Benjamin Myers

WINNER OF THE 2018 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE 'Powerful, visceral writing, historical fiction at its best. Benjamin Myers is one to watch' Pat Barker 'Phenomenal' Sebastian Barry 'Superb' The Times From his remote moorland home, David Hartley assembles a gang of weavers and land-workers to embark upon a criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history. They are the Cragg Vale Coiners and their business is 'clipping' – the forging of coins, a treasonous offence punishable by death. When an excise officer vows to bring them down and with the industrial age set to change the face of England forever, Hartley's empire begins to crumble. Forensically assembled, The Gallows Pole is a true story of resistance and a rarely told alternative history of the North.

The Gallows Pole

An England divided. From his remote moorland home, David Hartley assembles a gang of weavers and land-workers to embark upon a criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history. They are the Cragg Vale Coiners and their business is 'clipping' - the forging of coins, a treasonous offence punishable by death. A charismatic leader, Hartley cares for the poor and uses violence and intimidation against his opponents. He is also prone to self-delusion and strange visions of mythical creatures. When excise officer William Deighton vows to bring down the Coiners and one of their own becomes turncoat, Hartley's empire begins to crumble. With the industrial age set to change the face of England forever, the fate of his empire is under threat.

Sian Wadey

DNF - it didn't hold my attention at all. About twenty people were introduced in the first twenty pages and the sections written from Hartley's point of view were really hard to read. Not for me!

Liam Byrne 

‘The Gallows Pole’ was dripping with mud and the smell of sweat oozed out of every page that I read. Throughout the story, Myers does a brilliant job of bringing 18th Century Yorkshire to life, a world that is as wild and dangerous as the men who live upon it. Every setting and fluctuation in the season is presented in glorious detail, further emphasising the harsh and unflattering lives lived by the Cragg Vale Coiners and those who lived in the moors. They respected the land, harsh and unforgiving as it was, believing that it would see them right when needed.

It is this clash between the old world values of working the land, getting your hands dirty and looking after your kith and kin, against that of encroaching industrialisation, that drives the narrative forward almost as much as David Hartley’s attempts to line everyone’s pockets with counterfeit gold. Though Hartley is never played for sympathy, especially in his written ramblings from a jail cell after the law catches up with him, the awareness of how lives such as those represented in ‘The Gallows Pole’ were due to change so significantly does at least give you pause for thought. Drunken and rugged though they were, the Coiners just wanted a better life and were not long for the modern world that was about to hit them hard in the coming years.

The descriptions of the less than positive facets of life as a treasonous coin clipper are told in unflinching detail, including several acts of violence that even had myself wincing with pain. Considering this is all meticulously researched makes the aggression shown from the men to their fellow peers even more disheartening. Acts of violence are a means to maintain status, and Hartley is never too many words away from a threat that you know if more than possible a viable outcome of the confrontation.

Hartley as the main protagonist is interestingly realised as a man who oftentimes seems more excited by the prospect of the ‘celebrity’ surrounding being ‘King’ than any true desire to protect his men and their relative families. Though he does once reward his men with a feast after a day’s hard work, it is the songs and rhymes that proclaimed his value that he ends up reminiscing about during his time behind bars.

‘The Gallows Pole’ and the world it explores is unashamedly masculine, but the occasional dabbling in this situation viewed through the eyes of a woman are all the more rewarding for it. Indeed, from an early section where Grace Hartley compliantly allows David to complete his husbandly duty whilst her mind wandered to the spiders and dust around the room, to her stoic responses to her husband’s incarceration and eventual death, and the actions she takes in the epilogue, her involvement is engaging, if brief.

Grace’s aforementioned actions in the epilogue do almost come as one last middle finger to the authorities that attempted to keep the Cragg Vale Coiners from their illegal behaviours. That it would come against a backdrop of a sea change to life in the area leave the gesture ultimately futile, but could fan the flames of any particularly anti-establishment reader as the little guy gets one over on those that try to contain him.

Occasionally heavy work, but an otherwise interesting historical slice of fiction from a time in the not too distant past, this books deserves all the recognition it received.

Bryan Alexander

The Gallows Pole is a fine work of historical fiction, narrating the rise and fall of an 18th-century British counterfeit gang.

You can read it as a crime story. Myers presents the criminals - the Cragg Vale Coiners - in detail, showing their relationships, social condition, and how they conduct their crimes. He also shows their opponents, a local customs agent backed up by other authorities: how they perceive the counterfeiters, what steps they take. The plot consists of their struggle.

The Gallows Pole is also a very successful historical novel. It offers us a carefully detailed glimpse into 18th-century York's town and (especially) countryside. It shows us clothing, food, housing, seasons, conversation, restaurants, sex, prison, technology, and more. More, the novel follows the ideas of György Lukács and Pierre Macherey in showing not a frozen moment in time, but a period in transition. The coiners emerge from a subsistence agriculture setting as it starts entering the first industrial revolution. The novel describes a transition in process. Some of the characters foresee what's coming, and their reactions - fear, violence, acceptance, celebration - sketch out what is to come over the next several generations (cf 202 and 322-4).

At the same time the novel is a lush, deeply appreciative ode to the landscape of West Yorkshire. One every page Myers offers poetic descriptions of local nature. At times the book reads like a travelogue, especially as we follow characters in motion. The style as a whole essays the lyric in description and dialogue, at times reaching an incantatory level. For example, Myers follows Homer and Blake (in America a Prophecy, 1793) when he catalogs the names of people entering the action, listing their full names again and again as if reciting a charm, or summoning entities. Ditto the names of places.

Myers loves the local language. He dots paragraphs with offcumdens and bodgers, plus furmenty, sneck band and wapentake. David Hartley names his land (a touch improbably, if accurately) Jórvíkshire (215). Scandinavian names sneak in as proper nouns, like brogger. This is a stylistic trick too many historical novels miss. It acts akin to the transformed language (cf Eric Rabkin) in fantasy and science fiction, in subtly conveying to the reader the feel of a world different from our own.

The book is fond or short, surprising turns of phrase. A very cold man sings "through chattering teeth that gave his song a new staccato rhythm with percussive enamel accompaniment." (285). Earlier, "[a] silent moment passed until the trance of the unmoving woodland was broken by the ruffled racket of a bird taking flight like a flung book." (11)

Myers doesn't hold back from describing ugliness, suffering, and horror. His lyricism continues even in those domains. A dead body presented as a warning, for example, appears: the warming morning's rays readying the corpse for hatching a forthcoming summer's insects in the clefts and creases of socket and sore, and the retraction of skin and muscle and gums over the gaunt architecture of a desperate man already hasting the sickening sweetness of the bubble and foam and fizz of him. (5)On top of that, there's a touch of the supernatural in the novel. Specifically, it's an example of the rural branch of dark fantasy now known as folk horror as the lead counterfeiter, "King" David, repeatedly sees visions of stag-men. His ally, a technician known only as the Alchemist, also does some scrying. 

Overall, a splendid novel. This is one I slowed down to savor, and parts I read aloud to my long-suffering family. Strongly recommended.

Gary Homewood

Dark, brooding, visceral and violent historical fiction based on real events at the dawn of the industrial revolution. A gripping study of folklore and myth. Impressively authentic language including colourful cursing.

The Gallows Pole

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