fuonlyknew

Llys y Garn, a rambling Victorian-Gothic mansion, with vestiges of older glories, lies on the steep slopes of the Arian stream, under the Preseli heights, in the isolated parish of Rhyd y Groes in North Pembrokeshire. It is the house of the parish, even in its decline, deeply conscious of its own importance, its pedigree and its permanence.

Others see it differently.

Rooks wheel over the deep valley of the Arian and see it in its entirety. Below them, tangled oak forests cloak the slopes, from the high crags to the glinting flash of the river as it swells, gathering the gullies that pour down from the hills, heading for the thundering ocean.

The rooks are the real owners of these forests. Their nests cluster in the trees and have done so from time beyond time. To them, the great house, Llys y Garn, is a transitory thing, intrusive, shape-shifting, of value for the occasional perch it offers, the food it discards. But it isn’t permanent, like them.

They see it from above, a mess of slate and cobbles, gable ends and chimney pots and mossy urns on terraces, clinging to the hillside.

But they saw it too when there was nothing here but round houses, women squatting over querns and wolves howling in the deep woods.

They saw it when, below the Devil’s stones of Bedd y Blaidd, a nobleman held court for poets, in a timber hall under sooty thatch, and men quarrelled over family feuds.

They saw it when gatehouse, stables, kitchen and stores clustered around a great stone hall and tower, and kings fought for sovereignty.

They saw it when Tudor wings embraced the hall and people battled and butchered over the sanctity of bread and wine.

They saw the dismantling and remodelling as Queen Anne breathed her last.

They saw the slow decay, the arrival of Victorian affluence and the building of a house that dreamed of King Arthur and croquet on the lawn. The rooks were not, and never will be, greatly concerned with documents, but it might be of interest to note that in the 1881 census, Llys y Garn, with its associated dwellings, was listed as the home of Edward Merrick-Jones, gentleman, aged thirty-six, his wife Agnes, son James, aged five, aunt Eleanor Pendrick (visitor), and twenty-seven servants, indoors and out. The Arthurian croquet lifestyle required a great deal of maintenance.

Romancing the past.

I write historical fiction, or fiction in which history plays a vital part, but my books don’t necessarily fit the usual sub-genres. I don’t write about famous people – not even Tudor Queens. Plenty of other authors do that very well. There is a whole sub-genre, I know, of Historical Romance, but I don’t think anyone reading my books would mistake them for romances.

What a lot of romance there was in the past. Romantic fiction too, from tales of King Arthur, Tristram and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere. Everywhere, troubadours were singing about knights wooing fair ladies, begging for their favours, swooning with desire, passion swirling in the air. One thing that was lacking was the final line “and they married and lived happily ever after,” but it does seem to be an essential part of historical romances. Man and woman fall in love and therefore, after various adventures, with plots to divide them, they finally get married.

In the 20th century, except in royal families, it was taken for granted that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. Go back to the start of the 19th century and the idea is germinating, but it is still an ideal rather than a norm. There are repeated conflicts in Jane Austen’s novels between characters who see marriage as a matter of affection, like Elizabeth Bennet, and those who see it as a financial settlement, like Charlotte Lucas. Sometimes there are characters, like Eleanor Dashwood, who realise that a certain level of financial security is essential to ensure the survival of affection. There are also characters, especially among the older generation, who see marriage as a matter in which parents arrange and children obey. Jane Austen was writing at a critical moment in romance. Prior to the nineteenth century, marriages were arranged, by parents or by the couple, as a deal, a contract providing benefits and demanding duties, and romance had nothing to do with it.

Among the propertied classes, marriage was very much a matter of exchanging assets. It was the families of bride and groom and their potential alliances that mattered, with a view to enrichment, security or improved status. Sons and daughters were at the disposal of their parents or, if they were noble orphans, at the disposal of the King, who had an interest in the land, titles and, especially, military forces they represented. If they found their future spouse agreeable, that was a lucky bonus. Their duty, impressed by society, church and outright force, was to produce children who would ensure a line of succession to keep that all-important land and title in the family. They didn’t have to like each other. They didn’t have to fancy each other. They didn’t have to be heterosexual. They just had to procreate.

For the ordinary labourer, there might have been less pressure to obey parents, but the same imperative existed to produce children, because without them, how would men and women survive in their old age when they were too crippled or blind to be able to work and feed themselves? Love wasn’t really a consideration, although lust played a useful part. Come May Day, or Harvest Home, or those long summer nights when the rye was high, there was plenty of frolicking opportunity to get down and dirty. Any resulting pregnancy would likely lead to marriage, not because of disgrace or the need to amend sin, but because if the couple were capable of producing children, that was good enough to make their future relatively secure.

My books feature marriages, but that really isn’t the same as romance. In SHADOWS, which is set in the present day, there are marriages created in the 20th century way, via a belief in the all-conquering power of love, attraction and romance, and they don’t work out very well at all. In LONG SHADOWS, set across six centuries, there are marriages or attempted marriages created in the old way, via arrangement, command, calculation and convenience, and I am afraid they don’t work very well either. But then, if I don’t write romance, I do write drama.