to have ended up in a Workhouse. The knitters continued to have a low level of involvement in formal education (school fees being an issue), particularly amongst the female knitters. Occasionally the complex phraseology means the general reader struggles to follow the argument, but one can only be amazed at the sheer depth and width of Postles’ research. Although he rightly pays tribute to other historians’ work in the field, as shown by his useful Bibliography, it is clear that his personal delving into the records of the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland (ROLLR) and the National Archives (TNA), for probate files, wills and inventories, as well as the local Leicester newspapers of the time, was immense and time-consuming. Micro history perhaps; but macro research.

Peter Drax's 'Death by two Hands' 1937

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.62 - 1939?

'Peter Drax' was the nom de plume for Eric Elrington Addis (1899-1941). Born in Edinburgh, he attended the city's university and served in the Royal Navy, retiring in 1929. He then studied law and practised as a barrister in the 1930s. When the Second World War broke out, he rejoined the navy, serving on HMS Warspite.. He was killed in action on 31 August 1941, having been mortally wounded in an air rad on the Royal Navy base at Alexandria, Egypt. He left  a wife and two children. He published six crime novels between 1936 and 1939, Death by Two Hands aka Crime within Crime (1937) was the fourth. A further novel, Sing a Song of Murder, unfinished by Drax on his death, was completed by his wife - Hazel Iris (Wilson) Addis, and published in 1944.

While commuting to his office in the 1930s, Addis read thrillers himself, and concluded that most of them had far too many unlikely events and characters in them. His aim was to write thrillers that were 'credible'; as contemporary publicity put it, police who are not endowed with supernatural powers and crooks who are also human, i.e. 'real' people. I feel, in this tale, he achieved just that.

The novel is set mainly in the environs of Chalk Street, Camden Town. (In fact, there is no such thoroughfare as 'Chalk Street' - there is Chalk Farm Road, which runs through Camden Market and is part of Camden High Street). The author quickly sets the scene: Chalk Street was crowded from end to end and from pavement to pavement with a slow-moving jostling crowd. Costers' barrows lined the gutters. One of these petty traders is Mr. Rivers - nearly every stall or barrow had its attendant crowd except his. He never shouted. He never waved his arms about or told the story of an adventurous life, to catch the attention of the crowd, He stood behind his barrow with his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his tightly buttoned overcoat. He was wearing a flat cloth cap. A cigarette hung limply from his mouth. As well as this 'legal' trade, Rivers engages in petty crime. One of his conduits is Barney - an avid reader of American True Life Romance Magazines - who keeps two pet mice, usually along the brim of his wide black felt hat. One was fawn and white and was called Fanny. The other, her husband, was a portly brown and white gentleman mouse called George. The reader should remember them, as one provides a vital clue to solving a murder. 

Rivers also meets up with twenty-five year-old Spike Morgan - his eyes were a cold blue, and there was a hardness in his face that put ten years on his age. He was wearing a stained raincoat and a light fawn felt hat with a green band. He is a petty criminal and always hard up. A chance to make a financial killing presents itself. Alma Robinson, the 24 year-old orphan niece of Rivers, is coming up to London, as her aunt has just died. Her 'boyfriend' (or at least he likes to think so) Will Dorset, says he will be driving to London with a consignment of expensive fox furs on the forthcoming Friday. Rivers finds out about this and determines on a potentially lucrative theft. 

Alma boards with a friend of her uncle, Mrs. Kemp - a great barrel of a woman clad in a dirty and enveloping overall which fell in straight lines from her bosom to her feet...when she laughed huskily she showed a double row of broken teeth. It comes as no surprise to the reader that she easily slips into nefarious practices. The description of the Kemps' house, Number Three Napier Terrace, absolutely fits the author's determination for credibility. Seedy, dirty, untidy, it fits the sort of abode Mrs. Kemp and her spineless husband, Joe, would doss down in. Whilst Alma is reluctantly settling in, and meeting the seedy lothario Spike, Barney is telling Rivers about the consignment of fox skins due in the Great Wen that Friday. What should have been a simple robbery (the skins are stolen from the van by Spike and an even murkier friend, Len Harmon, while Barney keeps a look-out), degenerates into first one murder at the scene and then another (of Rivers) in London. Len had crowded more crime into the twenty-two years of his life than most of his kind and will be responsible for one of the murders.

