WELCOME TO RACHEL’S FICTION WRITING AND REVIEWS BLOG
This is where Rachel keeps you up to date with her novels and stories and also shares reviews, highlights and extracts from other authors.
A New Book Award for Lady of Lincoln!
I’m absolutely thrilled to announce that LADY OF LINCOLN has won another award—the Bronte Award (for UK and Commonwealth Historical Fiction).
I’m so pleased that my story about the real-life medieval heroine, Nicola' de la Haye, is being recognised.
More about the novel here.
Universal purchase link here.
Medieval New Year's Eve: When Chaos Was the Point
Forget champagne at midnight and awkward renditions of "Auld Lang Syne." Medieval New Year's was an entirely different beast, and honestly? It sounds way more fun.
Across Europe, the turning of the year wasn't just a date on the calendar. It was a full-blown excuse to flip everyday life on its head, stuff your face with roasted meat, and generally behave in ways that would make your local priest extremely nervous.
The Feast of Fools: Your Annually Scheduled Revolution
The Festival of Fools
Picture this: It's January 1st in a medieval town. The lowly church clerks and regular townsfolk have just elected a "Pope of Fools." They're parading through the streets in ridiculous costumes, possibly drunk, definitely making a mockery of sacred rituals. There's dancing. There's dice rolling during church services. Someone's definitely cross-dressing. It's absolute pandemonium.
Welcome to the Festum Fatuorum—the Feast of Fools.
What started as cheeky bits of playacting during Christmas church services eventually spiraled into something gloriously unhinged. By the later Middle Ages, you had masked dances, muddy street parades, and the kind of irreverent chaos that eventually made church authorities say "okay, that's ENOUGH" and ban the whole thing in the 15th century. (Though, naturally, people kept doing versions of it anyway because people have always been delightfully stubborn about their fun.)
Think of it as medieval Mardi Gras meets The Office Christmas party, but with more livestock in the streets.
Fastrada: Charlemagne’s Queen History Tried to Forget
Charlemagne is usually thought of as the iron-willed king, crowned Emperor of the Romans in 800, architect of a European empire and champion of learning and reform. What we never hear about, however, are the women who stood beside him: women whose influence shaped politics, justice, and the fragile stability of his realm.
One of the most controversial of these women was Fastrada, Charlemagne’s fourth wife and queen, a woman remembered less for what she did than for how male chroniclers chose to describe her.
A Frankish Noblewoman in a Dangerous Court
Fastrada was born into the high Frankish nobility around the mid-8th century, the daughter of Count Radulf. Her marriage to Charlemagne in 783 was not a romantic match but a strategic one, strengthening ties between powerful families within the Frankish heartlands. This was a period when Charlemagne’s empire was expanding rapidly through conquest, forced conversion, and ruthless suppression of revolt.
Queens in the Carolingian world were not crowned consorts in the later medieval sense, but they were far from ornamental. They managed households, acted as intermediaries, dispensed patronage, and, crucially, advised the king. Fastrada arrived at court at a moment when Charlemagne’s rule was under strain from internal rebellion, particularly in Saxony.
“Cruel” Queen or Convenient Scapegoat?
Our surviving sources paint Fastrada in dark colours. Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, describes her as harsh and cruel, claiming that her influence made the king more severe in judgement. Later chroniclers echoed this, blaming her for brutal punishments meted out against rebels and dissenters.
But this raises an uncomfortable question: Was Fastrada truly cruel, or was she blamed for decisions Charlemagne himself made?
Early medieval queens were often held responsible when kings ruled harshly. Advising firmness could easily be reframed as bloodthirstiness, especially when the adviser was a woman. Fastrada’s reputation may tell us more about medieval anxieties over female influence than about her actual character.
It is worth noting that Charlemagne’s most notorious acts of brutality, including the mass executions of Saxons, predated and outlasted Fastrada’s life. Yet only she became a symbol of excessive severity.
Feasts, Folklore & Boar: A Medieval Christmas with a Dash of Wild Hunt Magic
Christmas is coming; and if you think today’s festive spread is decadent, just imagine what a medieval English banquet looked like! Long before turkeys were discovered in America, people from monks to monarchs gathered round a banquet table groaning with pies, ale, spiced wine, and one very impressive centrepiece: the boar’s head.
Richard the Lionheart at Sixteen: the Making of a Warrior Duke
In 1173, a boy of sixteen took his first step onto the stage of war. His name was Richard, Duke of Aquitaine, though he had yet to earn the epithet Lionheart.
Before he became the crusader-king of legend, before his songs and sieges, Richard was a restless teenager thrust into the most dangerous political storm of the twelfth century: the Great Rebellion against his father, King Henry II.
It was a rebellion born of pride, family betrayal, and the impossible weight of expectation. And it was here — amid defeat, shame, and fire — that the making of a warrior began.
A Son in His Mother’s Shadow
Richard was Eleanor of Aquitaine’s favourite son, and in many ways her reflection: intelligent, impulsive, proud. Born in Oxford but raised in the cultured courts of Poitiers and Bordeaux, he was steeped in his mother’s world of poetry and politics. By his mid-teens he could compose in Occitan, debate theology in Latin, and command a hall full of barons — yet he was still a boy in a man’s game.
In 1172, Henry II had forced Eleanor to surrender the duchy of Aquitaine to her teenage son, intending to bind the region more tightly to the English crown. But Aquitaine was Eleanor’s inheritance, her life’s work, and Richard was fiercely loyal to her. The gift was both a promotion and a trap: the young duke found himself governing a proud and fractious land, surrounded by lords twice his age and loyalty only thinly pledged.
When the rebellion of 1173 began, Richard stood between two worlds — son of a king, heir to a duchy, and caught between the two towering figures who defined his destiny.