CHAPTER 14

Joliffe took in that bit of information with a jolt deep in his guts.  Was still finding his way to some response when Sebastian said with less satisfaction, “Not that that suffices to prove anything…”

In the early days of new prosperity for Basset’s company, Joliffe treated himself to a small book of poems by Thomas Hoccleve, purchased from a scrivener in London.  If you’d not heard of Hoccleve before then, I’m not particularly surprised.  Despite his poetry seeming to have been reasonably popular in his own time (born in the late 1360s; died 1426), it afterward fell from notice for a few centuries, was then noticed and denigrated by scholars for a few generations, and only in the latter half of the 1900s began to be appreciated again.

Hoccleve himself admired and knew his contemporaries Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, and seems to have actually been one of several scribes who copied out some manuscripts of their work.  His admiration did not keep him from a personal creative vigor all his own, though, including a wry willingness to write against the grain of fashion.  Where it was common practice to set poems in the fair, green days of Spring, he began one long work with:

“After that harvest had inned his sheaves,                                                      [brought in]
And that the brown season of Michaelmas
Was come, and began the trees rob of their leaves . . .
And they into color of yellowness
Had died and been down thrown underfoot . . .”

And whereas it was commonplace to have a poem take place as a dream to the poet, Hoccleve instead preferred to keep the moment intensely awake and personal as:

“And in the end of November, upon a night,
Sighing sore, as I in my bed lay,
For this and other thoughts which many a day,
Before, I took, sleep came none in my eye,
So vexed me the thoughtful malady.”                                    [melancholy/depression]

Indeed, he was very much the poet of the personal, to a degree that only the captive Charles, duke of Orleans matched in England at the time.

Hoccleve worked for his living all his life as a government clerk in the Office of the Privy Seal at Westminster, but at some point in his life he had some manner of mental breakdown – “…the substance of my memory, Went away to play for a certain time…”  — so severe that it incapacitated him and frightened people away from him.  When he recovered, he wrote of that, too – the anguish of losing control of his thoughts, the friends who deserted him, and his struggle to recover, all the while questioning the reason why it happened to him.

Hoccleve seems to me very much a poet who would appeal to Joliffe, both for his wry humor and deep thoughtfulness, as well as for his rich use of words.  I personally think I may keep for my own use in moments of severe irk, “Vexation of spirit and torment, Lack I right none.  I have them in plenty”!

There’s a quite satisfactory Wikipedia article about him, including a contemporary painting of him presenting one of his works to the future Henry V, and a painting of his much-admired Geoffrey Chaucer that Hoccleve included in a manuscript of his own poems as a “remembrance” of Chaucer for the sake of those who had not known him or had forgotten what he looked like – an endearing gesture on Hoccleve’s part toward a man he never ceased to admire.

There are various modern editions of his works.  From my own library, I can recommend:

Hoccleve, Thomas. “My compleinte” and Other Poems. ed. Roger Ellis.  University of Exeter Press, 2001.
Hoccleve, Thomas. The Regiment of Princes. ed. Charles R. Blyth.  Medieval Institute Publication, 1999.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 13

A few days followed that were as near ordinary as Joliffe was used to anymore.  He worked twice with the young devils for hell’s harrowing.  He firmed his lines as Ane and the Prophet into his mind.  He strolled out once to see how Tisbe and Ramus were doing where they were pastured outside of Coventry.  He spent time with Basset and the others, helping with their cart and gear, Basset having decreed that this while off the road was the perfect time to give a good tending to everything, from greasing the wheels and checking all the underpinnings and harness to laying out every one of their playing properties, to mend those that needed it and dispose of such as were past decent use.  Basset set Joliffe and Gil on quest to find and buy what could be used in place of the latter, a quest which diverted Joliffe and Gil for most of a day and gave Joliffe chance to be in places around Coventry for which he might otherwise have lacked excuse…

I’ve said a little bit about Saint Genesius the Actor (otherwise St. Genesius of Rome) elsewhere, but there’s more to be said – as well as adding the fact that there are several Saints Genesius, so you want to be sure you’re invoking the right one, depending on your particular need, right?  Especially since I can’t help the suspicion — given the Church’s official stance against players — that St. Genesius the Bishop is the one who makes it rain on outdoor performances of the Genesius Guild’s plays.

