The Love Knot

Author's Note

The author's note at the end of my novels is the place where I like to explain the threads of my research which have had an important bearing on the telling of the tale. I think this is because quite often the truth is stranger than fiction and I want to show that while the main characters in The Love Knot have come from my imagination, the roots from which they sprang are firmly grounded in fact.

The period of the civil war in England between Stephen and Mathilda is a complicated one with families and loyalties strained and sundered, sides swapped at the flick of a sword, and sudden shifts in the balance of power. I have tried to simplify the politics as much as possible so that they do not hold up the drive of Oliver and Catrin's story. Indeed, to have covered every switch and turn of the conflict would have made The Love Knot longer than The Lord of the Rings, more complicated than a tangled ball of knitting wool, and given my editor a nervous breakdown! Having said that, all the broad brushstrokes of the turbulence are in place.

Since leprosy made a sufferer an outcast from society, there were those prepared to take desperate measures to find a cure It was while researching the midwife's art in the Middle Ages that I came across the true case of a Frenchman stricken with leprosy who had inveigled an unscrupulous midwife into procuring a stillborn child for him in the belief that its fat was a certain cure for the disease.

It was also while researching the role of the herb-wife on more general terms that I turned up a wealth of information on knot magic, a lore which had been practised from the time of the Ancient Greeks. Even today, when people marry they are said to be 'tying the knot', a saying that goes back to the binding of two life threads by the Goddess Aphrodite. For anyone wanting to read further, I recommend the utterly fascinating Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker.

Although I have used the name Chepstow in the novel, during Stephen's time it was known by the earlier Welsh title of Striguil. As this is a name unfamiliar to the modern reader, I have changed it to the later rendition by which it is now known.