Stephen Baxter: Conqueror

Ken Dark's Britain and the End of the Roman Empire (Tempus, 2000) is a recent and fascinating reference on the transitional centuries that followed the formal end of Roman Britain in AD 410. The sketch of the career of Arthur given here is based on the fragmentary sources available (see for instance Celt and Saxon by Peter Berresford Ellis (Constable, 1993)), and is of course speculative, as are all such accounts.

A reference to recent work on Bamburgh is Bamburgh Castle: The Archaeology of the Fortress of Bamburgh, AD 500 to AD 1500, published by the Bamburgh Research Project in 2003. A recent reference on Lindisfarne is Lindisfarne: Holy Island by Deirdre O'Sullivan and Robert Young (English Heritage, 1995).

Two useful references on the age of Alfred and the Vikings are Douglas Woodruff's The Life and Times of Alfred the Great (Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1993) and Julian D Richards' Viking Age England (Tempus, 2000).

Biographies of the key protagonists of 1066 include David Bates's William the Conqueror (Tempus, 2004) and Ian Walker's Harold: The Last Anglo-Saxon King (Sutton, 1997). There are many but contradictory sources on the Battle of Hastings. Stephen Morillo's The Battle of Hastings: Sources and Interpretations (Boydell Brewer, 1996) is a valuable compendium, and a recent review of these sources and the problems they pose is M.K. Lawson's The Battle of Hastings 1066 (Tempus, 2003). The description of the events given here is informed fiction. 1066 by Franklin Hamilton, a.k.a. science fiction writer Robert Silverberg (Dial Press, 1964) contains counterfactual speculation on the outcome, as does Cecelia Holland's essay in More What If (ed. Robert Cowley, Pan, 2002).

The 'flying monk' Aethelmaer was an historical character, mentioned in William of Malmesbury's twelfth-century history Gesta Regum Anglorum (The History of the English Kings). The monk Aethelred is my invention, however.

Names of people and places have been a challenge. The spellings of names which emerged from a pre-literate society are inevitably variable, and the names by which we know the peoples of this period aren't necessarily labels they would have applied to themselves. According to Bede, the British referred to their 'Anglo-Saxon' invaders as 'Germans', and I have used this label in relevant sections. By Alfred's time, the 'Anglo-Saxons' referred to themselves as 'English'. I have used Stenton as my primary guide to names and spelling. But this is a novel, and my priority has been editorial clarity.

Note that any dates given here are according to the calendar as used before its medieval adjustment of eleven days. The Battle of Hastings, fought on 14 October 1066, was 'our' 25 October – rather later in the autumn. However this period was in the middle of the 'Medieval Warm Period' (AD 900-1300) – a warm spell which enabled the Viking colonisation of Greenland and Vinland – and late October would typically be warmer than we would expect it now.

Regarding specific places, the remarkable sites I visited in the course of this project include Bamburgh, Pevensey, Jarrow, Lindisfame, Yeavering Bell and York. In October 2005 I witnessed a re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings itself, at Battle in Sussex, mounted by English Heritage and the Viking Society. Of course, as I noted in the first book of this series, there is no substitute for visiting these wonderful places.

Any errors or inaccuracies are my sole responsibility.

Stephen Baxter

Northumberland

August 2006