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  Thom as a man of arms would have made slightly more than as a blacksmith, but as a regular knight would have earned £36 and a knight banneret (one who led men under his own banner) roughly £72 (ibid.). To put this in even more perspective, for Thom to have purchased a warhorse he might have needed as much as £80 (ibid.). Other horses were much cheaper.

  I used the term merk or mark, which was a medieval monetary unit (and later a coin); it was valued at about two-thirds of a pound. One pound was 20 shillings, and one mark/merk was 13 shillings, 4 pence (ibid.).

  If you’ve read my books and author’s notes before, you know that the complex and complicated subject of medieval marriage has been a recurring thorn in my side. I was very happy to avoid it in this book, but then I realized I had to deal with the betrothal. Ugh. Trying to get a sense of how common it was to break a betrothal was just like many of the marriage issues I’ve faced: it’s hard to say.

  Medieval betrothals were quite different from today’s engagements. In addition to being a much more formal, contractual event and undertaken by the family, breaking one—particularly a noble betrothal—was a much more serious matter. Although, interestingly, it was more of a secular than ecclesiastical issue—the church was much more worried about consent in marriages (and that they be public). As Genevieve Ribordy notes in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2006, 72): “In a society where honor and the given word were of the utmost importance, betrothals were instrumental in ensuring that the wedding would take place. Although they were optional according to canon law, in reality a betrothal was an important event that could be revoked only exceptionally and with great difficulty.”

  A quick—very quick—word on Lent. I usually do my best to ignore what was surely the dominating force in medieval life: the church. I do this mostly because it doesn’t lend itself well to a sexy romance (my usually unmarried heroes and heroines would be doing a lot of penance!), but I also think it’s very difficult to know exactly how rigorously the strictures were applied in everyday life. For example, married couples were expected to abstain from sex every Sunday, throughout the forty-seven to sixty-two days of Lent, for twenty-two to thirty-five days around Advent, for the period around Pentecost, on some other feast days, during penance, while pregnant, after pregnancy . . . you get the picture (Brundage, 155–59). There were so many days where you had to “abstain” from not only food but other delights, so to speak, you have to think that if everyone was taking this to heart there wouldn’t have been very many babies born.

  Although Lent certainly sounds like a dreary period—especially for the poor—and most people appeared to have adhered to it strictly with one big meal and perhaps one smaller meal at night, even religious houses seemed to find a work-around: “Lent was kept in the official refectory, but not in the infirmary, where the old and sick needed meat to remain strong. Many monks just went to the infirmary for supper” (Ruth A. Johnston, All Things Medieval: An Encyclopedia of the Medieval Word [Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011], 232–33). This was pretty much the approach I took to religious matters. People would be very conscious of the rules but didn’t always follow them.

  Finally, Bruce’s location during the taking of the castles is unclear, although he was with Randolph at Edinburgh during the beginning of the siege (probably in January 1314) to negotiate with the keeper, who was later imprisoned by his fellow Englishmen for parleying with the enemy. Where Bruce might have stayed is also conjecture, but there is evidence suggesting that Holyrood was used as a royal residence by 1329 and Bruce held parliament there in 1326 (John Gifford, et al., Edinburgh [New York: Penguin Books, 1991], 125).

  Would women have been in Edinburgh at the time of the siege? It doesn’t seem unlikely. Bruce had his wife, daughter, and sisters with him eight years earlier in much more precarious circumstances after the Battle of Methven. Similarly, during a siege of Stirling Castle ten years before Bannockburn by Edward I, his queen accompanied him from England. Much is made of the entertainment factor in watching Edward’s new siege engine “Warwolf” at work. A special window was supposedly constructed so that Queen Margaret and other ladies from court might watch (Cornell, 12).

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  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX ABERCROMBIE

  MONICA McCARTY is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the widely acclaimed, award-winning Highland Guard series, as well as the MacLeods of Skye and Campbell trilogies. Her interest in the Scottish clan system began in the most unlikely of places: a comparative legal history course at Stanford Law School. After realizing that her career as a lawyer and her husband’s transitory life as a professional baseball player were not exactly a match made in heaven, she traded in writing legal briefs for writing about sexy Scottish alpha heroes. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. Visit www.monicamccarty.com.

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  The Knight (Novella)

  The Raider

  The Arrow

  The Striker

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  ISBN 978-1-5011-0878-5

  ISBN 978-1-5011-0880-8 (ebook)

  CONTENTS

  The Highland Guard

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1