Showing results for "free" in Medieval

When young Tyballis discovers her husband has been arrested for murder, she is delighted. As a young orphan coerced to marry her abusive neighbor, she was horribly used. Now is her chance to be rid of him for good and find the confidence she never had. When Tyballis joins forces with the motley network of Andrew’s informers and thieves, they are lured into the dark and dangerous world of medieval London’s political intrigue and back alley slums.

Having escaped an unhappy marriage, Morgan finds herself in Camelot–the city of dreams and peace. Her brother, King Arthur, treats her as a valued advisor and Morgan finally has recognition befitting her intelligence within Arthur’s trusted circle, despite a longstanding conflict with Queen Guinevere. But Morgan’s life is not without complications. Between a vengeful husband determined to snatch their son away, the strict ideals of court life, and a jealous rival for Arthur’s attentions in the sorcerer Merlin, gaining true recognition and freedom is a greater challenge than Morgan envisioned.

Nine men ride into the tiny farming village of Corwick one morning in early March. When they ride back out again, no one is left alive except for Hadrack, a helpless eight-year-old boy. The crimes committed by those nine men will ultimately bring two conflicting religions and two nations to the brink of war.

Finding the battered body of a young boy was not unusual in Bloody Mary’s cruel England. However, the stabbed tongue, a false seal and strange letter implicate Princess Elizabeth, threatening to bring down the Tudor Dynasty. Doctor John Dee and his secret apprentice, Margaretta, using his...

Hrolf the young Viking has left the service of Jarl Dragonheart and sails with Jarl Gunnar Thorfinnson. When they find a home off the Frankish coast they begin to accumulate a vast fortune which earns them the enmity of other Vikings. The novel culminates in a bloody battle where Viking fights Viking but Hrolf begins to fulfill his destiny as Hrolf the Horseman!

This story is set at the end of the 10th century and charts the journey of a young warrior, whose father, Bersi, is killed during a raid on Wessex. Sven Bersisson has to grow up quickly and to follow in his father’s footsteps. Sweyn Skull Taker, his uncle, becomes his foster father and they raid Wessex and Frankia, where the young warrior becomes a man. King Sweyn Forkbeard, the king of Denmark, uses their clan to help in his dream of defeating the Norwegians and then taking the throne of England. 

Number one best seller in Norse historical fiction in UK, Canada, and Australia! The old world is burning. A hero will rise from its ash. Thirty years passed since Britannia voted to throw off the Roman yoke. Now, the old world crumbles. Pirates roam the seas, bandits threaten the highways, and barbarian refugees from the east arrive on Britannia's shores, uninvited. The rich profit from the chaos, while the poor suffer. A new Dark Age is approaching - but all is not lost. Ash is a Seaborn, a Saxon child found on the beach with nothing but a precious stone at his neck.

Anno Domini 1040. Christianity has swept unstoppably across Scandinavia, leaving few enclaves of the old ways clinging on to their fading world as King Olof of Sweden works to convert his people. A young warrior, Halfdan, has witnessed the ‘mercy' of the Christian lords, watched his people attacked, his village burned and the Odin stone toppled as heretical. Watched his father cut down by an ambitious Christian jarl and his zealous priest. Among the ashes of his world, he vowed an oath of vengeance before all the gods.

Tristan de Royans was raised by the House of de Royans, but de Royans blood does not flow through his veins. As the secret love child of Alys of France and Henry II, Tristan has been kept hidden since the day of his birth. Aware of his true parentage, he bears the shield of the royal house in the course of his duties, hating that he bears the crimson shield of his real family. A family that wants to kill him.

"For indeed the Frankish nation, which was crushed by the avenger Hasting, was full of filthy uncleanness. Treasonous and oath-breaking, they were deservedly condemned; unbelievers and faithless, they were justly punished." —Dudo of St. Quentin, Gesta Normannorum Orphaned as a child by a...

A grand tournament is about to begin, and the excitement grows as King Edward III joins the festivities at Mablethorpe Castle. Meanwhile, Lady Vivienne Harlowe's past comes back to haunt her, and she will do anything to find answers to the questions that have plagued her for the past seven years regarding her parents' unsolved murders. Meeting the king is nerve-wracking, but he is the only one who might be able to shed light on her nightmarish quandary.

AD 1045. Godwin of Wessex, one of the most powerful earls in the country, prepares for the marriage of his daughter to King Edward of England. The mood is jubilant, his family's relationship with the Crown secured through matrimony. But one man seeks to undermine him at every opportunity.

September 1284. Catrin and Rhys travel with the royal court to Overton-on-Dee where King Edward has called a thousand Welsh bards to a royal eisteddfod, a music festival, in honor of his conquest of Wales. Every bardd in Wales has been commanded to attend.

1310 AD. There is a new power in the Aegean, and its ships fly the black and white of the Knights of Saint John. Thomas Schwyzer has served the black knights for as long as he can remember. He would do anything for Grandmaster Foulques and his fellow brother sergeants. They are his family. His friends. Without them he would have no place in this world. His faithful years of service have not gone unrecognized.

April 1284. As a newly widowed lady-in-waiting to the very pregnant Queen Eleanor of England, Catrin never expected to return to Wales again. She was definitely unprepared to be confronted with murder when she got there-or to find herself face-to-face with Rhys, the childhood friend she lost twenty years before. Rhys had never intended to return home either, but a lifetime of war has deposited him right back where he started-impoverished and owing service to Catrin's older brother.

Alternate history—1116 AD. Three hundred years of cruel Viking raids have finally united Christian Europe against the pagan Northlands. A great crusade has been called to pacify the wild Norse kingdoms. The banner of the cross has been raised against the North, and all the power and fury of the West rides under it. Ordulf, a talented young German swordsmith, is ripped from his comfortable life and cast into the bloody chaos of the crusade. As fate deals him a cruel blow in the lands of his enemies, he will have to forge a new path through the chaos or be consumed by it.

September, 1284. Within moments of rejoining the king's company, Rhys and Catrin learn King Edward has not only melted down the silver seal of their murdered prince and turned it into a chalice, but the chalice itself has gone missing a matter of days before its intended consecration at Vale Royal Abbey.

Accused of treason and stripped of his knighthood, Crispin Guest has survived on the gritty streets of London by reinventing himself as The Tracker, an investigator for hire who can locate lost objects and uncover secrets. When the merchant Nicholas Walcote hires Guest to investigate his young wife Philippa for adultery, he discovers an underground world of danger and dirty dealings. Philippa is indeed hiding something—but she's not the only one. Walcote himself is rumored to possess a holy relic so powerful that some would even kill for it.

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the listener in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. 

Lady Vivienne Harlowe doesn't fear much, and delves into life's experiences head on. But for years she's been plagued by the unsolved murders of her parents and the strange disappearance of other family members. Now, in the face of a new tragedy, she vows to follow every twist and turn until she's solved the dark deeds at Mablethorpe Castle.