Literary Notes: The usefulness of thugs and lynching

IT'S DIFFICULT writing novels. Plots form with clarity in the author's head but which words should be used in a historical work?

English is an astonishingly rich language. Constantly changing, it has an almost inexhaustible supply of modern words and a fabulous bank of old or ancient words upon which one can draw. This means the enterprising novelist can add authenticity with passing reference to "misericord", the dagger used to put a fatally wounded enemy out of his misery, or "falchion", a heavy, single-edged sword. Mention of trailbastons and shavaldours, crucks and cob, will delight those readers who enjoy discovering medieval terms.

And yet one cannot write stories using words which were current in, say, the 1300s. English then was a mixture of Latin, Norman French, German and even Arabic. If one wrote in correct contemporary language, it would be incomprehensible to all but the most specialised historians. I defy anyone to understand a single line of Chaucer in its original Old English, unedited and untranslated.

Even words which appear unchanged can fool casual readers. Our 20th-century interpretation is often completely different to that understood by Chaucer's contemporaries. Look at "nice". Its meaning has altered from "foolish", "stupid" and "slothful" in the 1300s, through "particular" or "precise" in the 1600s, to "agreeable" today.

Writers get around this problem by giving their work a spurious patina of authenticity. They throw in "Gadzooks" hoping to lull the reader into the conviction that the subject has been carefully researched. But too often they are wrong. "Gadzooks" was first recorded in the 1600s. Thus people associate late medieval words with earlier times. Yet our people and their language changed massively between 1300 and 1600.

It is because of this that I write my stories in the language of the 20th century. I assume that English readers buying War and Peace or The Three Musketeers would expect them to have been translated. Likewise Chaucer's work.

But there's another problem. If one writes in modern language, one will be tempted to use words that weren't known. I recently received a letter of complaint for that reason. The reader was irritated that I used words like "posse" and "gang", along with "thug" and "lynch". She said these words were too modern for her taste and distracted her from the story. It is a difficult charge to answer, because it shows precisely the double- sided nature of the choice of specific words.

Take "posse": most people associate posse with grubby American cowboys chasing after a film's hero or villain. But posse is an ancient word; posse comitatus was the legal term defining a body of armed men and posse was certainly in use in 1300, as was "gang" - a collective term for a group of things or people. These two words were correct for the period and the fact that they are still in use today is hardly my fault.

Words like "thug" and "lynch" are enormously useful, their meaning obvious. Thug has been known in English since the 1600s, and lynch since the 1780s. If a writer were to be excluded from using any words which have come into being over the last 200 years - or, worse, 400 - it would be next to impossible to write anything.

Writing historical novels is fraught with danger: on one hand it's easy to upset folk by using words which are incomprehensible; on the other it's possible that words which are too contemporary might alienate others.

All one can do is plead the best of intentions and try to steer a middle road in the hope that people will enjoy my novels for what they are: historical stories that spring from my own imagination.

Michael Jecks is the author of the Templar series of medieval murder mysteries. His seventh book, `Squire Throwleigh's Heir', will be available in hardback from Headline in June