You have enough justified praise from fans so I will skip that bit and ask if your opinion of the church and their monks is contemporary or just assumed historical fact as in The Saxon Stories?
Peter Round

I read your Sharpe series several years ago, and I enjoyed them immensely. This year I’ve read Agincourt and I’ve just finished the fourth of your Saxon Tales. Thank you for creating a realistic world full of adventure, passion, and horror that I can escape to for a few hours each week. I’d give a kidney to travel to 9th century England to have a chat with Lord Uhtred. I appreciate that you spend time on details – the steps to loading a musket, the process of making a good arrow, the forging of Serpent-Breath – because it’s the details that make an unbelievable world believable. I am intrigued with your overall negative depiction of the church and the priesthood in the Saxon Tales. You describe a church that is predominantly self-serving and rapacious yet occasionally benevolent, and you present many priests who are narrow-minded and manipulative (and a few who are brave and honest)… and then there’s the tension between Christianity and the Old Gods. Is your handling of religion in your writing reflective of your personal beliefs, or do you depict religion and religious practitioners as your historical research suggests they actually were, or do you present the church largely as an opponent of Uhtred so as to thicken the plot and to build his stature? I’m an atheist, so I could as easily worship the Sun as the son of God, but I do find your handling of religion fascinating. Thanks again, and keep the books coming! Mark Daugherty