The novel opens with a confused throng of villagers, the publican, the local parson Sir Oliver Oates, the lord of the manor Sir Daniel Brackley, and his ward the young teenager Dick Shelton, as they get confused reports of a battle, or at least of another nobleman in some kind of warlike trouble, nearby. We see the conflict not from the vantage of courts and kings, but reflected in the microcosm of what seems to be a small area of the Fenland i.e East Anglia, around the fictional village of Tunstall, with its Moat House and nearby Holyrood Abbey. There is no high-level explanation of any of this in the novel, and no date given to help the reader orientate themself. (Hence the novel’s sub-title, A Tale of the Two Roses.) The story is set against the backdrop of the Wars of the Roses, a confusing conflict when the weakness and mental illness of King Henry VI allowed a major civil war to develop between followers of two large noble families – York and Lancaster, each fighting for the crown – which dragged on for a generation, from 1455 to 1485.

When the peasants gather at the summons of the bell, they are told that as many armed men as can be spared from the defence of Moat House are to join Sir Daniel at Kettley, where a battle is to be fought between the armies of Lancaster and York… You can listen online to free English audiobook “The Black Arrow” by Robert Louis Stevenson on our website.Cover of The Black Arrow illustrated by N.C. A messenger arrived with a message from Sir Daniel Brackley for Sir Oliver Oates, his clerk. One afternoon in the late springtime, the Moat House bell begins to ring. The Black Arrow is the story of a young man’s maturation during the mid-fifteenth century when England was torn by thirty years of civil war, known as the Wars of the Roses. The late 20th century brought a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight. His heirs sold his papers during World War I, and many Stevenson documents were auctioned off in 1918. Half of Stevenson's original manuscripts are lost, including those of Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, and The Master of Ballantrae.

Trained in law at Edinburgh University, Stevenson was under pressure to conform to the Edinburgh bourgeois society in which his family had made its name as lighthouse engineers he preferred a more bohemian existence as a writer.

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Scotland and died in Samoa at the end of a life of travels, during which he produced novels, short stories, literary essays, poetry, drama, and travel writing.

The black arrow novel