Roy Fox and the Palmatian

 I've got a new book!  It's called "Roy Fox and the Palmatian" (as you probably already guessed from this post's header), and it's what's called a "first chapter book," a book for kids who have advanced beyond picture books but who aren't ready for YA (Young Adult), kids roughly 7-10 years old.

It can also be enjoyed as a read-aloud, and I hope that adults will get a chuckle from it too.

As you have also doubtless figured out, it's about a fox, and in fact it opened on Amazon as #1 in New Release Fox Stories (who knew there was such a category?)  Roy is a trickster fox, so the story doesn't exactly have a Strong Moral Message, and if you want your kids to have stories in which they are taught to Always be Honest and Keep your Things Tidy it's probably not for you.  But it is very funny!

 

What's a Palmatian? you are doubtless wondering.  Well, it might be something like a Dalmatian, or it might be something like a spotty fox, or it might even be an old mongrel dog.  Whatever it is, it's part of Roy Fox's cunning plan.

It's available on Amazon both as an ebook and a paperback.  It can be ordered as a paperback from any bookstore, and the ebook version is coming soon to other platforms.  Here's the US Amazon link:

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGJMLCG7

And here's the opening to whet your appetite.

****

Daisy Fox was arrested as a chicken thief and thrown in the King’s dungeon. And I, Roy Fox, had to save her.

Now of course any fox will tell you that foxes are not really chicken thieves. We may take a chicken out of the hen house to protect them, in case there’s a bear or a weasel nearby. And if the chicken happens to die, because of old age or something, it would be a shame not to eat it.

But Daisy was locked up as a chicken thief, and it was up to me to set her free.

Fortunately I had a cunning plan. 

 © C. Dale Brittain 2023

Illuminated Manuscripts

 "Illuminated."  It means lit up, flooded with light.  So what's an illuminated manuscript, other than one sitting on your desk with a bright desk lamp?

Actually it means something somewhat different.  A medieval illuminated manuscript is one with drawings and paintings in it.  Because, you remember, the printing press was only invented at the end of the Middle Ages, medieval books were all unique productions.  They were copied by hand, mostly on parchment before the fourteenth century, and they were special and valuable.  Drawings and other images made them even more special.

 For something like a Bible, it was considered appropriate to be especially prolific with images.  One of the most common forms of illumination was to make the initial letter of a section into a little picture.  This is a capital D (for Deus, God) from a ninth-century book of Psalms, done at the monastery of Corbie (eastern France).

 Full page illustrations were also found, though less commonly.  Sometimes (like here) they would be in a few subdued colors, but other times they would be done in vivid colors.  Usually the copying of the text and the drawing of the illuminations would be done separately, by different people.  There are plenty of medieval manuscripts where the person who was supposed to be drawing the fancy initials started but then never got back to the project, because there are big blanks where an illuminated initial is supposed to be.

Those doing the illuminations seem sometimes to have gotten bored with their careful, devout images and started drawing little scenes in the margins, demons, cats, people with faces in unusual parts of their anatomy, horses, or whatever took their fancy.  Usually these do not show up in Bibles, but they were common in illuminated books of history and the like.

When the Middle Ages became popular and romantic in the nineteenth century, wealthy people started collecting illuminated initials.  They would even have scrapbooks, where they would carefully cut an especially nice initial out of a medieval manuscript and paste it into their scrapbook, then toss the now-mutilated piece of parchment.  This makes medievalists' stomachs hurt just to think about it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval manuscripts and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Coal mining

We don't think about coal and the Middle Ages together, but coal was certainly used for fuel then at least in some places and at least occasionally.  In fact, the Romans had used British coal when the legions were stationed there.

Now they did not have the deep tunnels and underground mines we now associate with coal mining.  Instead most of the coal that the Romans and medieval people used was what was usually called "sea coal."  They figured out that some of the black rocks that got washed up on shore would burn very hot (after being dried out, of course).  These would be pieces broken off from underwater coal deposits by the action of the waves, or perhaps pieces that fell from a deposit in an eroding cliff face.

