LADY OF LINCOLN and the Cutting Room Floor…

The Original Preface to the first in the Nicola de la Haye Series

I’m incredibly lucky that Sharon Bennett Connolly of ‘HISTORY… THE INTERESTING BITS’ has very kindly agreed to provide the foreword for my upcoming, Chaucer Award long-listed, novel, LADY OF LINCOLN. As the non-fiction biographer of Nicola (Nicholaa) de la Haye, there couldn’t be a better (or nicer) person to introduce the book.

But that meant there was no reason to keep the original preface I had prepared.

Instead of losing it to the cutting room floor, I thought instead I would publish it here as a taster and introduction to who Nicola (Nicholaa) was.

NB, Nicola’s name was signed as ‘Nicholaa’ on official documents, written in Latin (it was a common custom to translate a name into the Latin). Her Norman relations probably called her Nicole (which is the same name as the Norman-French name for Lincoln, which does not feel coincidental). Spellings were flexible at the time (even names were flexible), and I like to think the English would have pronounced and spelt her name Nicola.

PREFACE TO ‘LADY OF LINCOLN’ BY RACHEL ELWISS JOYCE

Woman, possibly Nicola de la Haye, under siege in a medieval manuscript

For three months in early 1217, in a time when women were largely invisible and the law deemed wives mere chattels of their husbands, Nicola de la Haye, the first female English sheriff and the hereditary constable of Lincoln Castle, held firm against a French invasion force.

Louis, the heir to the throne of France, had invaded England the year before, proclaiming himself king. Now in charge of large swathes of the country, Louis looked set to absorb England into a French empire and terminate the English boy King Henry III’s reign before it had even really started.

For months, enemy troops had encircled Lincoln Castle, firing boulders and crossbow bolts onto her and her besieged garrison. Food and medicine supplies were running critically low. But, even as hunger, disease, and death stalked the castle, Nicola, commanding the last of the royal strongholds in the region, did not surrender.

Nicola’s courage, fortitude, and determination under constant fire and relentless assault paid off. In a decisive encounter, French forces were roundly defeated at the Battle of Lincoln on 20th May 1217. Soon after, enemy armies fled England’s shores, never to return.

The Battle of Lincoln 1217

Contemporary medieval chroniclers, struggling to describe this remarkable female military leader, unprecedented in her time, declared that Nicola had ‘acted manfully’. Modern historians, however, hail her as a figure of far greater significance. She was, and will always be, ‘the woman who saved England’.

But Nicola’s story starts long before the events of 1217. By then, she was a widow in her sixties. This novel, the first of a series chronicling the life of this singular English heroine, is set in her youth, when both the kingdom, and Nicola’s future, hung on a precipice.

Find out more about the novel here.

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