Gone Medieval - A Fourteenth Century Thriller: The Lawless Land

Episode Date: August 20, 2022

England, 1351. In the aftermath of the Pestilence, Gerard Fox - a young knight robbed of his ancestral home, his family name tarnished - sets forth to petition the one man who can restore his lands and reputation. Fox's road entangles him with an enigmatic woman, a priceless relic, and a dark family secret. In today’s Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis meets #1 New York Times bestselling thriller writer Boyd Morrison who has teamed up with his sister Beth Morrison - senior curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum - to find out about their first historical fiction novel together, a fast-paced adventure titled The Lawless Land.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. I'm delighted to be joined today by a brother and sister team Boyd and Beth Morrison who have collaborated on a wonderful new novel titled The Lawless Lands. Boyd is a number one New York Times bestselling author with 12 thrillers under his belt including collaborations with Clive Custler. Beth is senior curator of manuscripts at the J-Porggetti Museum and has a PhD in the history of art from Cornell University.

Thank you so much for joining me today, Beth and Boyd. I'm delighted to be here. And I am already gone medieval, so I'm on your side. Oh, fantastic. We'll get sound about it said of that. I'll pay you the advertising fees later. So I guess the first question that I have is how do you come to write a book together as a brother and sister team? I'm sure a lot of people can't imagine anything worse than trying to work in a creative process alongside a sibling. Was it all smooth sailing? And I'm kind of hoping you say no. Yeah, that would be the much more interesting story. We've been best friends all our lives. And so it actually was very smooth. We balance each other out really well with our different backgrounds.

And we get along. We've taken many long vacations together, including researching the locations for this book. And the way we started it is I had the idea to do a historical thriller novel. But I I didn't know the time period. I know World War II pretty well, but I didn't know what to choose. And then my wife said, you've got the perfect co-author to do a book with. And I said, who's that? And she said, your sister, Beth. And so I called her up. What did I ask you, Beth? I think you just said, would you like to write a novel with me? And I said, yes, before I even knew anything else about it. But the idea of working with Boyd on something medieval, which are like two of my favorite things in the world, I couldn't resist. and it seemed like such a perfect collaboration, because for years, I've always been one of Boyd's

first readers. I love thriller novels. I love Boyd's novels. And I was always giving feedback about plot and whatnot, but it never occurred to me to actually work with him. All the stars aligned, and it all seems to fit perfect. If I can just start with you for a second, Beth, you're, as I mentioned, the senior curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. that must put you in a good position to craft a medieval story. But can you tell us a little bit more about the manuscripts that you work with and some of the exhibitions that you've been involved with, please? I'm just going to ignore the book for a second and indulge my medievalist interests. You can never indulge your medievalist interest too much for me.

Boyd has been on the receiving end of my medievalist interests for a very long time. I actually discovered illuminated manuscripts when I was 15, and I just knew that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. and I've been incredibly lucky in being able to attain that goal. The Getty has actually a fairly small collection of manuscripts compared to something like the British Library, which has thousands and thousands. Our collection is only about 230, but we do have a very active exhibition program. And so we show four different shows a year of manuscripts.

And so that really makes the Getty distinctive. But it's also given me a real background, I think, in storytelling. And I think one of the things that Boyd always enjoyed, traveling with me was, I don't think he's like a natural museum goer, but he always enjoyed going through with me because I think my enthusiasm for the artworks and my knowledge really brought them to life in a different way. And I think that was one of the reasons that he reached out to me for this book. Boy's nodding. That is a very entertaining storyteller. I wanted to write a story about all the trips that she has taken because she always has an amazing story

about something that happened on the airplane or getting lost in St. Petersburg. Yeah, she's a great storyteller. I've gone to all of her exhibitions. The latest one was, I think, Book of Beasts, the bestiary in the medieval world. And it was incredible. Just going through the exhibition with her brings a whole new light to it. That's what it's like going to a museum with me, but I'm not sure everyone would agree. I've just bore people about all the things I know.