Both Romans and medieval people would gather sea coal and, if they found an outcropping, dig out chunks, creating a pit.  Open pit mining is of course less dangerous than tunneling, which is why Britain closed its last coal mining tunnels around 2015, leaving only a few open pits.  Medieval people would have approved.

Coal had (and has) the distinct advantage that it will burn far hotter than wood.   A high temperature is needed if one is going to work iron or burn lime to make cement.  Coal was sparse throughout the Middle Ages, which is why they mostly used charcoal when high temperatures were needed.  But making charcoal, which requires burning a lot of wood very slowly, is a more complicated process than digging some shiny black rocks out of the ground, and it also uses up an awful lot of wood.

This meant that once coal mining became viable, enormous resources were poured into it.  Some of the first tunnels to be dug, following a seam of coal deep underground, were in Scotland.  Enough sea coal washed up on the shores of the Firth of Forth that a seventeenth-century entrepreneur in Culross started digging tunnels right under the firth, having figured out how to prop them so that they didn't collapse (or hardly at all).

Below is a view of the village of Culross today, on the edge of the firth. (The mines are long gone.)

 

In eighteenth-century Britain,  serious coal mining fueled the Industrial Revolution.  Britain, with its large supply of coal, was able to industrialize faster than any other region, which helped support its establishment of an Empire that extended from Canada to Africa to India to Hong Kong, with plenty of stops in between.

By the nineteenth century, Britain was fairly black with coal soot (the reason London had its famous "fogs," actually just really polluted air), and slag from the mines turned many rivers black.  Since World War II, however, Britain has really pushed toward improving its environment, phasing out coal and cleaning up the countryside.  Parts of the countryside look so verdant and pastoral that one can imagine they haven't changed since the Middle Ages.  Well, they have, but they've been restored to something closer to what they would have been like 800 years ago.

In the US, we are still mining coal, although with sustainable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydro now cheaper, coal is clearly on the way out.  A concern of course is for the coal miners, many of whom have destroyed their lungs by years in the mines.  None of them love coal mining for its own sake, but it pays very well, and it allows them to live in the mountains that they love, much of which is still beautiful territory in spite of the mines.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

 

Medieval households

 We tend to think of the "household" as the stereotypical Mom-Dad-kids, with the assumption that Mom and Dad as married and the kids as all theirs.  But in fact the US census shows that this describes only a small minority of households.  Medieval households were the same.

In fact the medieval Latin term "familia" meant not family but household.  "Family" was described by terms such as "gens," 'stirps," or "consanguinei."  Medieval people were extremely aware of their family connections, but for most purposes the household was the more important unit.

Think about modern households.  There might be just one person in the house.  There might be a couple (married or unmarried) without children, or some non-romantic roommates, or some adults with children who might not all be both of theirs.  Children might live with a single parent.  Siblings might live together as adults.  There might be a grandparent or aunt or uncle attached to a household  There might be a boarder.  On a farm, the hired hands might live in the same house and eat with the farmer.  For more well-to-do families, there might be a live-in nanny, a cook or housekeeper, even a butler.  Medieval households could have versions of any of these.

Medieval peasant households routinely included a collection of relatives who did not match the simple Mom-Dad-kids model.  In a medieval town, a well to do merchant or artisan family would have a servant or two and probably also have young apprentices living with them.  A castle would have a whole array of people living there, the castellan lord and (usually) his lady, perhaps their children, perhaps some other relatives, unrelated knights, servants, craftsmen, young men in training, maybe a priest or two.  This medieval castle would be occupied disproportionately by men.

