As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields

An uncertain sixteen year-old in black armor steels himself to lead the vanguard of his father’s army on a muddy battlefield. It is a stormy day in August, 1346. He is Edward Plantagenet, called “the Black Prince.” The place is “The Valley of the Clerks,” near the town of Crecy, France. This is the story of his youth and adulthood as he tells it, from a childhood among lions in the Tower of London to his love for a woman whose life is as wild and exceptional as his own. She is Joan, called “the Fair Maid of Kent,” renowned for her beauty. At 26, after years of vast social and economic change and the desolation of the Black Death, Edward returns to France in another desperate gambit to save his father’s kingdom and discover who he truly is. Before Henry V and Agincourt there was Edward and Crecy and Poitiers. And Joan. As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields is an imagined personal memoir written from primary historical sources. It won the Utah Arts Council First Prize for Novel (under the title “Edward and Joan”).