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1648: A dangerous time in England for a woman to be different . . .
Tidelands
What you need to know before your trail
Midsummer’s Eve, 1648, and England is in the grip of civil war between renegade King and rebellious Parliament. The struggle reaches every corner of the kingdom, even to the remote Tidelands – the marshy landscape of the south coast.
Alinor, a descendant of wise women, crushed by poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard under the full moon for a ghost who will declare her free from her abusive husband. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run, and shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marsh, not knowing that she is leading disaster into the heart of her life.
Suspected of possessing dark secrets in superstitious times, Alinor’s ambition and determination mark her out from her neighbours. This is the time of witch-mania, and Alinor, a woman without a husband, skilled with herbs, suddenly enriched, arouses envy in her rivals and fear among the villagers, who are ready to take lethal action into their own hands.
Locations
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Ride through the Tidelands of History BookTrail style
The remote Tidelands is the area of marshy landscape on the south coast.
“He shivered with distaste. He felt that he could not bear the ugliness of these people’s lives on the very edge of the shore, with their loves and hates ebbing and flowing like a muddy tide, with their anger roaring like the water in the millrace, with their hatreds and fears as treacherous as the hushing well. …. James’s shudder told him that he wanted nothing to do with any of them. He wished himself back with his own people, where cruelty was secret, violence was hidden, and good manners more important than crime.”
Civil War
Sussex escaped the worst ravages of the English Civil War. However, in 1642 there were sieges at Arundel and Chichester, and a skirmish at Haywards Heath when Royalists marching towards Lewes were intercepted by local Parliamentarians.
Charles II was able to journey through the county after the Battle of Worcester in 1651 to make his escape to France from the port of Shoreham.
The author says:
“This book returns me to historical fiction based in a real period and place but with imaginary people. It was very liberating to get away from the royal family and royal palaces and into daily life of aspiring people, hoping to rise from poverty into the New England of political freedoms and opportunities.”
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Tidelands
Destination: England Author/guide: Philippa Gregory Departure Time: 1648
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