" Five strangers. Five secrets. No refuge. No turning back."

What Aitcheson has done is shown a very personal side to the political events following the Norman Conquest. In this instance, events styled as "the Harrying of the North" whereby in order to subjugate to the north of England (1069-1070) and defeat the rebels, William the Conqueror laid waste to the north with the result being widespread famine, looting, slaughter, and a terrible loss of life.

In the style of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", five very different people, escaping the both their own pasts and the onslaught of the Normans, find solace in their own company and in the telling of their own stories. All the while, they are fighting for survival - and their success (if we can call it that) will depend upon them all.

Aitcheson vividly recreates the events of this dark chapter in England's history where Orderic Vitalis wrote that people were slaughtered, homes and villages destroyed, innocent punished with the guilty, famine raged, stories of cannabilism emerged. Can our narrators (priest, lady, servant, warrior, minstrel) outrun their own fates.

Five travellers come together, all have very different reasons for shielding themselves, but all have one intent and that is to keep hidden and well out of the way of marauding Norman soldiers, who in the aftermath of 1066 are to be found plundering and stealing their way across the North of England. No-one is safe, not a lady and her servant, or a minstrel and a warrior, and not even a man of God can escape the flickering shadows of the past.
As this disparate group of travellers make their way north, they start to reveal snippets of their lives, and by the glow of a gently crackling wood fire they share the reasons why they are all fleeing shameful secrets.
I think that the author has done a really good job of creating such a harrowing past. The immediate years following the invasion by the Norman war lords were a dangerous time in England's history. Villages were stripped and laid to waste, and death cries, blood and destruction echoed throughout the land. Gone was the old ordered way of life and its place was a lawless and dangerous society, that knew no peace and gave succour to no-one.
There is no doubt that The Harrowing paints a grim picture of what life was like during this time of great unrest. The author proves that he has more than enough in-depth historical knowledge to maintain authenticity as time and place are captured really well. The characters are well written and their individual stories sit comfortably against the wider backdrop of all that happens to the travellers as they make their way to the border lands between northern England and Scotland.