Although it is disputed whether he existed at all, if St. Genesius of Rome did live, it was about 300 CE because his story has him martyred during the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian.  It seems that Genesius was a happily pagan actor but became well enough acquainted with Christians to understand their faith.  While performing in a play in the emperor’s presence, mocking the Christian rite of baptism, Genesius suddenly converted to belief and acceptance of the faith.

He then proceeded to tell the emperor so.

Diocletian, in return, ordered him tortured.  When Genesius still refused to give up his new faith, he was beheaded.

His feast day is August 25, and he is considered the patron saint not only of actors, but of dancing teachers, mountebanks, musicians, and organ-blowers – apparently the sort of people considered fit companions for actors?

Modern additions to this list include lawyers, barristers, and stenographers.  I am not going to speculate on this.

St. Genesius, Bishop of Clermont is another sort altogether.  For one thing, he is known for certain to have lived.  In the first half of the 600s, when Christianity was the accepted religion in Europe, he grew up at Clermont, France, and was (as told in Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints) “learned, virtuous, and benevolent”, and so beloved in the area that when the previous bishop died, Genesius was unanimously elected his successor by churchmen and common people alike.  He really didn’t want the job, even tried to go to Rome to ask the pope to release him from the office, but his people insisted and he became “like a wise father” in the diocese, building a church, a hospice, and a monastery.  He died quite peacefully about 660.

Unfortunately for him, a Google search for “St. Genesius” does not bring up a reference to him until the third page.  Apparently being certainly real does not compensate for not being an actor and martyr, however possibly fictitious.  Now that I think about it, he may have more reasons than one for raining out those plays.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 12

The work with Dick went well enough, and Joliffe told him so.  That did not keep the boy from bolting out the yard’s rear gate as soon as Joliffe released him.  Powet, watching his great-nephew escape, suggested they leave the same way.  “So as not to trouble my niece, you know.”

More likely to avoid being called to account for Dick’s disappearance, Joliffe guessed, but agreed.  His own motives were mixed and he regretted that.  He liked Powet, understood somewhat the hurt the man was in, but beyond that he was not likely to have a better source than Powet for matters in Coventry and about Kydwa.  That made of value every chance to talk with him and draw him out…

Old John Kydwa quotes from the book of Ecclesiastes in this chapter, but while the words are close enough to the familiar form in more modern bibles for the verse to be identifiable, they’re nonetheless different enough to ring strange.  That’s because they’re drawn from the medieval English Bible of John Wycliffe.

There are a number of misconceptions regarding this early translation of the Bible.  For one thing, bibles in the vernacular were not a new phenomenon, either in English or other languages.  As early as the 700s portions of the Bible were being translated into Old English and German and surely other languages.  By the end of the 1100s there were enough vernacular versions abroad in Europe – and several powerful heresies using them – that the pope banned versions of the Bible not authorized by the Church.  Still, in the late 1200s there was a complete Bible in French, with no sign that the Church tried to suppress it, and around the mid-1300s there was a Czech translation of the whole Bible, a few decades ahead of Wyclif’s Bible in the 1380s.

So the concept of a Bible in the language of ordinary people was not a cause of trouble in itself.  In truth, reading the Bible in English was not automatically punishable as heresy.  The heresy lay in using what you interpreted from the Bible as reason to challenge and deny the Church’s authority.  Telling the Church it was wrong and refusing to obey it – that was heresy, and all the more infuriating to the Church because the refusal was usually accompanied by a matching refusal to fulfill the monetary duties the Church required of good Christians.

In England, the heresy that arose in the late 1300s was Lollardy, and its challenge to the Church reached such a pitch that Wyclif’s Bible was banned in 1408.  Even then, however, it was not absolutely illegal to possess a copy of it.  Copies appear listed among the books of a number of nobles, including the famously pious King Henry VI himself, and it can be a fair assumption that many more people had copies that have escaped the records.  In fact, texts from the Wyclif Bible exist in more than 250 medieval manuscripts, more than for any other piece of Middle English literature.  True, by the time of A Play of Heresy it was necessary to have official permission from the Church to possess a copy, but that was not impossible to get nor would it immediately brand you a heretic.