The author's descriptions of this string of sordid events is very realistic; as are his portrayals of the various individuals caught up in the caper. Rivers and his pretentious flat over his shop; Izzy Hyams, the Jew who purchases the stolen fox skins and secretes them in his warehouse; the forces of law and order, such as Detective-Sergeant Leith, the local rozzer, who has had both eyes on Rivers, Barney, Spike and others of their ilk for a long time, and his superiors such as Chief-Inspector Thompson; all these incidents, places and people combine to produce an almost 'plodding' tale. But that is what makes the story so 'natural'. The individuals are very real, and the errors on both sides are totally believable. There are no moments of 'clever' detection or unlikely escapes by the petty criminals. The denouement, when it finally comes, is not surprising. The guilty are found guilty, thanks to a mixture of perseverance and luck; as Detective Leith says at the end, "They're a couple of bad eggs all right." And Alma gets the happy, if rather dull, future she deserves. As the Saturday Review of Literature commented, 'Little people in [the] grip of tragic destiny...brilliantly done.'

M.E. Braddon's 'The Infidel. A Story of the Great Revival' 1900

Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. first edition - 1900

This is the first time I have read one of M.E. Braddon's (1835-1915) novels. Opposite the title page is a list of (some?) of her works - they totalled 62 by 1900 - led by her most famous novel, Lady Audley's Secret. In fact, according to the Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association (MEBA), a literary organisation founded in 2013 to promote international interest in the life and works of the author and subtitled Sensational Victorian, she wrote over 90 novels, 150 short stories, as well as numerous plays and articles. She takes up 41 pages in Robert Lee Wolff's Nineteenth-Century Fiction; he also wrote Sensational Victorian, The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Garland, 1979). Apart from the usual information about the first edition,  a Note is added: MEB's diaries report that she "planned" this novel on January 17, 1898, and wrote it largely between then and the end of May, revising it at leisure, over the summer. A historical romance introducing Wesley and Whitefield, it deals chiefly with the intertwined themes of sex, money, philanthropy and religion, which preoccupied her during her last fifteen years.

Braddon's own life would make a fascinating novel. Born to a Cornish solicitor and an Irish journalist, she was educated at a private girls' school after her parents split up.  Using a stage name, Mary Seyton she started on an acting career, aged 22, to support her mother and herself. This lasted for three years; once she started writing novels, this change of career took over. In 1860, she met John Maxwell (1824-1895), who published periodicals and moved (with her mother!) in with him in 1861. He was married with five children, but his wife was in a mental institution; only when the latter died in 1874, did Mary and Maxwell get married. By 1864, she had two children with a third shortly expected. They eventually had six children. In 1866, she founded the Belgravia Magazine. She lived finally in Richmond and was buried in the town's cemetery. She has a plaque in the parish church and several local streets are named after characters in her novels.

  

What I enjoyed most about The Infidel was the feeling I could engage with the characters; they became very real to me, whether I had sympathy for them or not. In Chapter I, Grub-Street Scribblers, we are  pitched straight into the lives of William Thornton and his daughter Antonia (the Infidel of the book). They work together at the trade of letters. Father contributed verse as well as prose to periodicals; he wrote sermons - he, the unfrocked priest, the audacious infidel, who believed in nothing better than this earth upon which he and his kindred worms were crawling; nothing to come after the tolling bell, no recompense for sorrow here, no reunion with the beloved dead - only the sexton and the spade, and the forgotten grave. Thornton, as curate-in-charge of a remote Lincolnshire parish, had eloped with a farmer's daughter - a strapping wench of eighteen - and £200 from her father's cashbox. Caught in London about to sail for Jersey, Thornton did 2 years (of a 5 year sentence), coming out a rank atheist, a scoffer of all things holy, a scorner of all men who called themselves Christians...a natural product of that dark age which went before the Great Revival - the age when not to be a Deist and a scoffer was to be out of fashion. This is the milieu in which his daughter Antonia (Tonia) is brought up. Now 20 years-old, she is well educated, a lover of books but a despiser of religion - a hideous superstition of the dark ages. Voltaire and those of his ilk were her gods. The fascinating account of how Antonia has to address an increasing awareness and confrontation with Christian beliefs and its upholders, notably George Whitefield and John Wesley, forms a core of the book.

