Bloodline
Bloodline will take you back to the distant past of the British Isles – a bloody tangle of warring kingdoms and tribes, where trees, animal and people live in closer harmony, and loyalty is everything. War threatens, and Essa is thrown headlong into a mess that threatens the lives of everyone he loves. He is just a halfbreed, son of a wandering Briton song-man in a land where the power of the Anglish settlers is rising – can he really do anything to stop the bloodshed? Swearing loyalty to both sides is a dangerous way to try…
Meet a few of the characters from Bloodline…
ESSA
I am fourteen winters old, and I have no tribe. My name is Aesc. It means “ash tree” in Anglish, but my father used to call me Essa and so does everyone else. I have a hound of my own, Fenrir. I can see what she is thinking. My foster mother Hild tells me I am drawn to trouble like a bee to honey. She is right.
My jobs: Where do I even begin? Weeding the fields, herding goats, cleaning cattle muck from the byre, trapping fish – it never ends. Best is when I work the horse-folk, because then I can talk to them. They speak more sense than men.
My secret: My father shall come back for me one day – he always claims what’s his. Will I be pleased to see him? I don’t know.
LARK
My name is Lark and this will be my fourteenth summer. I come from the Wixna tribe, and I have never left this village except to shoot ducks in the meadow – I am the best archer, even better than the men. Ma says we have to be careful living so close to the Border – a Mercian might kill me like they killed my father.
My jobs: I spend most days spinning sheeps’ wool into yarn. I also help Ma and the other women with the weaving. It’s very boring but if us girls didn’t make cloth, the whole village would have to go naked – a sight I’d rather not see. My other jobs are more than I can count on two hands – I look after the little bairns, weed the barley field, feed our pigs – it goes on and on. Sometimes I milk the goats, too.
My secret: If I told you, it would be no secret.
Wulf
I am Wulfhere the Atheling, and I have fifteen summers. My father is King of Mercia and one day soon he will be High King of all Britain, once that Christian wretch is out of the way. I like hawking and hunting.
My jobs: I serve my father. Sometimes this is good and I must hunt the wild boar with his men. At other times it is bad to serve my father: I do not like killing his prisoners.
My secret: Some nights, the first man I killed comes to me in my dreams. I do not like to see his face. I was twelve summers old when I did it.
Anwen
I am the daughter of a king, Eliudd Powys. Once, my people ruled the island of Britain from shore to shore. But now the Anglish have come from the east and we rule alone no longer. They are not even Christians but worship devils, or so says my aunt, and she has all the sense of a goose – I don’t listen to her. If I had my way I would do nothing but hunt with our goshawks.
My jobs: I do not spin and weave like the other girls, but sew birds and beasts on bright cloth with my aunt. When my father and brothers fill the hall with their beer-drinking guests, I walk among them, filling their cups. My brothers tell me to look nice and say nothing.
My secret: One day I shall run away from this place, and no one will stop me.
The History Bit
So what – or when – were the Dark Ages? Basically, it’s a time we know hardly anything about, which used to be called “dark” because historians couldn’t clearly “see” what life was like. All this lasted several hundred years after the last Roman legions sailed away in AD 410 – taking with them the knowledge and inclination needed to build cosy villas with heated floors, and write about their lives in Latin. But why do we know so little about what happened in Britain after the Romans had gone? The Romans wrote a lot – plays, poems, histories, boring legal documents, even curses carved on stone tablets – it’s easy to get an idea of how they saw the world. But during what became known as the Dark Ages, hardly anyone in Britain could read or write, so it’s difficult to piece together what really happened.
From the scraps of surviving evidence, historians have discovered that, at this time, Britain was split up into a motley collection of warring tribes or kingdoms – East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia to name but a few – and that for a long time, many people stopped being Christian. Britain must have had its attractions, though, because immigrant tribes came in waves from mainland Europe – the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes and many more. So this period of history is often referred to as “Anglo-Saxon” – but what about the people who already lived here? And were the Anglo-Saxons really “invaders” or just settlers? We will never really know. The few people who could write were Christian monks – it’s unlikely they spoke fairly about the pagan Anglo-Saxons.
We might have very little written evidence about these so-called Dark Ages, but archaeology has started to show us that life in the British Isles was not quite so miserable as people used to think. In fact, it’s now a bit outdated to even call this time the Dark Ages – modern historians often say the “early medieval period” instead. In the 1930s, archaeologists made a wonderful discovery at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Around AD 625 an entire ship had been buried beneath the ground, filled with treasure. One of the finds was a large silver bowl that had come all the way from the Byzantine Empire, which stretched all way from Western Europe to the Black Sea in modern Turkey. And by looking at skeletons in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, archaeologists have discovered that many of the people were tall and well built with extremely good teeth (there was no such thing as sugar!). Judging by their skeletons, Anglo-Saxons were actually bigger and healthier than the Victorians. Nearly everyone lived in the unspoilt countryside, and although life must have often been hard, their world was harsh but beautiful. Bloodline and Bloodline Rising will take you on a journey into the past to explore these strange and distant times.
You can also check out the BBC History page – it’s stuffed full of interesting facts.
-
Flickr Photos