The People's Queen
My latest novel, which deals with Chaucer's love life, a royal mistress turned businesswoman-on-the-make, and a fourteenth-century credit crunch, has a lot in common with our own times seven centuries later. I wrote it against a modern backdrop of global economic downturn, cutbacks, and crisis which, give or take computers and banks, were pretty much what Chaucer, then the King's man in the merchant City of London, had to contend with as he counted sacks of wool and tried to make sure the King's coffers were full despite the worsening economic gloom of the times.
More about this book
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review
What the critics say ...
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Geoffrey and Alice
The diplomatic Chaucer was coy about putting information about the politics or great people of his own time into his work. But, reading between the lines, we can see glimpses of Alice.
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further reading
What else to read
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background article
The Wheel of Fortune
One spin of Fortune’s wheel will take you up, but you’ll be plunging down to the abyss soon enough if you don’t know when to get off …
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background article
Credit crunches of the 14th and 21st centuries
The downturn we’re experiencing today is only a shadow of the one that engulfed England in the late 1300s
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background article
Geoffrey Chaucer, father of English literature
Geoffrey Chaucer, remembered with love as a literary genius, was seen more as a humdrum mid-ranking civil servant in his own lifetime.
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background article
Introducing Alice Perrers
Cherchez la femme: when it turned out there was nothing left in England’s coffers, who better to blame than the King’s minxy mistress?
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inspiration
Where the idea for the book came from
… a footnote … a tabloid sting? … and the discovery of one of history’s most engaging rogues