And of course medieval people lived in a very "face to face" world, unlike us, who chat with our friends and family largely through social media or phone calls.  In a peasant village, you'd know the people next door almost as well as you knew the people who slept under your roof.  For one thing, you'd see them every time they trotted out to the dung pile, as well as other times.  In a castle or monastery, a lot of people slept in the same room, so there wasn't much of what we'd consider privacy.  Still, the household was the basic economic and social unit, as it really still is for us.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval families and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval prisons

 We think of jails and prisons both as somewhere to lock up bad people so they won't do further harm and also as places of punishment, where someone who has committed something less than a totally heinous crime may "serve their time" and then emerge, considered properly punished.  Medieval prisons were somewhat different.

(In the US we draw a distinction between local "jails" and state or federal "prisons," which I'm not going to worry about here.  We don't really have "dungeons" anymore, a dark nasty place under a castle.)

A medieval person convicted of a crime would not be punished with "prison time."  Usually the punishment was a fine or, for serious crimes, hanging, though capital crimes (leading to the death penalty) were usually only tried by high courts, not by a local mayor's or manorial court.

Prisons were intended to hold people until whatever "happened next" might happen.  Someone awaiting a trial might be held in prison (as people still are if they can't make bail).  Since trials were extremely speedy by modern standards, this might just be a day or two.  Someone captured in battle might be imprisoned until his friends and family could pay a ransom.

Cruel castellan lords were routinely accused of capturing people and putting them in prison just because they felt like it.  Saints like Saint Foy of Conques was praised for freeing prisoners.  She would appear in a vision to someone unjustly held, telling them how to escape, or unlocking the door for them.  They were, unsurprisingly, highly grateful and would come to Conques, still wearing a chain or two, to thank the saint and get the chains cut off.  Her altar was surrounded with discarded chains.

Political prisoners were also imprisoned.  For example, King Henry I of England imprisoned his older brother, Robert Curthose, for the rest of his life, after defeating him in battle, for daring to think that he, rather than Henry, should be king of England.  King Henry II imprisoned his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, for a period for fomenting rebellion against him.

What were these prisons like?  Sometimes being in prison was more like house arrest.  Robert Curthose was not down with the ooze and the rats and could lead a comfortable life, as long as he got no ideas about leaving.  Political prisoners in the Tower of London had perfectly nice quarters.

But dungeons could be appalling, down under a castle.  Being underground, dungeons were wet and dark.  There were of course no sanitary facilities.  As well as being locked in, prisoners might be chained to the wall.  Food would be provided at times, but of course not fine dining (Robert Curthose did all right, but he wasn't down in a dungeon).

Sometimes prison cells had more light and air but came with their own problems. At Château Gaillard in Normandy, some French princesses were imprisoned at the end of the Middle Ages, accused of adultery.  As princesses they were not down in the dungeon. They had a cell high above the river, carved out of the cliff, with no furniture, and one side wide open, as seen here (the grill is modern, to protect tourists.)

When cold or rainy, the weather came right in.  Even worse, the floor slants ever so slightly.  At night, one would not dare fall asleep too deeply, for fear of rolling over and dropping through the opening.  (George Martin borrowed this idea for one of his books.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval law and justice and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.

Kindle Unlimited

 The rise of the independent author ("indie") has set up a curious dance between the indies, their readers, and Amazon, which leads the world in indie-published books.

It all goes back to a little over fifteen years ago, when Amazon introduced the Kindle.  The idea of an ebook had been around for a while, and business people had long been reading documents on the screen (and often then printing them out), but the Kindle was different.  About the dimensions (width & height) of a small paperback but much thinner, its screen showed what looked like a page in a real book, not like text on a web page.  And the person reading could choose their favorite font to read it, Times or Helvetica or whatever, and make it bigger or smaller for reading ease.

Great!  People loved it!  But wait!  There were hardly any ebooks to read on the Kindle ereader.  Amazon begged traditional publishers to digitize some of their list, quickly digitized a whole lot of out-of-copyright classics (Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, here we come), and launched.

Immediately people bought up Kindles and loved them.  One could have dozens of ebooks ready to read on a device lighter than one paperback.  Half a million were quickly sold.  But there were fewer than 100,000 titles for those half million readers to read.

