Tombland by C J Sansom

I started CJ Sansom’s most recent book, Tombland, on a Wednesday – and finished it the next Wednesday. A week spent with lawyer Master Matthew Shardlake and his companions. I’d put off reading this book by the sure size of it – at 800 and some pages it was a serious amount of reading. But, embarking a plane trip and a time off work it was my choice to begin the holiday reading, and a good choice it was.

Tombland begins in the summer of 1549, King Edward VI is the child king, His step-sister Mary (daughter of Catherine of Aragon) is next in line to the throne, and his step-sister Elizabeth (daughter of Anne Boleyn) is now the employer of Matthew Shardlake. It is a summer of discontent in England. The poor are very poor, even in the country. The landowners have been turning over farmland to sheep rather than crops – there is at this time an insatiable demand for wool. Many of the tenant farmers have been thrown off the land they leased, and even common pasture has been taken over by the gentry for sheep.

Matthew Shardlake has been directed by the Lady Elizabeth to travel to Norwich to investigate the arrest of her relative, John Boleyn, who is accused of murdering his first wife, Edith. Edith had left her husband nine years earlier, and had been declared dead after seven years. But when her body is found, recently dead and obviously a victim of murder, her husband is the prime suspect. Matthew travels to Norwich with his assistant Nicholas, and they begin their investigation. Staying at an Inn in the Tombland district, and with the assistance of a local man, Toby Lockswood, they begin to interview those who knew John Boleyn. Shardlake is also anxious to find his former servant, Josephine who lives in Norwich with her husband and child.

But, the summer of 1549 is a summer of great unrest across the country. The class system in England has always been very structured – the gentlemen ruling and everyone else subservient. In this summer of discontent the people are grumbling, and a leader surfaces who will call them to battle. “Captain” Robert Kett is intelligent and charismatic and the people look to him to change the country, so that the common man will have rights of property and a voice in government. Matthew Shardlake becomes caught up in all of this, and assists Captain Kett with legal advice at trials. It is an idealistic movement – one that ends in bloodshed. Shardlake observes, “I understand why those who had nothing to lose had cause to be fiercest”, and finds himself with some sympathy for the movement. How little difference there seems between the summer of 1549 and so many more recent uprisings of citizens who feel they have nothing to lose in so many places around the world.

This is a novel about class, feudalism, serfdom, tenant farmers and gentlemen. About politics and religion, and loyalty, and greed. Tombland was published last year, and released recently in paperback. It is as excellent as all of the previous books in the Shardlake series - in spite of its size I was always absorbed in the story and the fate of the characters involved.

There has been a certain amount of press about CJ Sansom and his diagnosis, in 2012, of multiple myeloma, a rare and incurable cancer that affects the bone marrow. In spite of his illness he has written and published two Shardlake novels since his diagnosis, so we wish him well, and can only hope for more.