PREFACE

The 13th Century was an age of considerable achievement. Our modern Parliament evolved through the singular efforts of Simon De Montefort, a man many years ahead of his time. Scholarship and debate were well advanced with Thomas Acquinas, Duns Scotus, Adam Marsh, Robert Grosseteste, and the unforgettable Roger Bacon very much to the fore. Larger than life personalities strode the stage of history not just in our own Island but abroad where the great Pope Innocent III stamped his authority on a World not yet grown cynical about Faith. Besides there were the “ordinary” men and women, the people who had to live and eke out a livelihood in far from easy conditions. No vast palaces and furnishings for them, with life short and poverty not far from the door, dependent on the good-will of leaders not imbued necessarily with a sense of duty towards those less fortunate than themselves.

This is a novel which drinks in all these shapes and types of people, for good or ill, for this is what humanity is all about. But it is also about some other human beings, the form and substance of which we know tantalisingly little. Those pieces of information, scattered frugally and the subject of theories and analyses by academically-inclined pundits tempt us to fill in those gaps. Such a person was that romantic figure the Pearl of Brittany - once seen, forever smitten. The sad but lovely Princess glides through these pages together with the proud and haughty and the kind and gentle. Read to your fill, dear reader and share the lives and loves of these flesh and blood people - in many ways very much like ourselves.

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