Could you tell us a little bit about that exhibition on the Book of Beast? please, Beth. Yeah, one of my other loves has always been animals. And a bestiary is a sort of medieval encyclopedia of animals. But instead of telling, like, how much they typically weigh or what you would regularly find in a Wikipedia entry, the medieval bestiary was really about making correspondences between the natural world and the divine. So all the animals had significance in the Christian worldview. But there's all these sort of crazy stories about animals, not just dogs and cats and bears, but like unicorns and phoenixes and all of this. So it just seemed like a really great opportunity

to bring those manuscripts together. We actually were able to bring together two-thirds of the world surviving bestiaries. And when I went through with Boyd and his wife, Randy, they actually spent two full days going through with me. And one of our longest stops was at a case about foxes because the main character in our story is named Gerard Fox. So we even were able to slip a little bestiary lore

into the book, so keep your eyes out for that. Fantastic. And do you feel like your experiences with medieval manuscripts affected the direction and the interests of the story? Does it have that element of a medieval chivalric romance to it? Yeah, I think there's two elements that are really very distinctive. One is that chivalric element that you talk about. The story revolves around a medieval manuscript in many ways. You'll have to discover in the book what that is. But of course, I was like, okay, if I'm going to write a book, a medieval manuscript is going to be its heart. But I think Boyd's approach in terms of the overall feeling of the story is very medieval in a way itself. And so I'll

let Boyd take it from there. Yeah, it's really about what it means to be a knight and noble and living up to the chivalric ideals. And we explore that a lot in the story. And so it really follows closely to a lot of the traditions of the romances that started in the Middle Ages. Tristan and Azolda and the legend of King Arthur and what it means to be a noble, not in the feudal sense, but in terms of living up to the vows you take when you become a knight. I think it's quite easy to cynically overlook sometimes how some people did attempt to live up to those values, maybe not everyone succeeded. And obviously there were lots of bad nobles who didn't make the effort. But I think it's quite easy to be cynical about the fact that some people did base their

entire life on trying to live up to those ideals and those extremes. Yes, and that's something we wanted to explore. And we wanted to explore the idea of the knight-errant, which really, you can see influencing many stories to this day. Clint Eastwood Man with no-name Westerns, He was a knight-errant. The Jack Reacher stories, he's a knight-errant. Lee Child has even said he based the idea for Jack Reacher on the medieval tales of the knight-errant. The Mandalorian in science fiction is a knight-errant.

We just decide to go back to the origins of this and actually write about a knight-errant in the Middle Ages. Yeah, and I think the novel is very much in that tradition because medieval romances are also not about the bad guys and the people who fail and ordinary people. It's about extraordinary people. And that's exactly what modern films are about. You don't have some ordinary Joe walking down the street who is not a very nice guy and doesn't do much. That's not what storytelling is about.

And we really feel like this does follow in that tradition, that sort of big, epic, heroic tradition. Sounds perfect. And boy, to turn to the writing side of this, you're a, as we said, a best-selling author with a dozen books under your belt already. what pulled you to the medieval period? I guess the obvious answer is Beth. But is the way you craft a story independent of the time in which it's set? Or does the time in which it's set help to drive the story? I think my storytelling sensibilities influenced it.

We really wanted to bring back a sense of adventure and fast-paced, action-packed, storytelling to this era. Obviously, I would not have tried this without Beth's expertise. but it does lend us some opportunities in the story that you couldn't get in a contemporary novel. They're isolated. They can't resort to calling the police or calling up someone on their cell phone or looking at Google Maps to find their way. So it brings about a lot of interesting plot points and character development that you couldn't find in a novel that takes place today. I always think for contemporary books, and I guess you may well have experienced this,

that it must be difficult to get over the fact that everybody has a phone in their pocket. They can phone the police, find a Google map to get out of wherever they are. Now, that removes all of the jeopardy and the problems. So I guess if you go back to this medieval setting, you're really putting somebody in an empty room with no phone, no connectivity, and how do you deal with life then, which is probably a skill that we've forgotten. Yes, they are definitely on their own. And that's one reason the book is called The Lawless Land. And the resort to law enforcement is virtually non-existent.

