Walking with Katherine: Facts, Footsteps and Finding the Story

Kettlethorpe Churchyard 

Last week I had the pleasure of leading a walk for the Lincoln Bailgate U3A Walking Group around Kettlethorpe, Fenton and Laughterton, following a route closely connected with Katherine Swynford and the landscape she knew more than six centuries ago.

We gathered beside the medieval cross base at St Peter’s Church, Kettlethorpe, before stepping inside a building that, although much altered since Katherine’s lifetime, still serves the community that once formed the heart of her estate. From there we crossed the fields to Fenton, continued to Laughterton, walked down towards the River Trent and finally returned across what was once Katherine’s deer park to Kettlethorpe.

As always, I arrived with pages of notes.

Dates, charters, grants of land, church history, estate boundaries and the remarkable 1383 licence that allowed Katherine to enclose 300 acres of land and create a deer park. Those details matter. Accuracy matters. Anyone who follows this blog will know that I believe history deserves careful research and respect for the evidence.

Yet somewhere between Kettlethorpe and the Trent, the notes found their way back into my pocket and I simply began telling Katherine’s story.

Not an invented story, but a reasoned one.

The records tell us a great deal. They tell us where Katherine lived, the lands she held, the family she created and the extraordinary journey that took her from knight’s daughter to Duchess of Lancaster. They tell us about documents signed, estates managed and marriages arranged.

What they cannot tell us is what it felt like to stand where we stood, looking across the open Lincolnshire landscape.

Did she pause beside the Trent and watch the traffic on the river? Did she find comfort in the relative peace of Kettlethorpe when court politics became overwhelming? Did the deer park represent status, security or simply home?

No historian can answer those questions with certainty.

Our task is not to invent, but to interpret. We take the surviving evidence, place it within its historical context and, with care and honesty, build the most reasonable picture we can. Facts provide the foundations, but understanding creates the house.

Writing my biography of Joan Beaufort, Katherine’s daughter, has reinforced that lesson every day. Medieval records rarely hand us complete lives. Instead, they leave fragments: a payment, a licence, a will, a passing reference in a chronicle. The challenge is to connect those fragments without ever losing sight of the evidence.

Perhaps that explains why I find history so endlessly fascinating.

I have always been open about my dyslexia. Less well known is that I also have a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome, which manifests itself through motor tics.

For much of my adult life I tried to hide them, convinced that other people noticed far more than they actually did.

Age has a wonderful habit of changing perspective.

The tics have not changed, but my relationship with them has. What once felt like something to conceal has become simply another part of who I am. There is a quiet freedom in that realisation. Energy once spent worrying can instead be devoted to curiosity, conversation, research, writing and sharing stories.

Perhaps that is why I am increasingly drawn to the people behind the records. Medieval men and women were not names on family trees or figures in chronicles. They were individuals with ambitions, loyalties, griefs, humour and resilience. Katherine Swynford was certainly all of those things.

As we walked from village to village, history became something more than dates and documents. The church remained. The fields remained. The River Trent still flowed northwards as it did in Katherine’s lifetime. Even the outline of her deer park can still be traced across the landscape.

For a moment, six centuries seemed a very small distance indeed.

Crossing the old parkland on our return to Kettlethorpe, I was reminded that history is often found in the spaces between certainty and imagination. Not imagination that invents, but imagination disciplined by evidence and informed by place.

That is where Katherine still lives.

Not simply in charters or chronicles, but in the landscape she knew and in the stories that careful research allows us to tell.

Finally, my thanks go to the members of the Lincoln Bailgate U3A Walking Group, a group that has contributed enormously to my wellbeing over the years. Their friendship, support and enthusiasm have enriched far more than my walking. Their questions and observations on this walk were a reminder that history is not confined to archives, libraries and books. Sometimes it is found beneath our feet, in familiar fields and forgotten paths.

And that, perhaps, is why I keep returning to Kettlethorpe and to Katherine Swynford—a remarkable woman whose story still rewards those willing to slow down, look carefully and walk in her footsteps.B

My Lord John: Georgette Heyer.

 

Georgette Heyer
Wikimedia Commons 

Every so often a book gains a reputation that becomes difficult to shake. Readers hear that it is disappointing, flawed or unsuccessful and approach it already expecting to be underwhelmed. Georgette Heyer’s My Lord John is one such book.