As for reading Wyclif’s Bible today, the language can be dense and difficult going, but every once in a while some familiar passage lights up with a fresh seeming because the words are different.  Perhaps my favorite is from the Psalms:  “. . . and my cuppe, fillinge greetli, is ful cleer.  And thi merci schal sue me; in alle the daies of my lijf.  And that Y dwelle in the hows of the Lord; in to the lengthe of daies.” —  . . . and my cup is greatly filled full clear.  And thy mercy shall pursue me in all the days of my life.  And I [will] dwell in the house of the Lord into the length of days.”

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 11

With Piers full of delight at showing off his skills and surprisingly patient at helping the other boys begin to learn simple tumbling, Joliffe had an easier time with the pack of them than he had feared he would.  Whatever Piers had been doing these days of running wild in the town, he had plainly found an acknowledged place among these boys that made them willing to listen to him and follow his lead.  Of course the thought of anyone following Piers’ lead in anything was usually cause for alarum, but Joliffe was not about the scorn the present usefulness of it…

In A Play of Heresy there’s much talk about merchants traveling back and forth between Coventry and Bristol, with mention made of the iron and wool that come into Coventry as raw materials and later sent out as completed goods.  What some readers may find surprising — given the prevalent notion that medieval people did not travel far from home (the exceptions of course being to go on crusade or pilgrimage, or forming a mob to march on London) — is just how widely medieval people travelled in the ordinary way of things.

In England by late medieval times, serfdom was well on the wane due to economic changes at the manorial level, and by way of people named such things as John of Bywater and Joan of Ramsey turning up hired in towns a goodly distance from their apparent birthplace, we know there was significant shifting of individuals about the landscape and that people did not necessarily stay within a few miles of their village for all their lives.

Among those who most surely travelled farthest and widest were the merchants – the heart of the rising middle class of their day – and with them, not incidentally, would go their servants, taking advantage of an elaborate network of trade routes spread the length and breadth of England and stretching well overseas.  Within England, there was a constant movement of native products: iron and other metals and the finished products made from them; wool to weaving centers from which the finished cloth went Europe-wide; slates from Wales to roof houses in London; coals from the North to heat homes in the south (air pollution from coal fires are noted in London in the 1480s); cattle on the hoof by drove roads from the grazing uplands in far corners of Britain to towns and cities where they could be sold for a profit.  And so on.

And then from the ports, goods and merchants constantly came and went, ranging north to Iceland and the Scandinavian countries and into the Baltic, east to Flanders and France, southward along the Iberian coasts, with hope of eventually breaking the Italian control of the Mediterrean trade.  A fascinating work that details this international trade from the English perspective is The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye – The Little Book of English Policy – written about 1436 and happily to be read online, should you wish to see into what a wide network of international trade the mercers and drapers and other merchants of Coventry were actually bound.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 10

With both of them mutually silenced for the moment by those thoughts, Joliffe took his empty cup and Sebastian’s and went to have them refilled.  Sitting down again and handing Sebastian his, he said, “It would be good to know if the murderer encountered Kydwa by chance or on purpose, planned ahead to kill him or simply used the moment as it came.  And what happened to the horses Kydwa and his man were riding?”

Here and in the previous chapter, Joliffe is in the first stages of gathering sufficient information to catch a murderer.  But could he, would he – as a medieval man — actually have done this?  I ask because I’ve heard that someone has claimed that all history mysteries set in medieval times are simply wrong from the very outset – are not historical at all — because medieval people didn’t do that kind of thinking, that the concept of detecting anything was beyond them.

This notion has to be rooted in the enduring idea that the Middle Ages were inhabited by people who were, without exception, crude, violent, ignorant, and unremittingly filthy and disease-ridden; that medieval people could not read or wash or stop killing each other, and certainly couldn’t think much beyond the level of “Who do I hit/rape/rob/slaughter next?” or – at best – “When will the Renaissance get here so I can take a bath?”

I shall ignore all the exceedingly overt evidence that might give someone with an ounce of intellectual chutzpa pause over accepting the above clichés.  That’s for another day.  Instead, let’s simply look at the idea of whether medieval people had the concept of “detect”.

The immediate, plain answer is yes.

Admittedly, no one could be a “detective” because the word did not come into being until the 1800s, but the words “detect”, “detection”, and “investigate” were alive and well in England by late medieval times.

More than that, instructions to coroners as early as the 1200s give instructions on what to look for at the scene of a crime that are still procedurally valid today.