And sometimes the law is as corrupt or more corrupt than the people that they're fleeing. And so they really are on their own. And that makes for really interesting character building because they have to draw upon themselves and their friends and loved ones to get out of whatever situations they're in. Yeah. And I think it's interesting in terms of the contemporary world is that Boyd and I are attempting to set a novel in the Middle Ages at a time when none of this existed. But frankly, this novel wouldn't exist except in this time period

because Boyd and I never would have been able to do this novel together without Zoom and talking to each other like every day on a cell phone. I was thinking about if we tried this in the 80s, I don't even know what the phone bill would have been like, what we would have been writing letters to each other. So it's interesting. And then the other aspect of it that came to mind is that oftentimes when Boyd and I hit a snag in a plot.

And we would be like, why don't they just go down the road and do this instead? To break the tension, we would also often have these jokes. Well, oh, duh, just pick up a cell phone. That'll work. And so these sort of technological advances we have now actually did play a role in the way that we worked in this because we're always like, yeah, he doesn't get on a horse. Why does he just take the helicopter over to Monta-Messéchelle or whatever? Head to the ye oldie internet cafe.

Internet tavern, maybe it should be. Yeah. The lawless land is set in England in 1351 in the midst of the Black Death. Why did you pick that specific period to set the novel in? There were a couple of different reasons. One reason is because my specialty is actually 14th century. I am currently working on a large scholarly tome about 14th century manuscript elimination. So I knew I would have at my fingertips all sorts of visual evidence that could really help us to set the tone.

What did buildings look? like? What kind of armor were they wearing? What did women wear? All that kind of stuff. So I knew I'd have huge visual resources. But I think the reason, moreover, that the period really applied to us was that there was so much happening in the 14th century. There was the Black Plague. There was the hundred years war. It was a time of upheaval. And I think that's always a really interesting time period to set something in because there's so many different aspects of it that you can draw on in the novel. And Boyd and I didn't. set out to write a novel about post-plague Europe in the middle of a European war. And we didn't even

start this. We started this novel well before any of that happened. And yet here we are in this moment, in a time of post-plague, a European war has very sadly broken out. But I think it will give our readers a chance to have resonances between what these characters are actually going through psychologically at this time period and what's happening to us now. Yeah, we wanted them to be on their own. They really are on their own for most of the story and have to draw on their own wits and information that they've gleaned through their experiences

and just trying to overcome whatever they come across on their own and which makes very much more interesting characters. I suppose it facilitates that bit of empathy with what the characters are dealing with around the kind of main part of the story. And I suppose from a storytelling point of view, anywhere where there's that kind of a vacuum of authority or power or certainty

or anything like that is always a good place to start a story, you've got lots of space to operate in there. Well, Beth actually wrote a book about a wandering, adventurer knight in the Middle Ages. I think his name was Gilleson de Tresigny. But we wanted to really lean into the idea of a knight-errant. and what would that look like really in the Middle Ages? And the other thing that we wanted to do was make him a bit of a man out of time.

He's much more advanced thinking than probably his contemporaries in the story. And so we wanted to make him a little more identifiable with contemporary readers so that he can be their look into the Middle Ages what it might have been to live at that time. And the woman he comes across, Lady Isabel, is somewhat. of the same way. And so they just find each other and they found the exact right person because they're both straining at what's happening to them around them and the strictures of life at that time. And so they probably would be more like Renaissance people, but we just put them about 150 years early. Do you think it's important to provide that link for modern readers? Because I guess there's

a danger that you head back to the 13th century and it becomes so disconnected. and there's nothing to relate to in that world. So it's hard to get your reader into the story. So I guess is that a way to help provide a bridge for the reader? I think it's really important because, after all, Boyd and I are writing fiction. We're not writing a nonfiction book about something that really happened to a real person.

