A review of Alison Weir's forthcoming biography Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess raises doubts about the author's "discrimination in the use of evidence."
Weir tells us, for example, that Hugh of Swynford, Katherine’s first husband, was “a shrewd and terrifying fighter”, citing John of Gaunt’s Register as the source for this phrase. Readers might be justifiably perplexed to discover that the fourteenth-century Register of John of Gaunt includes not a single indexed reference to Hugh, and that the phrase “he was a shrewd and terrifying fighter” appears to be borrowed from an amateur genealogical blog (worldconnect.rootsweb.com, posted June 2006), which itself cites merely unspecified “registers” as its source. [Link]