But then there’s “sleuthing”.  Oddly enough, until just now I had never given the word much thought.  Maybe it feels too Sherlock Holmesian, but for whatever reason, I’d never thought of using it.  Now, as an exercise in expanding my vocabulary horizons, I just checked my Oxford English Dictionary and am taken by surprise.  (A refreshingly common occurrence.)  “Sleuth” does exist as a medieval word.  Unfortunately, its primary meaning as a noun is “sloth” or “laziness”.  Not the best of qualities for our, um, detective.  Only somewhat better is its secondary, albeit Scottish, meaning, dating from 1200, where “sleuth” means the track or trail of a person or animal.  But as a verb, it seems to have only referred to being slothful – meaning to delay, postpone, and neglect.  Apparently it was not used in the sense of tracking a person until the early 1900s.

So I guess that while Joliffe can go on investigating and detecting, he won’t be doing any sleuthing.  Unless he decides to take some time off work, of course.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 9

Cautious to make his curiosity seem light, Joliffe said, “I thought I’d heard Lollards were against plays and players.  Mockers of God’s creation.  Mockers of the divine.  All that manner of thing.”

“They wouldn’t live long in Coventry crying havoc against our plays,” Powet said easily.  “Nay, it’s only the worst of them that go that far with things.  Same sort as think they can overthrow the king and lords and church and all.  I’d guess most have naught against it at all, just enjoy suchlike with the rest of us.”

The town of Coventry was a prospering place in the 1400s, and as was usual in prospering medieval towns, the citizens showed their gratitude to God (and, not so incidentally, their prosperity) by building grand churches. In Coventry’s case, that included three churches with fine spires.

Over the following centuries, Coventry’s prosperity fell and rose in cycles, but always rising proud against the sky above the town were the three spires of its great churches. Of course when Joliffe comes to Coventry in 1438, there are only two finished spires. He sees the third, unfinished, as he approaches the town, and later, he has an assignation in the church there – St. Michael’s, a parish church so grand that when Coventry became a bishopric, St. Michael’s became its cathedral.

In my travels around Britain, I’ve been in many cathedrals, collecting guidebooks, taking notes, garnering impressions, but although I’ve been to Coventry several times, I’ve never been inside medieval St. Michael’s. It isn’t there anymore. When the medieval heart of Coventry burned in 1940, its cathedral burned with it. The handsome church that Joliffe walks through in A Play of Heresy was hit with too many incendiary bombs to survive even the heroic efforts made to save it. The lead covering the roof melted and ran like rainwater. The carved roof timbers burned and crashed into the nave and chapels. The stained glass windows shattered. The great stone pillars cracked and fell into rubble.

What the people of Coventry did afterward is an inspiration to warm the heart, but it’s not for telling here. Here the question is: If St. Michael’s is gone, what do we actually know of what Joliffe sees there?

Happily, the age of photography had come before St. Michael’s went. There are useful books and online sites in plenty that show its floorplan and how it was before World War II. For me, though, the source that touched me most deeply came in a fat bundle of little pamphlets from a series called Notes on Famous Churches and Abbeys. Sent by English friends, they include one on St. Michael’s, Coventry, and while other sources had much to tell me, there is sometime particularly immediate in reading words about St. Michael’s written by someone when St. Michael’s was still “alive”, when it was an actual place that could be walked through and experienced, not merely a memory and a regret.

For me, this particularly matters, because bringing alive a past time and place and people is what I try so hard to do in all my books. So much is gone from medieval times, most of it leaving behind far less trace than St. Michael’s has, that the recreating can be laborious, but I’m always glad to do the most I can to make lost places, lost people, lost times seem immediate and real, giving a kind of life to what is otherwise altogether gone.

At Historic Coventry, if you go to the bottom of this page, there is an aerial photograph of St. Michael’s as it was in the late 1800s. Click on the picture to see an identical photo the day after the German raid in 1940.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 8

Joliffe went with him willingly, wanting escape from there almost as much as Powet did but even more wanting escape from the chill foreboding cramping at the base of his gut.  He was never comfortable when Fortune, that treacherous goddess with her wheel that rolled you high only so she could roll you low, seemed to play suddenly into his hands.  The mourning behind him was for a man expected home a week or more ago and now found dead, and Joliffe was afraid of the answer even as he questioned…

Of all medieval symbols that have lost their potency over the centuries, perhaps the most debased is Fortune’s Wheel.

