Writing a novel for any genre involves research, but is especially rewarding for historical fiction where it becomes a light to illuminate the world the writer and reader are going to occupy for several hundred pages.  I love doing the research to create my medieval world.  That doesn’t mean it should all be dumped in the novel or become self-indulgent.  Rather it should shed the above-mentioned light to give the world of the novel clarity and richness, and imbue the pages with the idea of actually being there in that room, in that scene, in that person.  It’s a heck of a lot of work, but let that work not show its workings, but only gleam within the finished article.

These are some, by no means all of the works that helped me to understand Joanna and William de Valence, and the world they occupied.  These are works from my personal library.  I also used numerous online resources such as the works of chronicler Matthew Paris, several unpublished university PHD’s on various subjects, including a fascinating one by Abigail Armstrong on the daughters of Henry III.  The Dictionary of National Biography proved very useful, although biased and there wasn’t an entry for Joanna de Valence which I thought a shocking sin of omission.  Professor Huw Ridgeway is responsible for William de Valence’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography which I feel is balanced and concludes that “Valences’s poor reputation has been much exaggerated.”  I read too Ridgeway’s paper “William de Valence and his Familiares, 1247-72   Historical Research vol LXV No 158.