While researching this book I was delighted to learn that the trebuchet team at Castelnaud had already experimented with tossing bags of water. They also alerted me to a remarkable article on this medieval technology in Scientific American, the issue of July, 1995, which notes that some of biggest trebuchets of the Middle Ages could fire weights of a ton and more (1000 kilograms). A modern trebuchet built in England in the 1990s was able to fire a small car weighing 476 kilos (without its engine) a distance of eighty metres. The researches of the thirteenth-century mathematician Jordanus de Nemore on the use of pivoting counterweights to increase the range of these missiles had an important impact on the later work of Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo and the makers of mechanical clocks.
As always, much of what I write depends on my friends and neighbours in the Périgord, on their splendid cuisine and wines, on the stories and legends they love to recount, and on the landscape they and their ancestors have tended for millennia. My debt to them is very deep indeed, matched only by my gratitude to my family, always the first to read, edit and advise on my manuscripts.
Without the help of my wife, Julia, Bruno’s cooking would too often end in disaster. All the recipes in this book come from the cookbooks we wrote together: Brunos Kochbuch and Brunos Garten Kochbuch, both published by Diogenes Verlag, my splendid German publishers. Julia and I are extremely proud that Brunos Kochbuch was named ‘The World’s Best French cookbook of the past twenty years’ at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2015, a prize awarded by Gourmand International. Without the work of our daughters, Kate and Fanny, Bruno’s investigations would lead up blind alleys, be stuck up trees or sink without trace. Kate runs the brunochiefofpolice.com website and Fanny keeps track of all the characters, the books and incidents in which they appear and the meals they enjoyed. She also organized and ran the video readings and interviews that we made to stay in touch with readers and to entertain them when we and much of the world were all locked down under the threat of the Coronavirus. Thanks to Julia, Kate and Fanny, the world of Bruno is a family affair.
I owe more than I can say to the help and support of my literary agent, Caroline Wood, and to the skills of my editors, Jane Wood in London, Jonathan Segal in New York and Anna von Planta in Zurich, and to the printers, copy editors, sales people, librarians and booksellers who bring these stories to the final, crucial link in the chain – you, the reader.
Martin Walker, Périgord, 2020.