And so we always have to keep contemporary readers in mind. But also, as Boyd mentioned, there were so many confines in medieval society that I think it would be hard to, for us to understand, and I think it would also be really hard to sympathize with the characters if we made them exactly what they were like in the Middle Ages. And for example, Boyd talked about this night that I wrote a scholarly book about named Gillian de Trasigny, and there's a wonderful manuscript at the Getty that features his adventures. And much like our book, it was a medieval adventure.

It was made up. It was fiction. It was based on a real person named Gilles de Trasigny, but it was a composite of different things. And he goes off and he becomes a bigamist by mistake. And there's mistaken identity. And there's battles and there's twin sons that didn't know they had a father. And it really is like a soap opera. So in many ways, if you could actually read that entire text compared to the one that Boyd and I wrote, ours actually sounds much more reasonable.

It's a far more believable than genuine medieval stories. Exactly. What's your favorite place that the book, takes in, what did you like about that place? How did you craft the experience of a character being in that place? Part of the great thing about these books is we get to pick places that are a combination of places we've always wanted to see, but also places that we thought our contemporary readers would want to go and see through different eyes. So the book begins in Canterbury and Canterbury is obviously a place you can still go to. Hopefully many of our readers will be overseas already, either living

there have visited and will instantly call it to mind. But then the book moves on to France and we go to, for example, Mont Saint-Michel, which is still such a magical place. And I think there's a really important scene where they come across the flats and they see Mont Saint-Michel for the first time. And I think Boyd really captured in his writing what it's like to see that place because it is unbelievable, but it still exists. And that was the kind of excitement we wanted to bring to the book. Yeah, and I think that one of the things that we like about it is that all of the places we visited are very similar to how they would have been 670 years ago. And so writing about these characters in these places, and if you're lucky enough to go visit one of these places in person,

you can really see exactly how the scene would have played out because very little has changed since then. And that was really magical for me to see that and know that you could take a travel log. And we basically followed the path of our characters when we were doing our location research. And it took us only about 10 days instead of two months. But we really saw them almost as if they would have seen them, which was very cool. It is. And I guess that helps as well provide another bridge for the reader that these are places we recognize that exist today. You can go and touch the places where these characters are standing. It's not kind of abstracted. So the people aren't too abstracted. The places aren't abstracted at all. And I guess that makes it all feel much more realistic and genuine for the reader. Exactly. Because you could go to some of these places and you could be standing on the steps and be like, oh my gosh, that's where Fox did thus and such. There are some. some things that have to have changed.

And it has been many hundreds of years. But we did as much as possible use the actual topography, the actual architecture in constructing the scenes. And it did introduce some difficulties here and there, but I think it was really worth it in the end. And we do feature Notre Dame Cathedral in our story. And we were lucky enough to go there just two months before the tragic fire. And so when they reopen it,

it will be so exciting that this place that we were able to feature, and in the time of our book, it was already 100 years old, which is just astounding to think about. And luckily, it's still here that everybody can enjoy it. And I hope we do again very soon. Definitely. It's amazing how many of these places have survived centuries and centuries, almost unchanged, but how they can also endure things like that terrible fire at Notre Dame,

and they'll be reborn again, and they will continue to have life for hopefully centuries more. Did you know that some of literature's greatest characters were real people? It's so fascinating, isn't it, that some of the Three Musketeers are also based on real soldiers? That Sir Walter Raleigh

wasn't all that he's been cracked up to be. Chemist, poets, scholar, historian, courtier. He could have been great in all these different things. And that if your name is Dudley, you better watch your back. For the tutors, each one of them took something from the Dudleys, either by working with a member of the Dudley family or, of course, by having one executed. I'm Professor Susanna Lipskin, and I'm learning all this and much more bringing you not just the tutors twice a week every week.

