The Song of Oswald is set in the Weald (or forest land) of medieval Kent, in the south of England, and the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France. Imagining the landscape of the novel was one of the more pleasurable aspects of writing this work.
The novel begins at Boxley Abbey, just north of Maidstone, Kent, a Cistercian monastery that was prominent in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Pilgrim’s Trail, used by Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, passed a short distance behind the abbey, attracting pilgrims on the way to St. Thomas Beckett’s shrine in Canterbury. Boxley had its own attraction for pilgrims: the Rood of Grace and a small painting of St. Rumwold, an infant saint well-known in Kent and the north of England at the time. Boxley was closed and destroyed by Henry VIII, along with 800 other abbeys between 1536 and 1540. All that is left of Boxley today is the precinct wall, the gate and an old barn. The abbey described in The Song of Oswald is based on the remarkable Fountains Abbey, another Cistercian monastery in Yorkshire, near Ripon.
The Boxley Abbey gate and wall are all that remain. When we visited in the Fall of 2015, the only occupant was a mare who was grateful for a rotten pear, found nearby.
In the medieval period, the Weald of Kent was a vast expanse of heavenly verdure, forests and a few villages. The roads were minimal and rough. The forests were full of game and fowl and the streams teeming with trout and eel. You might find a few iron bloomeries and smithies along the way, as the land was plentiful in iron ore. The major road was The Stone Road, stretching from the south coast to Maidstone. It was built by the Romans, though vestiges of it existed well before the Middle Ages. Today, the landscape is more farmland, pastures and oast houses.
Richard, Claire and Oswald travel the back roads of the Weald to avoid the police. They leave Maidstone, pass through Hedcorne and Tenterden and end up in Rye, now part of East Sussex. Rye was a proper sea village, in medieval times, though silting has built up the land and the town is now a couple of kilometres inland. The same is true of Appledore, the port where Richard and Claire return after their time in France. Appledore is even further inland than Rye.
Richard, Oswald and Claire cross the English Channel in a hulk, a two-masted, square-rigged sailing ship used by merchant seamen. They arrive in Calais, then an English possession and a key trading port for the wool trade. This is the time of the Hundred Years War between England and France. The two countries conducted raids on each other’s soil: the French sacked various English towns along the English Channel, while English inflicted the medieval equivalent of “shock and awe,” decimating all towns, farmland and people in the indefensible north of France. Our characters follow the English army south into the countryside as it proceeds to Saint-Omer. Staying far back of the army, Richard, Oswald and Claire veer off before Saint-Omer to the Abbaye de Clairmarais, where the bones of St. Ursula reside.
Clairmarais is a farming area resting on reclaimed marshland. In The Song of Oswald, I conceived the landscape from that one fact. The abbey precinct is already reclaimed, but the land surrounding it is dense marsh. I made the waterways around and through the abbey central to the plot, where the abbey is used as a storehouse for the assets of local nobility and merchants. The Cistercian monks were experts at diverting water ways for their own purposes, in this case as a means of transporting riches inside the fortified abbey for safekeeping. Richard falls into a fast-moving sluicing channel that passes through the precinct, while soldier/monks fire arrows at him.
During the writing of The Song of Oswald, my wife and I traveled Kent extensively, including all of the places in the novel. We also visited Fountains Abbey to imagine what Brother Richard’s world looked like. I have not seen Clairmarais, but was able to glean some impressions using the Google Earth “fly over” tool.