The Long Fall — our Humilis Hastings edition of this is now published

At last we have this available on Amazon in both paperback and e-book.

You can get it here on Amazon UK and here on US Amazon.

 It's taking us a while to gradually bring all the first Hawk & Dove series out under our own imprint (Humilis Hastings). The work is slow and patient, requiring multiple checks, because of the changes in formatting needed as we take the text from the files the original publisher used, re-format them to something we can work with, edit and proofread, then format again to upload for paperback and (different format required) for e-book. Each time the format changes, oddities occur in the text — eg the paragraph indentation slips or the italics vanish — so the text has to be proofread and corrected again.

Happily, both Jonathan who works on the paperback and creates the cover from Alice's and Hebe's artwork, and Tony who prepares the e-book, are meticulous and thorough. Without them, you would not have this book.

Anyway, for those of you who are collecting this new edition, or reading it for the first time, here it is.

As this book has been through different editions with different publishers (originally Monarch in England, then Good News in America, then Lion Hudson in England, finally SPCK), most of the tiny errors that slip through in a text had been spotted and nuked. But in editing this time I wanted to correct a few historical errors occurring from simple ignorance when I first wrote the book at the beginning of the 1990s. At the time, though I knew that such vegetables as potatoes and tomatoes were not available in the 14th century, I assumed that other root vegetable were — for both human and farm animal consumption — but they were not. The introduction of roots for cattle feed in the eighteenth century revolutionised farming and human wellbeing. Until then, both animals and humans were dependent on grain to see them through the winter, and in a hard year there wasn't enough to go round — especially in the 14th century as it happens, when they had a lot of wet winters and the grain harvests suffered.

So the practice had been to slaughter the animals they could spare at Martinmas (early November), when there'd be a big feed-up followed by lean days through the winter as milk gradually dried up and egg yield dropped off and the grain stores eroded. They had dried beans, of course.

Once roots (turnips, beet etc) became a thing, there was more food to go round both humans and cattle, so slaughter for food could be more measured, not all at one go at Martinmas. 

The food of the fourteenth century, then, was mainly animal products (meat, poultry, eggs, milk, butter, cheese), grain, fruit, and green vegetables. We read of garlic, onions and leeks being eaten, but I suspect they don't mean what we take them to mean — the kind of fat, round garlic and onions we buy at the supermarket now, and the hefty leeks.

If you look up three-cornered leek, also known as white-bells, also known as three-cornered garlic — Allium Triquetrum — you find these:

The whole thing is edible and tastes like spring onions (scallions US), but with a somewhat milder taste. They're easy to grow, spreading like wildfire if you plant them in the garden.

So I think that's what they meant when they talked about onions/garlic/leeks. There's also wild garlic — sometimes called ramsons — and as it's a ubiquitous indigenous plant I assume they had that too. They also ate nettles and rocket and chervil and cultivated lots of herbs. So, plenty of green fare, but not much of starchy veg before the 1700s.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, because there was thriving sea trading, the cooks of the fourteenth century did use ingredients like oriental spices, almonds and rice — and I think they may have had citrus fruits available to them that early by the same means. Certainly they did by the Elizabethan era.

When I first wrote The Long Fall, I just assumed roots were available for both humans and animals; so for this new edition I went back into the text to correct that error. Other than that, it's all pretty much as it was in previous editions. This, the third book I wrote, mattered to me very much; I had grown in confidence enough to dig my heels in about some editorial changes (yes, specifically "hot and soft and wet") urged upon me for the American market — I wouldn't change it. In this book, written out of experience working as a care assistant and and a hospice chaplain with people going through chronic/terminal illness and end of life, I wanted, even working with the somewhat anodyne requirements of Evangelical publishing, something real, something that gave a voice to lived experience.

Six more of Series 1 to publish under our own imprint, and two more of Series 2 to write (I've made a start).

I hope you like this story.