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

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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.