Book Reviews
Daniel Cure: The Silver Knight
Publisher:
Title: The Silver KnightAuthor: Daniel Cure
ISBN:
Publisher: Lulu
Pages: 426
1452, A very Bad Year, and a Bad Time to be in England!
This book isn't like any other book that I've ever read. Partly it's a novel and partly it's a history lesson. Many of the characters in the book give Anglo-centric, mid-late medieval history lessons either to each other or to the central character, Jacques. And, in a sense, this serves two purposes, one to educate him, and two, to educate us. And, to be fair, both he and we only get a relatively narrow medieval education at that, first-hand, through Jacques, who acts as a messenger and a witness inside the Westminster court of the largely unpopular French queen to Henry VI, Margaret of Anjou. We learn about the rivalries, both petty and serious, between Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York and Edmund Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset, which culminated in the Battle of St Albans, the first battle of the Wars of the Roses. And, before that, we learn about some of Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset's failings as a military commander. For it was under his stewardship that the Crown of England lost all of its territorial possessions in France.
Now, it's a matter of fact that there are a few juicy bits of the Hundred Years War that most people in the world are familiar with. (The arrival of Joan of Arc is one of the most internationally famous incidents, for example.) Actually, Joan of Arc herself is not mentioned at all in the novel, because the novel concentrates on a later bit of the Hundred Years War. But the epic struggle between England and France is mentioned several times and is one of the story's central themes. Of course English school children all get taught shamelessly about the two great English victories, of Crecy in 1346, and our warrior-king, Henry V's, miracle victory at Agincourt, in 1415. The battle of Agincourt is described in fairly fulsome detail, (even though it happened forty years before our story begins,) Jacques drags a blow-by-blow account out of an old knight who co-incidentally happens to be his saviour and patron. That old knight was a real historical figure called Sir John Falstof, (ignominiously misrepresented by William Shakespeare as the loveable, but cowardly, Sir John Falstaff, in the Henry IV plays.) It's the real-life war-hero, English history's Sir John Falstof, who befriends our central character, Jacques, finds a castle for him to live in a job to do, (becoming a medieval knight.) And all of that, is only a part of what happens in the story, the rest of it, (most of it, in fact,) is an account of Jacques series of adventures on becoming a penniless orphan and a stranger abroad in England when his father dies.
England at that time, in 1452, is no place for a homeless child. The whole country was unsettled by a calamitous series of events. Firstly the English army was recieving a proper pasting at the hands of the victorious French armies. Secondly England, but more importantly the crumbling government of Henry VI, was recovering from the ill effects of John Cade's popular rebellion. And thirdly, the king's government was no longer effectively running the country, (or the war,) but was in fact finding ever more dastardly ways of enriching its ministers at the expense of the population at large. Landlessness, poverty, hardship, lawlessness, injustices at the hands of various rapacious feudal barons, and many other social ills grew to almost epedemic proportions. It was a bad time to be anybody in England in 1452. But most of all it was a bad time to be a homeless boy in England in 1452. And the hero of Daniel Cure's novel, The Silver Knight, is one such extraordinarily unfortunate boy in that year of civil strife, social and economic peril and general English mysery.
Review by Patrick Mackeown, July 2008
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