Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England Earl Hubert's Daughter, by Emily Sarah Holt. ________________________________________________________________________ This is one of Emily Holt's admirable and deeply researched historical novels, this time set in the early years of the thirteenth century. The main players in the story appear at first sight to be the upper-class ladies of the Court, and their various somewhat confusing relationships. But early in the book an old Jewish pedlar comes and displays rich wares of a surprising value and variety. One of the girls asks if he can get some special embroidery done on a scarf she wants to give as a present. Abraham sends in his young daughter Belasez and conditions are agreed such that she will not be called upon to do or eat anything she should not, and all this seems to work very well. But the story involving Belasez, her mother Licorice, and her brother Delecresse, gets more and more involved and interesting. Belasez realises that there has been something in the past that she wants to unearth, and gradually the whole strange story is revealed. ________________________________________________________________________ EARL HUBERT'S DAUGHTER, BY EMILY SARAH HOLT. PREFACE. The thirteenth century was one of rapid and terrible incidents, tumultuous politics, and in religious matters of low and degrading superstition. Transubstantiation had just been formally adopted as a dogma of the Church, accompanied as it always is by sacramental confession, and quickly followed by the elevation of the host and the invention of the pix. Various Orders of monks were flocking into England. The Pope was doing his best, aided by the Roman clergy, and to their shame be it said, by some of the English, to fix his iron yoke on the neck of the Church of England. The doctrine of human merit was at its highest pitch; the doctrine of justification by faith was absolutely _unknown_. Amid this thick darkness, a very small number of true-hearted, Heaven-taught men bore aloft the torch of truth--that is, of so much truth as they knew. One of such men as these I have sketched in Father Bruno. And if, possibly, the portrait is slightly over-charged for the date,--if he be represented as a shade more enlightened than at that time he could well be--I trust that the anachronism will be pardoned for the sake of those eternal verities which would otherwise have been left wanting. There is one fact in ecclesiastical history which should never be forgotten, and this is, that in all ages, within the visible corporate body which men call the Church, God has had a Church of His own, true, living, and faithful. He has ever reserved to Himself that typical seven thousand in Israel, of whom all the knees have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth hath not kissed him.