Menewood

Hild is eighteen and has become the formidable lady of Elmet, but the authority she won at Edwin’s court cannot protect her from the approaching war. While she establishes a stronghold and household in the valley of Menewood, Edwin grows increasingly suspicious and summons his most valuable adviser back into a court divided by ambition. Hild must decide whom she can trust, prepare her people for violence and learn how power can be preserved when the king who created the existing order loses control of it.

The novel dramatizes the destruction of Edwin’s Northumbrian supremacy at the Battle of Hatfield Chase and the campaigns associated with Penda of Mercia and Cadwallon ap Cadfan. Its later movement through displacement, retaliation and political reconstruction leads towards Oswald’s victory at Heavenfield. Against those recorded events, Griffith concentrates on the labour of survival after war: feeding refugees, rebuilding farms, training defenders and creating obligations strong enough to outlast a dynasty. Hild’s historical future as an abbess remains ahead of her, but Menewood shows the secular leadership and community-making from which that later authority might have grown.