Sutcliff, Rosemary - The Times Literary Supplement

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Rosemary Sutcliff is a master of the concrete detail which brings home to us that our ancestors, though men like ourselves, lived in very different conditions…. [Knight's Fee] which tells how a poor dog-boy rose by faithful service to knighthood under King Henry I….

The reader is told what people ate and at what times, as well as what they wore. The characters are not deeply explored, but the sketches of chivalrous knights and turbulent barons are adequate for the purpose of an exciting story.

In fact this would be a perfect introduction to the Middle Ages, from which older children might learn all they need of its daily life, if one great medieval preoccupation had not been completely omitted. We are told almost nothing about religion or the Church….

Miss Sutcliff does not suggest that her Saxons and Normans were agnostics; she supposes that most of them practised a pagan fertility cult. On the...

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