Let me write “Wheel of Fortune” now, and what probably comes first to most modern minds is that long-running television game show dedicated to the fulfilling and frustration of plain greed.  The medieval goddess Fortuna’s Wheel had a more complex meaning than that.

First, of course, Fortuna was not considered an actual goddess (polytheism not being an acceptable concept in medieval Europe).  Like her Wheel itself, she was a symbol – a way of illustrating a complicated idea in an abbreviated, visual form.  The symbol for a sports team or other popular product presently serves that same purpose, but Fortuna and her Wheel had deeper significance.  Sight of them was supposed to remind mankind that nothing lasts.

Pictures of Fortuna with her Wheel show a beautifully gowned woman, often crowned, often blindfolded, standing beside a giant, upright wheel in her control.  Around the rim, small figures of humans cling.  Some are obviously being carried upward toward the top of the Wheel where a richly garbed figure is always perched, an obvious winner who has Made It To The Top.  But below him, opposite to the rising figures, are figures clinging desperately, head downward and all too plainly being carried down against their will, while at the Wheel’s bottom are those fallen as far as they can go, ragged and impoverished.

Particularly effective are pictures where the little figures around the rim are the same man, rising to the height of prosperity, only to be cast down by blind Fortune.  But still Fortuna’s Wheel is always turning, and there he always is, still clinging to the rim, still trying to rise, always repeating the fate no human can escape – Life’s constant rise and downward sweep and rise again, only to sweep downward once more.  Inconstant Fortune.  This was meant to be a potent reminder of the world’s inconstant ways and a lesson to Man that he should strive to escape his clinging to Fortune’s Wheel by stepping away from worldly things and cleaving to those of the eternal realm of the spirit.

Not, of course, that this high purpose kept ordinary folk, in the ordinary way of things, from praying for Fortuna’s favor when they went to cast the dice or wager on a horse race.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 7

The players were readying to bed when Joliffe came up the stairs.  Someone – probably Rose – had already laid out his pallet, pillow, and blanket.  Basset asked how the practice had gone with Sendell and all.

“Not so bad as he feared,” Joliffe said.  “He has some players who will do.”

“But then there’s you,” Ellis said.

Making show of ignoring that, Joliffe went on…

A number of records survive from Coventry, including accounts of the expenses for various guilds in various years.  From 1450, the craft guild of Smiths’ accounts include:

Accounts in other years have such things as:

The mending of Herod’s gown is probably explained by the fact that the actor playing Herod was generally expected to fling himself about as he ranted and raged, a tradition that held for probably close to two hundred years at least, as evidenced by Shakespeare having Hamlet warn his players not to “out-Herod Herod.”

We also have a pay scale for 1490, where God is paid 2 s. [shillings], Caiphus 3 s. 4d., Herod 3s. 4d., Pilate’s wife 2s., two devils and Judas 18 d., Peter and Malkus 16 d., Pilate 4s.

From the Coventry Leet Book, in the accounts kept for the expenses of producing the Weaver’s Play in the year 1542:

Or, as those last two items are actually spelled:

These are all from Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, ed. R.W. Ingram, University of Toronto Press, 1981 – one of a series of marvelous books where scholars, having gone back through local records, from the earliest ones available on into the 1600s, gathering all references to drama and other entertainments.  There’s hardly a better way to see the plays from the working side of them – and a delightful way it is, too.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 5

Before he went his way, Will Sendell offered to come for Joliffe late in the afternoon, to take him where his company (said somewhat scornfully) would have their practice.  He added, “If we’re somewhat before the others, you can have chance to look through the script, to see if there’s aught to be done with it.”

Chapters 5 and 6 are taken up with Joliffe’s first involvement in the play that’s mainly his through the rest of the book.  Under the guise of the rehearsal, I slip in our first acquaintance with people later vitally involved in the story.  That said, though, I have to admit I greatly enjoyed the chance to blend in some finer points of medieval stagecraft.

Because of that, questions can arise over just how likely it was that medieval players brought the degree of skill to their work as Joliffe and Sendell show here and require of their fellows.  Besides the evidence of the plays themselves, requiring a high level of acting skill to make them effective, we have documentation from the time that shows how acting was seen as a complex and demanding skill.

