The Sprig of Broom

The Mantlemass Chronicles #3

by Barbara Willard

In sixteenth-century England, a boy of humble birth searches for his identity while Plantagenets plot to reclaim the throne from the Tudors.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Young Adult, Fiction, Childrens

192 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Barbara Mary Willard was a British novelist best known for children's historical fiction. Her "Mantlemass Chronicles" is a family saga set in 15th to 17th-century England. For one chronicle, The Iron Lily (1973), she won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a book award judged by panel of British children's writers.
Willard was born in Brighton, Sussex on 12 March 1909, the daughter of the Shakespearean actor Edmund Willard and Mabel Theresa Tebbs. She was also the great-niece of Victorian-era actor Edward Smith Willard. The young Willard was educated at a convent school in Southampton.
Because of her family connections, Willard originally went on the stage as an actress and also worked as a playreader, but she was unsuccessful and abandoned acting in her early twenties. She wrote numerous books for adults before she turned to children's literature.
Very little about the author was written during her lifetime, because of her private nature. She died at a nursing home in Wivelsfield Green, East Sussex, on 18 February 1994.
The Grove of Green Holly (1967), which was a story about a group of 17th century travelling players who were hiding in a forest in Sussex from Oliver Cromwell's soldiers, spawned her most famous work, the Mantlemass series (1970–1981) including her Guardian Prize-winning book. Some other books were Hetty (1956), Storm from the West (1963), Three and One to Carry (1964), and Charity at Home (1965).
One of her last books, The Forest - Ashdown in East Sussex, published by Sweethaws Press in 1989, gives a detailed account of Ashdown Forest. In the introduction to the book, Christopher Milne notes that Willard had moved from her home on the Sussex Downs to the edge of Ashdown Forest in 1956 and that her new surroundings had provided the inspiration and setting for ten of her children's historical novels (eight in the Mantlemass series and two others). It is evident by her own account in her book that she actively involved herself in the affairs of the forest. She was a representative of the forest Commoners elected to the forest's Board of Conservators in 1975, and she remained in that capacity for ten years. She tells how she was later heavily involved in the fundraising campaign which enabled East Sussex County Council to purchase the forest in 1988, enabling it to remain as a place of beauty and tranquility open to the public.

Reviews

[Sherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding look at the time just before the death of Henry Tudor, VIII and the reign of his son Henry the VIII.
Medley Plashet, is the unacknowledged son of a father, Richard, not married to his mother Anis, local woman, curried for her cures but maligned as a wise woman and witch. After meeting a stranger, Kit Crepin, from London who resembles his father and gives him a sprig of Broom to keep, Medley is denied by his father guiding three men he’s argued with, and Richard then leaves his loved family forever to take danger away from them, but leaving them to winter and village suspicions. AfterMedley is taken into the aristocratic, but farming Mallory household, with his best friend Roger and wild Catherine, but not as a servant , but to be trained up as the master’s secretary. His hopeless love for Catherine he buries and she proclaims. Her father asks Medley to find his father and learn if it was dishonor in his past that drove him away. What medley learns is that his father has been trying to protect them from from Yorkist supporters trying to revive Plantagenet hope through even the slimmest threads, bastard or no.
A well told story, based on truth. Indeed in a Kent parish church register, the death of master mason Richard Plantagenet is recorded!

[Mary's Bookshelf · Rating 4 out of 5]

This second book in the Mantlemass Chronicles takes place a generation after the first book. It has a prologue set in 1485, at the time of the Battle of Bosworth, and then moves forward to 1507 and the accession of Henry VIII.
Medley Plashet is growing up in Ashdown Forest, the son of a stonemason and Jack-of-all trades. Medley knows that there is some secret his father has not shared with him, but he must accept that he and his mother are not to inquire into the past. He is best friends with Roger Mallory, the son of the owners of Mantlemass, but his own place in society is less than nothing. When some strangers come to the forest in search of his father, disaster follows. His father disappears and his mother, a woman who knows some about healing, is accused of witchcraft and killed. Medley is taken into the Mallory household and trained to be a secretary for the estate. But his growing love for Catherine Mallory has no future if he cannot prove that he is not from a disgraced origin. Medley goes in search of his father to find out the secret that destroyed his family.

This entry in the Mantlemass Chronicle has a relationship to the legend of Richard of Eastwell. Was there a lost Plantagenet heir and what would have happened to any who were a threat to Henry VIII's claim to the throne? This is a mostly plausible tale, but there are a few historical inaccuracies. It does give an interesting picture of the life of commoners in the late Middle Ages. The characterization is strong. Recommended.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This second book in the Mantlemass series moves on a generation from the story of Lewis and Cecily Mallory and follows the life of a young man, Medley Plashet, who lives in a small house elsewhere on the Mantlemass estate. Inspired by a true story of lost Plantagenet heritage explained in an author's note at the end of the book, it is an involving and cleverly plotted story set in the aftermath of the Wars of the Roses as the new Tudor monarchy exerts its control over the country. Marked, like The Lark and the Laurel, by a strong sense of place and belonging, and by powerful descriptions of the natural world, The Sprig of Broom didn't quite enthral me in the way its predecessor had done, but made for an enjoyable and revealing historical novel nonetheless. The third volume, A Cold Wind Blowing, looks to be set against the backdrop of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, a period I've always found particularly fascinating, so I look forward to reading that soon.

[Doodles McC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this children's historical story when I was eleven. Well written for the 10-12 age group

[scarlettraces · Rating 5 out of 5]

this really has it all - superb descriptive writing and specific sense of place, old-school childrens' book style, teamed with a plot in which the central mystery delivers the requisite character growth.

[CLM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Medley Plashet grows up in the home of Cecily and Lewis Mallory (The Lark and the Laurel) but is haunted by the mystery of his birth.