One of Antonia's few friends is the 29 year-old Patty Lester, a low-ranked and indolent actress at Drury Lane. Thornton tells his daughter, "I don't want you to imitate her", but Patty's companionship is a relief from the monotony of literary toil. Patty persuades Antonia to go with her to Mrs. Mandalay's  dancing-rooms; Thornton gets two tickets from his old friend, and Irish peer Lord Kilrush. Initially horrified - "Oh, father, don't leave me among this rabble. I shall die of disgust if any one speaks to me..." - she is introduced to Kilrush, who looked young at a distance, but old, or at best middle-aged, when he came near her, the man who is destined to affect her life thereafter. His wife had long ago run away with his bosom friend and he was determined not to be entrapped in wedlock again. Both are intellectually stimulated by the other and become fast friends. However, lust must out and Kilrush amazes and repels Antonia by declaring his desires - not for marriage but for a carnal relationship. Disaster. She declines and he retreats - to Tunbridge Wells. Then, back to London and out to Clapham, where we meet the third major figure in the tale.

Twenty-nine year-old George Stobart, late of a famous dragoon regiment, lives with his mother Maria, the widow of a Bristol shipowner. She is Kilrush's first cousin and George is likely to be the heir to the childless peer. However, two years ago in 1749, at an evening service in John Wesley's chapel at the Old Foundery, George had been "convinced of sin". His mother is not happy: "Oh, those Oxford Methodists! You have caught their jargon. I am a good churchwoman, George, and I hate cant". Worse, George is determined to marry a young seamstress, Lucy Foreman, daughter of a journeyman printer, her mother a drunkard and her father an atheist. Her home was a hell upon earth. To Kilrush, she is a pretty bit of plebeian pink-and-white. True to his word, he disinherits George after the young man refuses to give up Lucy. In fact, George marries her.

Kilrush tries once more with Antonia. Saying "Marriage is the gate of hell" is not the way to win her. Suggesting another relationship pours oil on troubled waters: "You are determined to take no second wife; and I am determined to be no man's mistress". So off Kilrush goes again, not to Tunbridge Wells but abroad - but not before giving Thornton an income of £100 a quarter. Two years go by. Then Antonio is summoned to the deathbed of Kilrush. His pride has vanished and he asks her to marry him! "I want your love to follow me in death". And she succumbs. But, there is a caveat: "I have married you to make you mine beyond the grave...you are mine by this bond...swear that you will be true to me, that you will never give yourself to another man." The irony, which pursues Antonia for the rest of her life is how can a Voltarian, a contrarian so far as religion is concerned, believe in immortality, the fairy-tale of faith.

The reader is only on page 93 of a 341 page novel, but the rest of the tale is simply how Antonia first simply delights in the new-found wealth bequeathed to her - she becomes the belle of the London scene - then gets drawn into good works, after meeting George Stobart, and increasingly questions the very beliefs impregnated in her by her father and held for so long. She is clear to Stobart: "I have no religious views. I have no religion except the love of my fellow-creatures. I have never been a believer in Christianity as a creed, though I can admire Jesus of Nazareth as a philanthropist, and grieve for him as a martyr to the cruelty of man." What she does do, is regularly provide sustenance to the poor from Kilrush's legacy. Stobart, who is very much a muscular Christian and no quietist, increasingly works with Antonia and, then, blots his copybook. Although married, with a devoted but simple wife and a young son, he crosses the same boundary that Kilrush did. Whilst Antonia increasingly loves his company, poor Stobart's heart was beating furiously...this man believed in the devil as firmly as he believed in God...Satan was spreading his choicest lure to catch the sinner's soul - a woman's ineffable beauty. He throws himself upon her, drawing her averted face towards his own with a wild violence, till her brow touched his, and his lips were pressed against her burning cheek. She is angrily aghast: "You devil. You that I took for a saint! I will not breathe the same air with you." Like Kilrush, he flees abroad;  rejoining the army to serve in North America under General Amherst. The distraught  Antonia flung herself with a new zest and eagerness into the modish whirlpool.

Meanwhile, another peer, this time from Scotland, Lord Dunkeld, begins to hover around Antonia. Thankfully for both, the friendship remains just that. Additionally, Antonia meets and comes under the influence of John Wesley (the author is much more positive about him than she is of Whitefield). She doubles down on using her wealth and time to help those in need, whilst withdrawing further from the empty 'society' life she was once drenched in. In many ways, though, she is still 'The Infidel'; not even Wesley can change that. Awakening had been no sudden act, like the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost, but a gradual change in her whole nature, the widening of her sympathies, the growth of pity and of love. It was not of Christ the Sacrifice she thought, not of his atoning blood; but of Jesus the Great Exemplar, of Jesus who went about doing good. It was the doctrine of 'good works', to which the Methodists attached only a secondary merit.

