Torque and Feu and the Legend of the Lost Roman Gold

Setting

The location is made up, but I imagine it to be somewhere near the middle of modern England, perhaps near Chesterfield.

The story takes place sometime around 428 AD.

Points of the compass

The terms North, South, East and West were not in use in Britain at this time. People used phrases indicating the direction where the sun rose (East) or set (West) or from which the cold winds came (North). In my first draft I tried to keep these directional elements, but found it too cumbersome, so the story uses North, South, East and West just as we do today.

Old and new words

In one of my early drafts I had a character say “OK.”  My wife pointed out that OK is a modern word (1839) so I replaced it with “right.” So began a quest to not have characters speak modern words. For practical reasons, I set the cutoff at 1839. Along the way I found that a lot of words one might think are modern are actually quite old (“Yea,” pre-12th century, spelled ya), and that others that sound old are modern (“Hello,” 1877). “Hello” comes from “holler,” which is very old, but the meaning is different. I used “hello” and a few other words anyway when I couldn't find suitable replacements.

Names

The names of my main characters are made up, as are the village names (and their spelling). I used the village name Hometon early on as a stand-in until I could come up with another name, I knew that the suffix ton in Hometon is from Anglo-Saxon times. Later I tried to replace it with a more Celtic sounding name, but I never found anything that I liked as much as Hometon, so the name stayed.

A word of thanks

Thanks to my wife Susan who encouraged me to complete the book and put up with my dyslexic writing during the editing process.

A few notes on the book