Uhtred of Bebbanburg returns!

I'm going to write (scholarly writing) for a couple of hours, and then reward myself with the new Uhtred of Bebbanburg novel, Death of Kings. The series (6 books so far) follows the adventures of a ninth-century Thor-worshipping Saxon warrior who loves to poke fun at the pieties and 'middle class values' of Anglo-Saxon life.

From The Burning Land (the previous book):

Next morning it was raining like the world was ending and so I waited until the wind and weather had done their worst. I roamed the monastery and eventually found myself in a dank corridor where three miserable-looking monks were copying manuscripts. An older monk, white-haired, sour-faced and resentful, supervised them. He wore a fur stole over his habit, and had a leather quirt with which he doubtless encouraged the industry of the three copyists. "They should not be disturbed, lord," he dared to chide me. He sat on a stool beside a brazier, the warmth of which did not reach the three scribblers. 

"The latrines haven't been licked clean," I told him, "and you look idle." 

So the older monk went quiet and I looked over the shoulders of the ink-stained copyists. One, a slack-faced youth with fat lips and a fatter goiter on his neck, was transcribing a life of Saint Ciaran, which told how a wolf, a badger, and a fox had helped build a church in Ireland, and if the young monk believed that nonsense then he was as big a fool as he looked. The second was doing something useful by copying a land grant, though in all probability it was a forgery. 

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