Author James M. Hockey was born on the slopes of the Iron Age hill fort of Ham Hill (check out the Ham Hill face book page). During the Roman period the IInd Legion had a camp here. This fort is only eight miles from the Cadbury hill fort, the favored if speculative location for Camelot and Arthur during post-Roman times. It is in this countryside that Alfred the Great hid and plotted the defeat of the invading Danes.
Moving just two miles down the road Hockey spent the early years of his life under the shadow of St. Michaels Hill, the scene of one of the last abortive rebellions against the Normans after 1066.
It is hardly surprising that history is in his blood and that his writing is set in this historic countryside.
We have all read about the Tudors, the Stuarts, and of course the late-comers to history, the Windsors. But in his two sprawling historical fiction sagas, Mr. Hockey takes us straight into the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 and through a fireside storyteller back to the story of the early migrations of Germanic peoples during the 5th Century.
In the West Country of England, the invaders were the followers of Gewis and were known as the Gewissae. They were also known as ‘The Trusted Ones.’ It is this that leads to the hypothesis on which Hockey’s two dark-age yarns are based.
Most migrating invaders needed to steal land and food to survive and had to fight to do this. So how is it, he asks, that the Gewissae settled so peacefully?
The assumption is that they had sufficient resources to buy rather than steal land and food.
The second book The Axe the Shield and the Halig Rood follows the Gewissae as the vicissitudes of Fate land them in an unintended place where, in exchange for the land they need they become embroiled in the wars between petty kinglets and chieftains, each seeking to gain dominance over a province broken apart by the withdrawal of the Legions.
Both these books are imbued with a belief in the workings of Fate. These bring about, through Gewis and the Gewissae, Cerdic the king and Arthur the Peacekeeper, the creation of the kingdom of Wessex and the conditions for the eventual re-unification of England.
Both books have been extremely well received by their readers. I urge you to visit Mr. Hockey’s Author pages here:
I looked at your Blog site and there I was already.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on the site, it is very impressive.
Once again many thanks for hosting me on it.
James M. Hockey
My pleasure, James. You chose such a little-known era and readers should be most interested to read and learn about it from your books.
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