Herding Historical Author Cats: An Interview with the Founder of the English Historical Fiction Authors Blog Debra Brown

1) Please tell us a bit what the English Historical Fictions Authors blog is all about. What sort of content is present on the blog?

The blog has a daily British history post written by one of many historical fiction authors. The eras and topics range widely from Roman Britain to World War II, and from warfare and weapons to tea, food, and dance.

2) What sort of other web presence does the group have other than the blog?
As a group we have a public Facebook page, English Historical Fiction Authors, where we chat on history and historical fiction with other authors, reviewers, and readers. Each member has their own web presence as well, book sites, blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc. We interact frequently everywhere.

3) What motivated you to start the blog?

I was making an effort to market my first book and felt fairly alone in the jungle. I wanted to blog about England, but had very little background in history and had to do an overwhelming amount of research. I felt that there must be other people like myself who wanted to learn more about British history in small bites, and that we could have a steady stream of information if we had enough people to produce one daily post, so I invited people who had obviously done their homework to share what they had learned.

4) What's your goal with this group?

I hope we will continue as we have been for over two years now with a daily post and friendly conversations on Facebook. I believe it has been informative, fun, and helpful to us all.

5) What originally made you interested in English history?

As a child, I had a seven volume set of books called My Book House. They were captivating, with bits from great writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Keats. They also had detailed drawings and paintings that introduced me to castles, cliffs, land divided by hedgerows, fashions from past eras, and many things that I hardly understood from old English culture. I loved it, and over the decades to come I picked up information and began to better understand what I had seen.


6) A recent collection of essays from the blog came out, Castles, Customs, and Kings came out. Please tell us about that.

After we celebrated the first anniversary of the blog, one of our authors, Deborah Swift, suggested we put together a book from some of the first year's posts. After a year of sorting, editing, and proofreading, we have, with the help of Madison Street Publishing, released Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors—a large, thick book of topics just a few pages long. The subjects are organized chronologically so the book flows nicely over the passing of centuries. A person can pick it up and start at any point, however, and have a satisfying read during a coffee break. It would be a good waiting room book or a nice gift for someone who loves Britain or history. We also kept the price below $20 USD, so hopefully everyone who wanted a copy in print could have it.

7) Please tell us a bit about your work.

My first novel is The Companion of Lady Holmeshire, the early Victorian story of a former servant girl who receives a rude reception in polite society. It is an Austen type of story with surprising twists and turns. I have also started a Victorian novel I call For the Skylark, the story of adult twins who were raised isolated on an estate by their wealthy, reclusive mother. Evangeline cannot cope when she “loses” Dante, her brother and only friend, to love.

8) There is a lot of content on the blog. Please tell us about a few of your favorite entries.

I especially enjoy Richard Denning's post, Old English—The Language of the Anglo Saxons, in which he has a YouTube video of the Lord's Prayer read in the old tongue to eerie music. Though there are countless other fascinating topics, there have been a few by different authors on the Bayeaux Tapestry that stand out in my mind. It is a story of the Norman conquest of England told in complex, coded needlework on a long stretch of linen that has lasted for nearly a thousand years. The age of it alone is awe-inspiring, but I love the explanations given for the symbols sewn in above and below the actual stitched story itself.

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Thanks, Debra.

The books mentioned are available at the following links:

Castles, Customs, and Kings:

Amazon US
Amazon UK
Barnes and Noble
Kobo

Companion of Lady Holmeshire at Amazon.

From Rome to Napoleon: Portchester Castle and the Castles, Customs, and Kings Blog Hop

As many of you know, I occasionally pen historical essays over at the EFHA blog.

In an effort to provide an interesting not-so-little book of bits of English history, the powers that be from that blog (particularly Debra Brown and M.M. Bennetts) gathered up and edited a collection of the essays from the blog and did a bang up of organizing them by period. The result is a nice collection of English history from well, before there was an England all the way to modern times:

 

As part of celebration of the release of the book, there's a blog hop going on focused on castles (though, just to be clear, the book subject matters covers a lot of different aspects of English history, even beyond just the customs and kings of the title). There are many fine people discussing many fine bits (and giving things away as well), and you can find their blogs here:

For my part, I decided to discuss Portchester Castle, a castle that links the ancient past of England with the perhaps more familiar to many medieval and later period.

Our fine defensive fortification tale begins before there even was an England, in the 3rd century AD. At that time, the Romans, those ancient masters of defensive positions themselves, established a fort at the location of modern day Portchester, in Hampshire along the southern England coast. The area's access to the sea allowed the Romans to use the fort as a naval base, in particular in their attempts to deal with local pirates.

Once the Romans mostly withdrew from the area, the prime location of the fort still made it useful for later groups to use for similar reasons, such as the Saxons dealing with Viking pirates. The Saxons added some additional buildings and towers in the area, and the evidence suggests continual occupation from the 4th century on, even after the departure of the Romans.

Of course, 1066 and all that brought Norman domination of England. In the 11th and 12th century, Norman lords controlled and helped fortify the area even more by adding such features as additional defensive ditches, timber palisades, and additional towers.

The castle would move from mere nobles to royalty by the end of the 12th century. Three different England kings (John, Edward II, and Richard II) would occupy that castle at various points between the 12th and 15th century, and Henry V spent some time in the castle in 1415. Every new occupant brought new fortification, expansions (e.g., royal apartments), and remodeling of the area. Other important royal leaders from English history, including Queen Elizabeth I, would also grace its halls.

Ownership shifted back from royals to "mere" aristocracy in 1632, when one Sir William Uvedale (his descendants the Thistlethwaites still retain ownership of the castle) purchased the castle from Charles I. The shift from royalty also resulted in a shift from focus, as the castle was often used as a prison for prisoners of war in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. During this time, although the defensive fortifications of the castle were not strongly upgraded compared to earlier periods, many additional wooden houses were built to house prisoners.

Coalition victories in the Napoleonic Wars would lead to less necessity for military prison in the early 19th century, with the last prisoners of the war gone from the location by 1814. The military itself would leave in 1819.

Though I am not personally one who is inclined to believe in ghosts, the long history of the castle, combined with things like the deaths of prisoners there, may have contributed to Portchester Castle's reputation as one of England's more haunted castles.

Thanks for stopping by. I encourage you to stop by and visit the various other blog hop participants listed above.

In addition, as part of the celebration,  I'm giving away an eBook copy (available in Kindle/Mobi, ePub, and PDF) of my Regency paranormal romance, A Woman of Proper Accomplishments, which doesn't feature any castles, but does reference the Napoleonic War. If you're interested, just leave a comment with a contact e-mail, and I'll pick someone next week at random.