Here I am again, reviewing a book written before I was born. This book was another of my finds via 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up. [NB: I continue to assume that I am not yet grown up, let alone old, despite evidence suggesting otherwise]. I find that I have read many of the more recent books suggested there, at least ones of the sort that interest me, because I have been working at the library for over ten years, and tend to read books as they come in to the library. Many others I read in my childhood. But the local library was small when I was a kid, and options were limited. Knight's Fee is another of those that I never saw when I was young.Knight's Fee is set a scant generation after the Norman Conquest of England (1066, for any of you who haven't reached that point in your history classes yet). Randal, the protagonist, is the orphaned child of a Breton soldier and Saxon (i.e local) woman. He has no family nor is he of anything like noble blood. But by a series of chances, at age 10 he is taken from his job as dog boy and becomes the companion of Bevis d'Aguillon, Norman heir of a small English manor.Randal's rise from lowest of the low to varlet (I think I would have said "page") and then Squire would be unbelievable, except that Sutcliff somehow makes it both inevitable and yet clearly a matter of great chance, a bit of luck the boy never forgets. Nor does Sufcliff hold back on the foreshadowing. From his first arrival at the holding of Dean (the d'Aguillon home), his sense of coming home is coupled with a sense of inevitable loss. We know this isn't going to end well for everyone.Nor is Randal very old before a chance over-hearing leads him to make an enemy whose prediction--that he "one day will weep blood for this"--is kept close to the reader's mind as events unfold. Randal grows and becomes a squire; Bevis becomes a knight, as Randal, being poor and landless, cannot.The conclusion is no surprise, but it is not disappointing. How Randal rises to meet each challenge, how he faces loss and gain, is really what makes the book. He could continue to always be a kennel-slave who happened to get away from it. But instead he truly becomes the knight and the lord when it is thrust upon him.The style of the book is, as expected from something written more than 50 years ago, a bit dated. It won't read to a modern kid like they are used to (though I have trouble putting my finger on the difference--something of tone and style), and you don't end up as far inside Randal's head as we are accustomed to do with characters today. But for all that, the story is very satisfying, and presents a period of history, its people and politics, in a well-researched manner without ever seeming to be anything but a good story. Writing and editing are top-notch, and vocabulary does not talk down to the young reader.Five Stars.
I recently found myself in the young adult section of a university library and saw Rosemary Sutcliff on the shelves. I read the Eagle of the Ninth series decades ago and again a few years ago and have always loved them, so I grabbed a couple of her books that I hadn't read and brought them home. Her prose is poetic, descriptions of the countryside and light often lyrical. The action of the story is skillfully plotted, as you would expect from Sutcliff. As Rebecca noted, you don't get much of the inner life of most of the characters, but I suspect that was absolutely true of the period she writes about - knights and varlets didn't spend much time on introspection and women pretty much on the sidelines of the main business of life.As always, her understanding of the period she is writing about is so deep that she takes you straight into the world her characters inhabit. This period of changeover in the first generation of Norman settlement into Saxon England is fascinating and not one we often see or hear about. (Robin Hood is set about 100 years later). As I think about it, these periods of change seem to fascinate Sutcliff, perhaps because they open opportunities to explore different approaches to life and the possibilities of forging friendships across cultures. Though this may just be me applying the thinking of the 2000s to Sutcliff writing in the 1960s, when we didn't talk much about cross cultural understandings at all.The book itself is a period piece, and a classic of its kind. Not quite up there with Eagle of the Ninth, but that is up there in my top 5 books I read as a child.
What do You think about Knight's Fee (1973)?
It's so funny to read of the Normans after so long in the Romano-British period and then the post-Roman Dark Ages; but Sutcliff did not disappoint, telling the tale as skillfully as her other protagonists. I very much liked the depth of her hero cycle, which followed the now-classic paradigm of rising from nearly nothing in life to the surety and ability of one's self and life. And Sutcliff doesn't shy from the hard things, either, which is no small thing for a YA book to convey. Compare, for example, the Harry Potter books where every death is a wrenching, disruptively emotional experience--every single time. Sutcliff handles the same situations much more deftly and with far less drama. You feel the awfulness of the death, but you understand also that death is part of life, something to be honored even as those living carry on. To me, that's a much harder thing to understand, and to give that lesson to young readers is remarkable. A lesser work, but a great one.
—SA
Decent, but not as gripping as other Sutcliff stories I've read. It's the story of how Randal, the orphan of a Breton knight and a Saxon woman, is rescued from his life as a dog-boy at age 10 and eventually becomes a knight himself, and of his close friendship with a Norman boy, Bevis.It's also a story of how the Norman ruling class and Saxons came to have a common English identity. The climactic scene is the battle of Tenchebrai against the still-French Normans, which the English won by using some tactics that the Saxons had used at the Battle of Hastings. There are a lot of politics and allegiances and side-switching leading up to this battle, which Sutcliff has Randal overhear or learn about while he's growing up. She manages to make some of this fit in reasonably well with his own story, but I had to skim over a lot of it to keep myself interested.The bits about Randal and Bevis being best best friends ever are adorable; I also liked Randal's relationship with all the dogs in the story, and the wise woman Ancret.There's a somewhat predictable future-love-interest in the form of a cranky, lonely girl who also likes dogs, but she barely appears and has no real importance to the story apart from being future-love-interest. Randal meets her, argues with her, thinks "well that's an interesting and vexatious girl, now where's Bevis?" and that's really it. I wish she'd got to do something else.Oh -- and after an early scene in which Randal and Bevis use a woman's size as an insult against her, Sutcliff partly makes up for it with this lovely sentence:She leaned quickly forward and took the packet from him, her plump face alight with eagerness -- for the marriage, made by Red William for his own ends, had grown to be a happy one, and the Lady Aanor, who had first come to Bramber riding her big white mare as lightly as a boy, was running to soft, sweet fat, like a full-blown rose in the sunshine.
—Dorothea
“Knight’s Fee” seemed to be the type of book that could have been one hundred pages shorter and then perhaps could have roped my attention. I tried hard to connect with the characters and feel for their emotions, but I was not able to do so because the Sutcliff did not allow me time to comprehend one scene before she was on to something entirely different. While I commend her for including large amounts of descriptive evidence to the story, part of the time I found myself skipping over sections in which too many details were given and as a result, left behind confusion rather than great use of my imagination.
—Spring Pierson