Enter the indies.  Everyone knew that there were thousands of people out there who imagined they could be great writers if they ever had a chance, or who had been trying to interest traditional publishers for years without success.  Come right on in! cried Amazon.  Give us your Word document, and we'll do the rest!  No more gate-keepers1  Anyone can publish a book!  And so KDP was born (Kindle Direct Publishing).

It was very exciting for the indie authors who got in early.  Pretty much anything would sell, and because the indie books were new, readers snatched them up in preference to the out-of-copyright classics they'd had to read in high school or college.  It quickly became obvious also that there was a great reader hunger for books "just like" popular books, and the indies could provide that.

For example, traditional publishers wouldn't publish a book too similar to one already out there, not even because of plagiarism issues, but just because they thought the market was saturated. But it wasn't. These were the days when the "Twilight" series, teenage romance with vampires and werewolves, was very popular.  Amanda Hocking sold hundreds of thousands of copies of KDP ebooks about teenage romance with vampires and werewolves (different setting, different names, different plot of course).

And traditional publishers rarely let their authors publish more than one or maybe two books a year.  KDP didn't care.  Anyone could crank out a book every couple of months, or put up a whole lot of books that had been written over many years, and KDP was fine with that.  So if someone found a new favorite author, they could count on lots of ebooks by that author on Amazon.

Other companies noticed what Amazon was doing.  Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Borders (with their Kobo branch) all jumped into ebook publishing.  And they started offering 70% royalties, rather than Amazon's 35%.  At the same time, traditional publishers all raced to digitize anything to which they had the publishing rights, and they put their own ebooks up on all platforms.

So Amazon had been first, but others were coming up fast.  KDP quickly raised its ebook royalty rate to 70% (at least for ebooks priced from $2.99 to $9.99) and tried to figure out how to hang onto its indies, who were starting to "go wide," that is publishing on all ebook platforms, not only Amazon (including me by this point).

Once traditional publishers had all their books as ebooks for sale on Amazon, B&N, etc., of course, that spelled the end of the brief golden indie age.  Now readers could choose from a great many ebooks, including new releases from the traditional publishers, often better than the average indie book (once a lot of people who should never have imagined themselves authors saw what Amanda Hocking was doing and thought they too could make big bucks).  Maybe gate-keepers weren't as bad as we thought?

But Amazon's big advantage was its indies, even if the indies quickly found out they weren't going to come anywhere near Amanda Hocking's numbers.  Amazon still had more indies than anyone else.  Even if a lot of bad indie books were flooding the market (by this time most lucky to sell 3 or 4 copies, ever), there were also a lot of good indie books, promising readers lots and lots of titles by their favorite author, not only one a year, and books "just like" some book everyone loved.  So Amazon had to make sure its indies didn't wander off ("go wide").

It did so by promising benefits to indie authors who stayed exclusive to Amazon.  It tried offering various marketing tools to its exclusive indies, but soon it settled on "Kindle Unlimited."  Avid ebook readers could pay $10 a month (it's recently gone up to $12) to "borrow" and read as many exclusive indie ebooks as they wanted.  Given that most indie ebooks are priced around $4 or $5, this was a bargain even if one just read three books a month.  But avid ebook readers, especially in genres like contemporary romance, might read three or more books a week.  They loved it.

Indie authors are paid on the basis of how many pages a KU member has read.  (Your Kindle knows what you're reading, how fast, how far you've gotten...  Does it know what you had for breakfast?)  It's helped a lot of indie authors find readers in today's saturated market, because someone would "borrow" and read an indie book through KU, knowing it cost them nothing extra, even if they might not lay out $5 for an ebook by an unknown.

(Incidentally, KDP has also started publishing paperbacks, and a lot of indie authors like having a physical book, but for almost all KDP authors ebooks far, far outsell paperbacks.)

