The 12th Century Years ago, when I started to study this time with a view to writing about it, I came across this sentence in a book on medieval forestry: “There were no rabbits in the 12th century.” No rabbits? No rabbits? I’d imagined a countryside hopping with the little devils. In fact the writer was wrong; there were rabbits but they weren’t wild and hadn’t yet escaped from the warrens in which they were kept for eating. But it was a lesson. If I couldn’t rely on rabbits, what else wasn’t around in England eight hundred odd years ago? (No sycamore trees, for one thing – they didn’t arrive until the 17thcentury.) So began the long research. Every time one of my characters got up in the morning, dressed, ate, travelled, it was a whole new ballgame of enquiry. I learned Latin in order to read the manuscripts, deciphered household and monastic accounts, studied the legal documents, badgered experts, visited castles, convents, cathedrals... It took fifteen years. By the time I’d finished I could have told you fairly accurately what seventy percent of 12th century people were doing on any given date. (Peasants and clergy kept to a rigid calendar. King and court travelled extensively but signed charters as they went, so we know where they were.) And I knew I’d finished when, asking an obscure question of a professor of legal history in Ohio, he wrote back: “Look, we don’t know. Your guess is obviously as good as mine.” We don’t know, we can’t know; we have the writings of brilliant 12thcentury men – and one or two brilliant women – but, thinking life would never change, they don’t bother to tell us the everyday things. Could there have been a woman like my heroine Adelia, the investigative doctor, in the 12thcentury? Well, there were women doctors being trained at the amazing School of Medicine in Italy’s Salerno (then part of the Kingdom of Sicily). We have the evidence in a treatise written by one of them. So why not? Any story set in that time has to be educated guesswork. I like to believe mine is as good as any – after all that research it damn well ought to be. The late 1100s was the best of the Middle Ages. There were hot summers in which crops flourished and cold winters to kill off diseases. There was great learning, great advances, great art, great humanity. No witches and no heretics were burned in England then – that came later after the 14th century Black Death. I’m not saying I’d want to be centuries away from the nearest antibiotic but if I had to go back in time, that’s the period I’d choose. Stand in front of Chartres Cathedral in France, go inside and look at its windows, play a CD of 12th century music – there are some – listen to the chants, read the poetry, and feel, as I do, the God who those amazing people worshipped breathing down your neck.