Sir Arthur’s favourite of all his many novels was not one of the Sherlock Holmes puzzlers read so avidly today.\u00a0 It was the one he called The White Company.\u00a0 This is the novel he wished to be remembered for.\u00a0 Sadly, nowadays it’s little read.\u00a0 If you’re familiar with the New Forest, however, you’ll find it endlessly fascinating in its descriptions of places as well-known today as in the late fourteenth century.\u00a0 If you’re a medievalist you’ll love it.\u00a0 He gives a lively picture of what it was like during The One Hundred Years War as the action follows the adventures of three men-at-arms travelling from the Abbey of\u00a0 Beaulieu, via Lymington and Christchurch before crossing by boat from Lepe to northern France and then on down to Aquitaine to join the army of the Prince of Wales, Edward, the Black Prince.<\/p>\n
Unlike today’s action-heavy medieval novels Conan Doyle takes his time to describe the landscape, the changing seasons, the customs, arms, clothes, the food and drink and all those other details that are fascinating to medievalists.\u00a0 Here’s a thought, though.\u00a0 Were readers better educated in his day?\u00a0 I ask this because he does not limit his vocabulary to the familiar and well-worn but uses the apt word to specify his meaning.\u00a0 Given that his book was a massive bestseller and wasn’t short of readers or popularity for decades, the unfamiliar words clearly didn’t put anybody off.\u00a0 I’ve had to add a glossary to my own novels set in the same period because, I’m told, readers will not want to struggle with words they don’t know.\u00a0 But\u00a0 I wonder what readers really think about this?\u00a0 It seems commonsense to use a word like arbalest, for instance, when that’s the exact word.\u00a0 Those massive cross-bow missile throwers are no longer used in warfare today but how else to talk about\u00a0 them without\u00a0 circumlocution?<\/p>\n
In the pages of\u00a0 The White Company I must have found over twenty words unfamiliar to me but it was a great joy to look them up in the O.E.D.\u00a0 Here are some – you might know them already but they were new to me.\u00a0 For instance, there’s\u00a0 camisade – a shirt worn over armour for a night attack;\u00a0 galeasse – a warship with oars and sails and bigger than a galleon;\u00a0 rovers and hoyles – the first refers to random shooting by an archer, the second when a specific mark is aimed for.\u00a0 There are many more.<\/p>\n
Maybe you won’t find a use for them in your everyday life but what about a culpon – a cut or portion –\u00a0 or a rammocky lurden?\u00a0 No translation needed.\u00a0 In fact, I think I’ll use it right away…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sir Arthur’s favourite of all his many novels was not one of the Sherlock Holmes puzzlers read so avidly today.\u00a0 It was the one he called The White Company.\u00a0 This is the novel he wished to be remembered for.\u00a0 Sadly, nowadays it’s little read.\u00a0 If you’re familiar with the New Forest, however, you’ll find it endlessly fascinating in its descriptions of places as well-known today as in the late fourteenth century.\u00a0 If you’re a medievalist you’ll love it.\u00a0 He gives a lively picture of what it was like during The One Hundred Years War as the action follows the adventures<\/p>\n[Read More...]<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":276,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions\/276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}