Historical Fiction
Speculative fiction based on historical people, places, objects or events
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A tithe surveyor arrives in an Oxfordshire parish in 1843 to map every field and account for every acre. The older records name a settlement called Slyne Birch, cleared by a local lord four centuries earlier. The dead do not want remembrance. They want someone to finish their paperwork.
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A minor landholder disputes a royal tax demand and is pushed into outlawry. Based on the 1225 Yorkshire pipe rolls entry for Robert Hod. Could this be the origin of Robin Hood?
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A Pictish chief faces an impossible choice when Anglian raiders violate his daughters and threaten his settlement. An origin legend of the carved stones at Dunnicar, told through the bloodline that survived.
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Spearhafoc was an eleventh-century monk, artist, and goldsmith, appointed Bishop of London under Edward the Confessor. Before the crown intended for Edward could be completed, Spearhafoc vanished with the king’s gold and jewels.
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William Cox tends the gardens at Othery Grange. He also tends the truth. Five Regency courtships, five birds, and one gardener who learns that an invented omen, once spoken, never stays his alone.
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Ralph Travers, a curate in Exeter, struggles with his conscience after inadvertently making the Devil, Bucky, known to children through a rhyme. As children start disappearing, he faces the consequences of his actions.
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At St Mildred’s, every blessing has a shadow. Cecily Scratcher waits beneath the lychgate to tell seven old warnings of beauty, grace, sorrow, roads, love, labour, and goodness, and of the children made to carry what adults should not.
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About a 24-minute read or a 36-minute listen. At White Head Lighthouse, Thomas Darling keeps the lamp burning through a violent storm. Then a half-drowned stowaway brings a warning about his former berth, SS Strumble, an empty ship, recorded lost, and now carrying ticking machinery that can calculate the future, and perhaps alter the coming…
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About a 22-minute read or a 34-minute listen. Three days after the battle at Arfderydd, Brother Robert searches for the missing bard, Merlin, amidst the devastation. As he and two others navigate the battlefield, they grapple with the dead king Gwenddolau’s unburied body, Merlin’s potential madness, and the need for a proper farewell.
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About an 11-minute read or 17-minute listen. In 1812, French artist Théodore Géricault painted ‘The Severed Heads’. With a reputation for macabre works, and a morgue supplying him with subjects, this was just one of several. The pair were unknown but France was in the turmoil of post-revolutionary governance, so who could this couple have…