Talking Location With … Boyd and Beth Morrison: Medieval Europe

23rd February 2022

#TalkingLocationWith… Boyd and Beth Morrison, authors of THE LAWLESS LAND – Medieval Europe

At the heart of our new novel, The Lawless Land, is an epic chase across medieval Europe. The time period of our story is one of the key turning points in human history because it is just after the worst of the Black Plague that wiped out more than a third of the continent’s population.

What was exciting about our research was that most of the locations in our book can still be visited 670 years later, today appearing much as they did during the fourteenth century. Our challenge was to filter out the elements that came after 1351 and replace them with the sights, sounds, and smells of the Middle Ages.

Although Google gave us many valuable insights, we were privileged to be able to actually visit our settings in person. The locations not only drove the story but were integral to the atmosphere for the knight and noblewoman who take this arduous journey. We wanted to feature places where surviving evidence of the fourteenth century still informed the feeling of the locale.

The tale begins in southeastern England and wends its way through France and northern Italy. We chose a combination of places our readers would know well, such as Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (which tragically suffered a devastating fire just months after we visited), and others a little more off the beaten path that we ourselves had always wanted to visit, such as the monastery of La Sacra di San Michele outside Turin (which served as the inspiration for another medieval novel, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose).

Mont Saint Michel

This familiarity with some places and a sense of wonder when encountering others paralleled the experience of our characters, enabling us to give a sense of what it was like to enter the town gates of Canterbury or sight the majestic outline of Mont-Saint-Michel from afar. Beth is a professional medievalist, so she was in charge of creating the list of buildings and sights we needed to see in each locale. Boyd is the professional novelist, so he envisioned the setpieces and action appropriate to the settings. Together, we worked as a team to figure out which locations exactly suited the needs of the story.

Tips we learned during our location research:

1. Planning: Do as much research as possible before you go, especially if you will have limited time. We were unfortunately unable to visit the Paris catacombs because we didn’t think to check that they’d open during the single day of our visit. We were able to squeeze five locations into twelve days through careful planning (although exhaustion was our most predominant feeling by the end of our whirlwind trip).
2. Photos: Take more photos than you think you might ever need, from establishing shots that show backgrounds to the small details that will give your story an air of realism. Our pictures of the city walls in Avignon and the remains of the city’s famous bridge helped us create one of the most thrilling scenes in the book.
3. Serendipity: Keep your eyes open for cool places you didn’t anticipate seeing. The cart used to raise and lower supplies at Mont-Saint-Michel and the Jewish quarter in Avignon provided unexpected inspiration for us.
4. Local Knowledge: Take guided tours and talk to people who work at locales as they may have special insights you’d never find online. Father Reji at La Sacra di San Michele became a pen-pal with whom we not only exchange Christmas greetings now, but also kindly described interior portions of the monastery that are not open to the public.
5. Note-taking: Boyd’s wife Randi serves as our unofficial archivist, creating a trip summary that reminded us of all the places we visited. We also kept track of ideas on a daily basis that we wanted to work into our story. Long train rides provided key downtime between settings for us to think about integrating what we saw into the story’s narrative.

Stairway of the Dead

Our aim was to provide readers with an authentic backdrop for the story, so that they would be able to imagine what living in medieval Europe might have been like. Some places they might know from their own travels, but we hope they might be inspired to visit others based on our descriptions. Most of all, we had a great time exploring the locations with an eye to how they could contribute to a fast-paced, action-packed thriller.

Thank you to brother-and-sister authors, Boyd and Beth Morrison, for such terrific insights.

Catch them on Twitter: Boyd and Beth 

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