I will not disclose the ending, as it would spoil it for anyone deciding to read this thought-provoking, 'deep' novel. It deals with friendship at different levels (Patty Lester is possibly Antonia's truest friend); with religious fervour, its width of compassion but also its narrowmindedness; with philanthropy and hypocrisy; with spiritual and carnal love. The London Quarterly Review (1904) said: Mrs. Braddon reproduces the people, the scenes, the atmosphere, the spirit of the eighteenth century, and she describes the work and the influence of Methodism with insight and sympathy. One feels that, perhaps, Antonia's happiest times were spent with her father in the garret in Grub Street. 

Sarah Hawkswood's 'A Shroud of Snow' 2026

 

Allison and Busby first edition paperback - 2026

Now that Susanna Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew (2020), C.J. Sansom's Matthew Shardlake (2019) have well and truly ended; Scott Mariani's Will Bowman is stopping this December, after a mere four books; and I am keeping the eleven volumes of Edward Marston's The Domesday Series for a rainy fortnight; I am having to rely on an annual 'fix' of Sarah Hawkswood's Bradcote and Catchpoll tales for my medieval/early modern historical novels. A Shroud of Snow is her fourteenth outing and we are still in the middle of the Stephen/Matilda Anarchy years. It is December 1145 and we are back in Worcester.

It is bitterly cold, and Hamelin Isenmongere has just visited the local priest, Father Anselm. The Gloucester merchant is a regular giver of money for the poor. On his return to his riverside warehouse, he crosses the path of Godhild, a young prostitute. Initially, she steps in front of him for the obvious reason; but, instead, she receives two silver pennies - to keep indoors and keep fed these next couple o'days. Hamelin is never seen alive again. The following morning, a local fisherman Walter stares at a snowy heap that resolved itself into the body of a man, lying at the water's edge, one arm dangling down so that the hand dipped into the water, except that for two feet out into the river, the surface was frozen, and held the hand in its vice-like grip. For the next 270 pages, the reader follows the usual trio - Undersheriff Hugh Bradecote, Sergeant Catchpoll and Under Sergeant Walkelin - as they doggedly search out the culprit.

By now, after thirteen previous tales stretching back authorially to 2014 (but only to June 1143 with the first story, Servant of Death), I have got to know their quirks of behaviour, their strengths and weaknesses. This is due to Hawkswood's natural story-telling skills, both of character and place. She conjures up the Worcester of the mid-twelfth century compellingly - no artificial cod-medieval speech or silly archaisms - and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the narrow streets, musty and gloomy warehouses, downbeat houses and brooding castle buildings is well done.

Catchpoll, rarely bested, is outmanoeuvred by Hamelin's riverman, Ragnaill of Duiblinn. The crafty bastard (Catchpoll's words, not mine) invited him on board his boat, to question the crew, and then casts off. So Catchpoll finds himself on his way down river to Gloucester. Meanwhile, Walkelin, assuming unusual authority due to Catchpoll's absence, rides over to Bradecote Manor for Hugh. The forbidding lord Sheriff of Worcester, William de Beauchamp, is absent, so Simon Furnaux, his castellan, is left in command of the castle. Our intrepid trio dislike, in fact loath, Simon. On this occasion, with increasing reason, as it soon becomes apparent that there was a link between the castellan and the dead ironmonger. When Bradecote and Walkelin visit Hamelin's home, not only do they find this evidence but also the body of the latter's widowed housekeeper, Agnes, raped before being murdered.

Catchpoll is not impressed when he meets the newly-widowed Mistress Sybilla Isenmongere - she maybe shocked at his news, but not grief-stricken. She is cold and haughty and wishes to go to Worcester - for her husbands body but, more importantly, to search for any money and artefacts belonging to him. Not only do Catchpoll, Ragnaill and Sybilla (it is soon clear that they are more than just servant and mistress) turn up in Worcester, but so does a bad-tempered William de Beauchamp, demanding an immediate resolution of the murders.

There are other realistic touches - Walkelin is on tenterhooks throughout, as his wife is expecting their first child; the scribes at the castle are definite individuals, not just caricatures; as are the warehouse figures, such as Tostig Thoraldsson and Samson One-Eye. I liked the tetchy relationships and dialogues between de Beauchamp and Furnaux, and Sybilla and Ragnaill; and the increasing telepathic communication between Bradecote, Catchpoll and Walkelin. The overall political scenario was not forgotten, either. Robert of Gloucester's machinations in Worcester were revealed and placed in the context of the conflict between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda. All in all, a very pleasant two-evenings' read.

