The Price of Blood

by Patricia Bracewell

  Thanks to Gillian Bagwell and Melanie Spiller for spending two years of their lives reading and rereading the manuscript as it grew and giving it as much loving attention as they gave their own work; to Leslie Keenan and Mary Wieland, who read the novel in bits and pieces and offered sage advice without ever discovering how it would end; and to Christine Mann for plowing swiftly through the second draft and making suggestions for draft number three.

  I am indebted to David Levin, pathologist with Washington Hospital in Fremont, California, for fascinating discussions about mortal illnesses and burnt bodies; and to Craig Johnson of the Oakeshott Institute, who helped me envisage a battlefield and taught me something of swordplay; he has had far better students, I’m certain, but none more grateful. A humble thank-you as well to the anonymous knight at the 2013 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University who explained what happens when a sword blade is grabbed bare-handed.

  Once again I have depended upon the work of scholars for my understanding of events in late Anglo-Saxon England, especially the following: Pauline Stafford’s Queen Emma & Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England and Unification and Conquest; Ryan Lavelle’s Æthelred II; Ann Williams’s Æthelred the Unready; M. K. Lawson’s Cnut; David Hill’s An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England; N. J. Higham’s The Death of Anglo-Saxon England; Ian Howard’s Swein Forkbeard’s Invasions and the Danish Conquest of England, 991–1017; and Gale Owen-Crocker’s Dress in Anglo-Saxon England.

  Most especially, my love and thanks to Lloyd, Andrew, and Alan.

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