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Dear Mr Cornwall,

 

As always, thank you for your continued work on the Last Warlord in the Kingdom sequence. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking of Uhtred as an old and slightly unreliable friend I catch up with on a semi-regular basis because he’s always good for a mug of ale and an outlandish story.

 

You’ve always been very open about the “semi-historical” nature of the books, but I have begun to wonder about the scale of Uhtred’s personal achievements in battle.

 

Now, obviously he is the protagonist of a series of novels and thus gets to be a bit of a superhero, so we allow his skills and luck to extend a little into the realm of hyperbole…

 

…but in the real world, were there 9th, 10th century warlords who would have fought in dozens of shield-wall battles, and personally killed many champions, and butchered scores – if not hundreds – of other men besides? I am personally not anal enough to calculate Uhtred’s “headcount” but it is the kind of thing someone on the internet will probably do, eventually… it’s high though, we can agree, surely?

 

But is it outlandishly high? Impossibly high? Or merely improbably high?

 

In short: were there really men in that time, who had personally killed hundreds of people?

Anthony