That brings us to my own current experimentation with KU.  My ebooks are mostly "wide," available on all major ebook platforms.  But fantasy is a genre that can do well with KU members.  So I've made my "Shadow of the Wanderers" exclusive to Amazon for 90 days (one promises exclusivity for 90 days, then can renew if desired).  It's never sold very well, either as an ebook or under its original title of "Voima," when traditionally published.  Yurt fans don't like that it's not Yurt, but it's one of my favorites.

 

So if you are a KU member, you can read it all summer for free, or anyone can buy it.  Here's the link.  It's epic fantasy, in the spirit of Norse legend (though without Thor and Loki).  I've given the opening below to whet your appetite.  Happy reading!

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

______________________________________________

Roric put his sword across his knees and his back to the guesthouse wall.  When they came to kill him in his bed asleep, they would find him neither in bed nor asleep.

Swallows swooped through the twilight air, then disappeared back toward the barns as the sky went from yellow to darkest blue.  He shifted on the hard bench, listening but hearing nothing.  Even the wind was still.  He reached into the pouch at his belt and absently rubbed the charm there with his thumb:  the piece of bone, cut in the shape of a star, that had been tied into his wrappings when he was first found.

It would be good, he thought, to see Karin one more time.  But it did not matter.  They had said their farewells as though they knew they would not meet again short of Hel.

The moon rose slowly above the high hard hills to his left.  His shadow stretched at an angle, dark and liquid, across the rough surface of the courtyard.  He bent to tighten a shoelace and turned his head to be certain the soft peep off to his right was nothing more than a night bird.  There was another shadow next to his.  Someone was sitting beside him.

 

Medieval monasteries post-medieval

 The twelfth century was a high point for monasteries.  With very few exceptions (primarily the cathedrals), all urban churches then either were monasteries or houses of canons regular, where priests shared their property in common like monks, though they devoted their days to ministering to the community rather than the reading, writing, and prayer of the monastery.  A great many new monasteries had been established in the countryside.

But what happened to these monasteries?  Although many of the churches are still there, many have been repurposed, as parish churches, as museums, as Protestant churches, as private houses, even as theatres.

 How did this happen?  Well, monasteries began going downhill (by twelfth-century standards) in the late Middle Ages.  Abbots of important monasteries were appointed by the pope, and he tended to appoint his friends (or those who came up with a suitable "donation").  Many of these abbots were the titular heads of multiple monasteries.  They lived more like lords than monks, often having a town house where they spent most of their time, rather than at the monastery.  For example, the Cluny museum in Paris is called that because the building was a town house of the abbot of the Burgundian monastery of Cluny (the museum now houses many medieval artifacts, such as the head of an Old Testament king originally on the facade of Notre Dame).

During the early modern period (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries), a lot of old monasteries stopped having a regular life, or monks at all.  Some continued, but with a much more comfortable life than the twelfth century would have considered appropriate.  The houses that continued assumed they would always continue.  The monks rebuilt, made inventories of their property, and expected their life to continue indefinitely as it was.

Thus in France the French Revolution (starting 1789) was a great shock.  The country went officially atheistic, and monks were ejected from their monasteries, many of which passed into the hands of private individuals.  The carvings on many churches were defaced, which is how the royal head seen above was knocked off.  Some monasteries were repurposed as prisons.  Although France returned to Catholicism under Napoleon, most monasteries never regained their monks.  Something similar had happened in Great Britain two centuries earlier, when Henry VIII turned Protestant, and in those parts of Germany where the local ruler adopted Lutheranism.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some monasteries were reestablished, though far fewer than earlier.  Most are a little more relaxed than the twelfth century would have tolerated; for example, modern monks may watch TV.  A few are very strict, however, most notably the Trappists, a group formed by reforming a branch of the Cistercians, back in the seventeenth century.  But the indefinite future for which early modern monks planned clearly no longer exists.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on monasticism and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other online bookstores.  Ebook or paperback.