Subscribe now to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. The book travels around a bit. It's traveling in Europe while the continent is in the grip of a terrifying, pandemic. Gerard is forced to take to the road and into conflict with some powerful forces. Where will Gerard's adventures take the reader? You mentioned a couple of places there. But also, how do you go about creating an authentic travel through a medieval plague landscape? I guess it's probably less difficult now than it was previously. But how do you go about envisaging those journeys for someone? Yeah, I was really surprised when, for instance, we all started to lock down in March of 2020.

And I was just so struck by the fact that here we are, hundreds and hundreds of years later, we think we're so advanced. We have so much more knowledge about health and how things spread. And yet we were huddling in our houses. And it was exactly the same experience as what our characters must have gone through

in the time of the Black Death. They didn't know what was going to happen. They were fearing, dying. There was nothing they could do to stop the spread of this except huddle in their homes and try not to come into contact with people. It just was so amazing to me

to think of how much time has passed, how little has changed. Now, of course, we have the vaccines now. It seems like we're now emerging from that and things have gone on and they didn't have quite that ability, obviously, in the Middle Ages. But it was amazing to me to just sort of relive that in this time period in a way that I had never really considered. This is the first pandemic of my lifetime and probably most people's lifetime.

And yet we were reliving the medieval experience over again. And in the story, it's about two to three years, depending on where they are in the story, after the worst of the pandemic. And so they're just like we are now. coming out of it and trying to figure out what life is going to be like again and is civilization going to survive and how are things going to change? And so even though we started the book long before the pandemic, we were still writing it when it started. And so that definitely fed into how we were creating the story. And then traveling through Europe during the war, we had to do a lot of research about how that would have been done, how they could, as an Englishman, Gerard Fox,

we made him so that his mother was French, so he is fluent in French and could use that while he was traveling through France, so he wouldn't be immediately identified as an Englishman. But there were still Chevos-Sheys and Marauders on the road that they had to confront, and that plays into the story as well. And so it was a very dangerous time, and we took that into account. the pandemic, the war, the politics of the time, how the country's related to each other, the beginning of nationalism at this time. And so it all played a part in how they made their journey. And can I ask whether we're going to see any more of Gerard Fox? Do you plan this to be a series? Will there be a sequel? Yes, we are working on Book 2 right now, and we're very excited about

where he's going next. We don't want to spoil anything in the story. We've got some great twists and turns in the story and so we want people to experience it as they're reading it. So we don't want to give anything away. We can't reveal much, but we have some super exciting things planned for Book 2 to happen to Gerard and others who are going to come into the story. So we're going to have some exciting things. And do you think our experiences of the last couple of years will impact the way you write the next book as well? Will it reflect a deeper understanding, I guess, of how pandemics affect people and how people deal with the longer term effects of those kinds of things? Yeah, I think it definitely will because we've experienced it ourselves.

And we have a scene in there where they're coming back to normal life and feeling what that's like. And so I think as things develop, one of the things that will be really important is, I think when we conceived of the book originally, it was this idea of they're going back to normal life. But I think what we're finding now in our own lives and that will be reversed. reflected in our characters is, no, the world is not going to be the same. There are fundamental changes that really impact continents and countries and individuals. And I think that will continue

to play a role. And especially after the Black Death, when a third to a half of the people you've ever known have died in the span of a year or two can't help but affect everybody's psyche going forward in the story and really affects whole economies and the direction of your life. If, say, you're a nobleman who's lost your entire family, you no longer have that legacy to leave behind. And so how does that change, how that noble carries on with their life, finding a new wife, trying to get new heirs, otherwise whole kingdoms were lost that way. And so that will play into the entire series as it goes along, because everybody will known somebody that they've lost and that will dramatically affect their lives.

I suppose it adds that extra layer of empathy to everything that's going on and maybe a good way to explore as well what might happen in the aftermath of a pandemic, which is essentially what we're all going to be moving into now. So what might be waiting for us. Well, thank you so much for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to both of you. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it. It's been lovely to be here. The Lawless Land is available from Head of Zeus. So if you're looking, for a fast-paced heart-thumping adventure with genuine authenticity as well, then look no further. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode.

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Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.