I love maps – I have shoeboxes full of them. Poring over maps is an essential part of my writing process as I work to construct medieval worlds for readers to step into. ‘Even when a map is not all the plot … it will be found to be a mine of suggestion,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson.1
An old map in the British Library showing the medieval French counties of La Marche, Perigord, and the Limousin was an important inspiration for my first two novels.2 The map below has proved to be a mine of information for the current novel I am working on, Love’s Bread and its Knife.3
The language on a map is often suggestive. A map of mountainous terrain might be littered with cairns, hills, ridges, waterfalls, shelters, rocking stones, while a map of a coastal area might yield marsh, dunes, salt house, high water mark, low water mark, boathouse, ferryside, jetty, cliff, salmon point. Studying a map can yield scenes and language for someone writing a novel.
Map of Medieval Toulouse
When I was writing my first novel about the eleventh-century Occitan female lord, Almodis de La Marche, I contacted the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse to ask if they had a relevant map of Toulouse. They kindly sent me the above map. I’m using it again now in writing Love’s Bread and its Knife, which is set in 1093.
This map helps plot the movements of my characters around the city and in and out of the many gates in the Roman-built walls. It also suggests the various things happening in the city at that time, which might provide motivation for a murder, including the lucrative trade in salt or the construction of the great basilica of Saint Sernin, which served the new, and also lucrative, pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela.
Saint Sernin was the first bishop of Toulouse in the third century. The basilica and abbey were built between 1080 and 1120. Pope Urban consecrated the altar of the church in progress in 1096. The site can be seen on the map above. Saint Sernin was (and still is) an important stop for pilgrims walking toward Compostela. One of the characters in my novel is a sculptor working on the site.
Floating Mills
The city of Toulouse was built alongside the river Garonne. Three areas on the map above appear to show shoals of fish in the river. I wondered was this a fishing spot, a fish trap, but the map legend told me they were ‘moulins a nef’, floating, water-powered mills. I was curious to find out more about these mills.
Medieval mills were owned by the lord – in the case of my novel, this was the Count of Toulouse – and the peasants paid to have their grain ground into flour. Floating mills were invented in Rome in the sixth century. Boats were anchored and had milling apparatus attached. Grain might be delivered by boat, or a wooden bridge could be constructed between the bank and the mills allowing deliveries and collections by donkey. The map above shows two ‘chaussées’ or wooden walkways, close to the floating mills.
Bev Newman’s research4 on floating mills cites an account of twelfth-century mills by Alexander Neckham:
The wheel is over the side; the millstones and operator are on a cupola-shaped platform with peaked roof, which is built amidships on each hull. A ladder leads up to this. Sacks of grain are being brought in small boats and passed up to the millers. Each miller pours the grain into a funnel which is over the stone. The milled flour is pouring into sacks beneath the platform.5
These mills could operate under bridges, as they did in Paris, or in open water. Newman’s account of the mills gives the details of how they operated above and below water. This rich detail has suggested a scene of sabotage that I’m planning to incorporate in my novel.
In addition to providing details and texture for my writing about medieval Toulouse, I am also fascinated by what medieval technologies, such as floating mills, might be able to suggest to us as we go forward into climate change.
Walking the Terrain
Where possible, walking the terrain is as provocative for a writer as poring over a map. Even when there’s nothing remaining from early medieval times, the lie of the land – a hill, a river, a tree, the birdlife – can give a writer ideas.
A few years ago, I published an article entitled ‘The Lure of Another Place and Time’ in Historical Novels Review magazine. I interviewed several other novelists on the importance of place for their writing. Jacqueline Yallop remarked that ‘treading the ground allows you to inhabit other lives’; Kate Mosse declared that ‘writing starts with landscape’; and Deborah Lawrenson said, ‘The landscape itself often suggests the stories that might be possible within it.’6
The map of medieval Toulouse, above, shows two bridges, Pont Vieux and Pont de La Daurade. The legend is that Pont Vieux was built by the Visigothic queen Pédauque in the fifth century. It disappeared long ago. In 1125 (a little after the time of my novel), the count of Toulouse allowed the Benedictines at Daurade monastery to build the Daurade bridge. Only one pillar of this bridge remains today. Since it appears on the map above, perhaps its building was already under discussion and in negotiation in 1093, when the action of my novel takes place. The foundations of the bridge’s pillars were discovered in an archaelogical survey of Daurade port in 2015. The bridge was damaged on a regular basis by the many river floods. The brick vaults were gradually replaced by a wooden roof, then covered with tiled gallery roofing.
‘I made the map of an island’, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson.
The future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among the imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters … The author must know his countryside, whether real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of the compass, the place of the sun’s rising, the behaviour of the moon.7
Going into the map provides the writer with a wealth of material.
Cited in Peter Turchi’s wonderfully inspiring book, (2004) Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press.
Tracey Warr (2023) Almodis: The Peaceweaver, London: Meanda Books; Tracey Warr (2023) The Viking Hostage, London: Meanda Books. See https://meandabooks.com.
This novel will be serialised on this Substack from 6 November 2023 – daily posts of a chapter for paid subscribers (around 40 chapters in all).
Bev Newman, ‘Agricultural Scenery – Floating Mills’, Woolly History of the British Isles, 16 August 2016. Available at: https://woollyhistoryofbritain.wordpress.com/2016/08/16/agricultural-scenery-floating-mills/.
U.T. Holmes Jr. (1952 ) Daily Living in the Twelfth Century, Based on the Observations of Alexander Neckam in London and Paris, London: The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 103–104.
Tracey Warr (2016) ‘The Lure of Another Place and Time: The Landscape and History of France’, Historical Novels Review, February, 75. Available at: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/the-lure-of-another-place-time-the-landscape-history-of-france/.
Turchi (2004).