Men of Iron

Reading time

about 5 h

Length

68,252 words · 254 pages

Structure

33 chapters · 2 front-matter sections

Language

English

Era

Victorian

Myles Falworth is eight when armed men come to the house at night, and grows up on a poor farm knowing only that his father is blind, outlawed and attainted for a treason he will not discuss. At sixteen he is sent as a squire to the Earl of Mackworth at Devlen Castle, where he promptly makes enemies of the older squires, organises the younger ones into a rebellion called the Knights of the Rose, and is taken up for training by the castle's own master of arms. The point of all of it, kept from him for years, is a single trial by combat: the right to challenge the Earl of Alban before the King, and either clear his father's name or die in the lists.

Howard Pyle published Men of Iron in 1891. He was an illustrator first, and the book's detail — the routine of a great household, the weight and fitting of harness, the exact business of a passage of arms — comes from the same research that produced his pictures of the period.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.

New editions

Never lose your place.

This book is free to read in full, and stays that way. Leave an address: one click confirms it and opens a free account, so your progress and bookmarks sync across every device. You'll also hear when the next restored edition enters the archive. Terminate at any time.

Subjects

About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

Howard Pyle (1853–1911) was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and studied art in Philadelphia before Scribner's Magazine accepted his first published piece in 1876. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), his own retelling of the ballad tradition illustrated with his own pen-and-ink drawings, became the version of the outlaw most American readers grew up on, and he went on to write and illustrate further books on medieval romance and piracy. From 1894 he taught illustration at Drexel Institute, and after 1900 ran his own school in Wilmington and nearby Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; its roughly two hundred students, many of whom became major illustrators in their own right, became known as the Brandywine School. He died in Florence, Italy, in 1911, while studying mural painting.