Tangled Web UK Review April 2007
The Legend of Hereward the Wake by
Mike Ripley
pbk out October 07
(Severn House)
at £9.99
Mike Ripley, who is famous for his long series of 'Angel' crime books,
has now published his second historical novel, the first being 'Boudica
and the Lost Roman'. He has stayed in East Anglia and used the well-
known Hereward tale of heroic resistance to the Norman oppressor.
Often popularly known as Hereward 'the Wake', the author explains that
this was a later misnomer, but the story has much of the romantic appeal
of Robin Hood and shares with him an outlaw status and a rather shaky
provenance, though unlike Robin, Hereward's actual existence is not in
doubt. He was a Saxon with a large dose of Danish blood and was under
the legal misapprehension that he was due to inherit the manor of Bourne
from his Danish grandfather – who never actually owned it. When
deprived of its possession by the newly-arrived Normans, Hereward took
great exception and began a long guerrilla campaign against them,
possible because he held out on the Isle of Ely, which in those days,
actually was surrounded by water, with only one defensible causeway.
Mike Ripley has used the ingenious narrative device of using Gerald of
Wales, that remarkable cleric who wrote so much that illuminated our
knowledge of the late 12th century, to write the story of Hereward a
century later, based on the fictional chronicles of Brother Thomas, a
priest from Ely and a contemporary of Hereward.
Mike portrays his hero as a pretty awful character, a psychopathic killer
and arsonist, but a brilliant tactician when it came to slaying Normans.
The book is pretty bloodthirsty, being a blow-by-blow account of
Hereward's defence of Ely. For the first time in a Mike Ripley book, he
didn't make me laugh, the prime feature of his Angel novels – and even
Boudica raised a few giggles.
He captures the grim reality of life at the time of the Conquest and the
hard times that rural folk suffered, especially when the bosses were
fighting all around them and laying waste to what little they possessed.
Though the hard historical facts about Hereward are thin on the ground,
this book makes you believe that everything the author describes must
have happened just as he says.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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