Elizabeth Chadwick

Chadwick writes the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the William Marshal novels are the best known: a knight who served five kings and was very nearly put to death at five years old when his father declined to surrender a castle for him. She belongs to a re-enactment society and has worn, cooked with and slept in the things she describes, which is where the physical detail comes from. The Summer Queen begins a trilogy about Eleanor of Aquitaine that argues against most of the legends attached to her. She lives in Nottingham.