As in Sworn Sword, several of the characters in this novel are based on real historical persons. As well as the various kings who ruled during this period, these include Eadgar ?theling, the various members of the Malet house, Guillaume fitz Osbern, Earl Hugues of Chester – whose byname ‘the Wolf’ is recorded in contemporary sources – the brothers and princes-in-exile Maredudd and Ithel, the castellan at Shrewsbury (shortly afterwards to become Earl) Roger de Montgommeri, and lastly the dispossessed Shropshire thegn Eadric, commonly known by his soubriquet ‘Wild’, derived from the Old English se wilda, which may in turn have originated from the Latin silvaticus, a term that the twelfth-century chronicler Orderic Vitalis uses to describe many of the English rebels of this period. All of the other characters, including Tancred and his brothers in arms, are products of my own imagination.
Establishing a firm chronology for the many tumults that engulfed England in the years following the Norman invasion is no easy task, especially since our principal sources for the period are in many places confused and contradictory. In this novel I confess to having taken a few more liberties with respect to the history. One of the decisions I made early on was to conflate some of the events of 1069 with those of 1070, in order to allow Tancred time to develop as a character and to settle into his newly acquired position on the Marches following the Norman victory at York at the end of the first book. Thus although The Splintered Kingdom begins in the summer of 1070, many of the events in fact rightly belong to the previous year, including the rebellion of Wild Eadric in conjunction with his Welsh allies, the Battle of Mechain, the arrival of the Danish fleet (in real life commanded firstly by King Sweyn’s sons Harald and Cnut and his brother Osbjorn before he himself came to England to take charge the following spring), the Danes’ alliance with Eadgar ?theling and his army of Northumbrian rebels, the fall of York and its two castles, and of course the Harrying of the North, which continued throughout the winter months. The taking of the Malets as hostages is also recorded in our sources, and from later events we know that they must all have been returned safely, but exactly at what point this took place, and whether they were ransomed or rescued by other means, has not been handed down to us. Into that gap in our knowledge I have woven the fictional tale of Tancred’s desperate mission to Beverley.
The extent to which the various rebellions and invasions that plagued England in this period were connected to one another is open for debate, and I have speculatively linked events which in reality may or may not have been related. For example, there is no direct evidence to suggest that the dynastic struggles between the Welsh kings and their rival claimants, the sons of Gruffydd, had anything to do with Wild Eadric’s rebellion, but given that the two events took place in the same year it is not implausible. All that we know of the fateful Battle of Mechain comes from the Welsh sources Brut y Tywysogion (The Chronicle of the Princes) and the Annales Cambriae (The Annals of Wales), which do not record the circumstances or nature of the encounter, or even the specific location, only the outcome. Neither is there any evidence of Norman involvement in this particular battle. However, in 1072 the Brut mentions them coming to the aid of another dispossessed prince by the name of Caradog in his struggles against the King of Deheubarth, whom they succeeded in killing in a battle on the banks of the river Rhymney. The Normans were evidently keen to play an active role in Welsh affairs during this period, engaging in direct military intervention where necessary and helping to install friendly client kings in place of hostile potentates. It is not impossible that a similar arrangement was reached with Maredudd and Ithel, whose long-standing hatred of Harold Godwineson would have made them natural allies in the eyes of the invaders.