Views and Reviews Sworn Sword by James Aitcheson Sworn Sword evokes a real sense of the immediate post-Hastings years when the irrevocable nature of regime change was not yet an implacable fact. In the darkest days after the conquest the English tried to fight back, leading to a war-torn period of insurgency and reprisal. Set against this background is the story of Tancred, a household knight of one of the Conqueror’s magnates. The Fourteenth of October by Bryher Until recently, most fictional treatments of the Anglo-Norman period have portrayed it as a time of high-powered masculinity dominated by the military values of a brutal garrison aristocracy where female characters are generally absent or fulfil a minor love interest. Actium’s Wake by Ralph Jackman Actium’s Wake is a stirring historical novel set in ancient Rome at the time of the rise to power of the ‘Emperor’ Augustus.