Published after Heyer’s death in 1975, the novel has often been dismissed as an unfinished curiosity rather than a major work in its own right. Many readers expecting the wit and romance of her Regency novels were disappointed to discover a dense, highly detailed story set in the late fourteenth century. Yet having recently revisited the book, I find myself wondering whether it deserves far more credit than it usually receives.

The first misconception concerns the title itself.

Many people assume that the “John” of My Lord John is John of Gaunt. In fact, the title refers to his grandson, John of Lancaster, the future Duke of Bedford and son of Henry IV. Heyer intended the novel to be the opening volume of an ambitious trilogy exploring the House of Lancaster. Sadly, she never lived to complete it.

That said, John of Gaunt remains one of the most important figures in the book.

When we encounter him, he is in the final years of his life. This is not the fiery young commander of the Castilian campaigns or the controversial political figure denounced by some chroniclers. Instead, Heyer presents an ageing statesman whose long experience has given him both wisdom and perspective. He is shown as a devoted family man, deeply concerned with the future of the Lancastrian dynasty and conscious that his life’s work is nearing its end.

For those of us interested in Katherine Swynford, this portrayal is particularly fascinating.

Popular culture has often struggled to know what to do with John of Gaunt. Depending upon the author, he can appear as a villain, a romantic hero, a political opportunist or a tragic figure. Heyer’s version feels much closer to the John emerging from modern scholarship. He is intelligent, pragmatic, loyal to those he loves and, above all, conscious of his responsibilities.

What struck me most on rereading the novel was how naturally Katherine Swynford and the Beaufort children are woven into the story.

By the period covered in the book, Katherine is no longer the duke’s mistress but his wife. The long years of uncertainty are behind them. The Beaufort children are increasingly visible within the Lancastrian family circle and are treated as part of that world. Modern readers sometimes forget how remarkable this transformation was. Within a few years the Beauforts would be formally legitimised and become one of the most influential families in England.

For anyone researching Joan Beaufort, as I currently am, these scenes carry particular resonance.

Joan is not a central character, but she is present within the wider family network. We are reminded that before she became Countess of Westmorland and matriarch of the Neville dynasty, she was a daughter of the House of Lancaster. Her childhood and early adulthood were shaped by the political and familial world that Heyer recreates so effectively.

Indeed, one of the novel’s greatest strengths is its understanding of family.

This is not simply a story of kings and battles. It is a story of relationships between parents and children, brothers and sisters, uncles and nephews. John of Gaunt’s influence extends through every page, not because he dominates events but because his legacy shapes the lives of those around him. The future Henry V, the young Duke of Bedford and the Beaufort children all inhabit a world that he helped create.

Critics frequently complained that My Lord John was too historical and not sufficiently novelistic. There is some truth in that observation. The book contains lengthy discussions of politics, administration and dynastic affairs. It demands patience from the reader. Yet these are also the qualities that make it rewarding.

Heyer spent decades researching the period. She immersed herself in chronicles, records and medieval scholarship. Reading the novel often feels less like reading historical fiction and more like stepping into the late fourteenth century. The texture of everyday life, the political assumptions of the age and the intricate web of family loyalties all feel authentic.

Perhaps that is why I enjoyed it more on this reading than I did years ago.

As my own research has increasingly focused upon Katherine Swynford, John of Gaunt and Joan Beaufort, I found myself appreciating details that I might once have skimmed past. The novel captures a moment when the Beaufort family stood on the threshold of greatness. Their future importance is not yet fully visible, but the foundations are already being laid.

The tragedy of My Lord John is not that it is unfinished. Rather, it is that Heyer never had the opportunity to complete the larger story she intended to tell. One cannot help wondering what her portrayal of Henry V, Bedford and the later Beaufort generation might have looked like.

Even in its incomplete state, however, the novel offers something valuable. It provides one of the most sympathetic and thoughtful fictional portrayals of John of Gaunt that I have encountered. It presents Katherine Swynford as a respected member of the Lancastrian family rather than a historical footnote. Most importantly, it reminds us that the Beauforts did not emerge from nowhere. They were part of a family whose influence would shape English history for generations.

For readers interested in Katherine Swynford, John of Gaunt and the Beaufort dynasty, My Lord John deserves to be remembered not as a failure but as an ambitious and often overlooked achievement. It may not be Heyer’s easiest book, but it is certainly one of her most interesting.