Other editions of book The fourteenth of October

This great historical novel discloses the warm and colorful story of Saxon resistance to the Norman invasion of Britain. The story is a magical achievement: the reader shares, as in an immediate experience, in the life of a Saxon boy. With him, he watches the Danes come over the hill, lives as hostage in a Norman stronghold, escapes to Britain, shares in the memorable ride to the Battle of Hastings, and has to come to terms with a conquest that alters history. Saxon life and landscape, with brilliant reconstructions, take on a wonderful vitality. The eleventh century lives again in its own terms. The world of A.D. 1066 is that of any people whose freedom is ever threatened or whose way of life seems doomed.

The year is 1066 and the fyrds, Harold Godwinson's levies, drawn chiefly from the peasants of England, are called the King's standard. They come straggling and uncertain towards a vague rendezvous, some confident, some fanatical, some questioning and some plainly dubious: they are thinking of their harvest, left to be gathered by only a few. Under the spell of Bryher's writing the reader becomes a dweller in this troubled countryside, a sharer in its people's passions, concerned with the great issues that are to be settled finally at Hastings. The story of Wulf, the Saxon boy, begins eight years before, when his father's Yorkshire home is destroyed by raiding Danes, his father and friends killed, and himself swept away as a hostage. It ends when he has to face the terrible choice between freedom in exile or the acceptance of subjugation. Wulf's predicament is vivid and tragic, for the authoress has expressed in him her own passion for freedom. And she has lovingly conjured up a picture of a country still absorbed in legend and ancient lore- a country which, after the fourteenth of October, was bound to a sterner destiny.