At its most basic is the hope expressed in one play that the players’ “pronunciation of what they are to say here may be firm and sure, and no bad delivery [of lines] obscure the matter.”  (Something devoutly hoped by all directors to this day.)  In another play are the instructions “And let Adam himself be well instructed when he must reply, lest in replying he be either too quick or too slow.  Let not only Adam, but all the persons be so instructed, that they shall speak coherently, and make gestures agreeing with the thing they are speaking of; . . . and to the metre of the verse let them neither add nor subtract a syllable, but let them pronounce every thing clearly; and let those things that are to be said be said in their due order.”  Obviously someone had had to deal with players both insufficiently professional and far too free-form in their playing.

Even more telling is an ordinance recorded by the city of York for April 1476 as part of readying for their great cycle of Corpus Christi plays.  It decrees that “…yearly in the time of Lent there shall be called afore the Mayor … four of the most cunning [skilled], discrete, and able players within this city to search here and examine all the players and plays and pageants throughout all the artificers belonging to the Corpus Christi play, and all such as they shall find sufficient in person and cunning [skill] to the honor of the city and worship of the said crafts for to admit and able and all other insufficient persons either in cunning, voice, or person to discharge, remove, and avoid [dismiss].”

As William Tydeman well-observes in English Medieval Theatre: 1400-1500, if skill, voice, and appearance “were the three qualities felt to be essential for players in York in 1476, these may well be the criteria which were applied to the field of medieval acting as a whole.”

And so, firm in agreement that if this level of skill was expected of amateurs, an equal or higher one would be demanded of professionals, I set Joliffe and Sendell to coaching their fellows, neatly giving cover to whatever authorial machinations I might be perpetrating the while.

– Margaret

Sources
Robinson, J.W.,  “Medieval English Acting”, Theatre Notebook,  vol. 13 (1959), p.86
Tydeman, William.  English Medieval Theatre: 1400-1500. 1986. p.183

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CHAPTER 4

Since there was no peace to be had in the players’ upper chamber once several women gathered to their sewing there with Rose, Joliffe spent the next morning cramped into a corner of the players’ cart with the scroll of the Nativity (it being called that for simplicity’s sake) play entrusted to him by Basset.  Before seeing what might be done with the Messenger, he made a quick read through the whole play, this being Basset’s copy and so all of it.  Everyone else in the play would have only his own part and whatever line from someone else’s speech cued each of his own speeches.  That saved on ink and paper but could make confusion over what happened when and with whom until everyone became familiar with whatever play they were doing…

There were, upon a time, far more medieval English plays than now exist, and even some of what we have are only fragments, but from what remains, we can build an idea of the richness there must have been.

Probably best known among the survivors are the “cycle plays”, written to be performed in procession on specially-made “pageant wagons” through the streets of cities and towns prosperous enough to afford the extravaganza.  The most complete sets of plays that can be associated with their towns are those from York and Chester.  Others that are known to have existed have disappeared completely or only partially remain, as with Coventry’s, where we have two plays surviving and no more, despite evidence showing there were a number of others.

But there were a number of other kinds of plays to be had in medieval England, and some of those we still have, too: Single-episode biblical dramas; knockabout farces; “action dramas” with Robin Hood and St. George; the exquisite Everyman; the brutal (but fragmentary) Dux Moraud ; and, far from least, large-scale productions like The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, and Mankind that require a large playing place, numerous cast, elaborate sets, and special effects.  Unhappily, they’re only a pittance of what there must once have been, giving tantalizing suggestions of things we’ll never have a chance to see (which makes taking the chance to see modern productions of what survives all the more precious).

To my own ends, when Joliffe appeared in The Bastard’s Tale, I had chance to use both Wisdom and an actual farce from the time, and in A Play of Heresy I use Coventry’s surviving two for the plays Joliffe and his company are most involved with.  With all these plays, as I “produced, directed, and acted” them while writing the stories, I came to appreciate more and more fully just how theatrically effective they are.  In other of Joliffe’s books, most of the plays that Basset’s company have done have been of my own imagining because few small plays, such as would work for a small traveling company, have survived.  But I’m ambitious for Basset’s company: There are still some splendid plays that I very much want to see them do and a number of medieval theatrical experiences I want to explore – with murder and intrigue along the way, of course.

– Margaret

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