Tim Sullivan's 'The Bookseller' 2025

Head of Zeus paperback edition - 2025

I read this over several sittings, as I couldn't quite get 'gripped' by the story. This is the seventh novel to feature the socially awkward, neurodivergent detective DS George Cross, and, perhaps, I may have enjoyed it more if I had read at least some of the other six. Thus, I came fresh to any character developments - of his family, his colleagues and his priest friend - which would have been charted in the previous books. The eighth book, The Tailor, was published last month. Cross has autism, and I find it hard to relate to that; my failing, not the author's - or the detective's! I did feel, however, that the frequent commentary on social interaction became a little tiresome.

Cross works with Joyce Ottey, who has recently been promoted to Detective Inspector; part of the dynamic in the story is how both colleagues adapt to this. Their superior,  DCI Carson, typifies the individual promoted beyond his skill level - incompetent in policing and social acumen. These three represent officialdom and the case they have to tackle this time relates to the antiquarian and second-hand book trade; a subject dear to my heart and really why I got the book (cheap from a charity stall!). 

Ed Squire runs a bookshop in Berkeley Square, Bristol. In his mid-fifties, he has followed his father, Torquil, into the antiquarian books trade. He, however, is in it as a businessman, not as an afficionado  like his dad. One evening, DCI Ottey and DS Cross are called to the bookshop - Ed has been murdered, the body lay to the side of the desk. The surrounding rug and bare floorboards were stained dark red with blood. There were several narrow puncture wounds to the bookseller's chest. (Spoiler alert - they turn out to have been made by a letter opener. Talk about the Last Post.) So, off the detectives and the reader set on a whodunit. Not Torquil, who had deep disagreements with his son over his management of the bookshop, as he had been in London at the time, but on his return had found his dead son. Was it Persephone Hartwell, Ed's niece? - who had seemingly taken refuge in the bedsit at the top of the building - in her late twenties, early thirties...clearly terrified. She was pale as a ghost and shaking involuntarily. She had long, dark curly hair and was dressed mostly in black with red tights. It would later emerge that, as a teenager, she had been impregnated by Ed and had had an abortion. Was it, therefore her angry mother or father Ian, just back from Spain, or Percy herself? Or, could it be Victoria Squire, Ed's shamed wife?  Or Sam Taylor, in his late thirties, early forties, with his goatee beard, there was something of Hergé's Professor Calculus about him, who had worked for Squire's for 15 years as an assistant and was disgruntled with Ed's lack of interest in the real antiquarian books? 

Another on the suspect list is Denholm Simpson, who ran a much humbler, less grand, establishment. More of an emporium of second-hand books. Originally, both he and Torquil ran this place near the Bristol Royal Infirmary together. Then a wealthy, childless widow, Sumner, a frequent customer of the latter, died and left him the Berkeley Square building - much to Denholm's chagrin and continual resentment. The two men hadn't spoken for twenty years. 

Could it be the de Souceys? Freddie and Francesca had sold their late father's book collection to Ed, which had included, unbeknown to them, a first edition of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Ed had then sold it for a mammoth profit and refused to give them any of the proceeds. Or was it Patrick Gibb, bookseller at Carnegie Books in Bedford Square, London? He and his firm had had a massive dispute with Ed Squire over several issues, mainly over auction rings and author hoarding for monopoly price-fixing. Denholm Simpson's son, Nigel, had worked for Carnegie Books but had left in mysterious circumstances. Was it to do with the Ed Squire feud? Did he harbour a grudge against Ed? Muddying the waters is a Russian connection. One Oleg Dimitriev, who owns the expensive and ostentatious Ashleigh Manor in south Somerset (it has its own helipad), as well as a yacht in the Mediterranean. His henchmen have been staking out Berkeley Square, with menace. Why? Ed had been involved in the sale of a letter by Christopher Columbus, which turned out to have been stolen. Dimitriev had purchased it for £2 million, and Ed pocketed 250,000 commission. Did D wanted his money recouped - at any cost? So, was the murder the result of nefarious book dealing or jealousy of the Squires? Or was it due to familial anger? Thanks mainly to Cross, we find out.

A major subplot involves Cross's father Raymond who, after an operation for cancer, has a stroke and needs fulltime care. His mother Christine, estranged from both father and son, comes up trumps to become that carer. Several chapters, or parts of chapters, deal with this ongoing family crisis. Not having read the previous books, the relationship between Cross and his parents was not particularly interesting to me and I flicked through much of it. What with the autistic protagonist, I found the book mildly flawed. I don't think I'll be reading any more mysteries by Tim Sullivan on George Cross.