The Great History of the Manor Bouchove Part 1: Small Village in the Big World

We live in a house in the centre of a small village. With its stately façades and turret, the villagers sweetly call it châtelet. Before us, French noblesse stayed in it, gentry with impressive estates in France. During numerous holiday trips, we located and documented all of it. But that didn't give an answer to the question: How to present it in a digestible...no, into a captivating manner?
How to abridge the centuries and how to connect the turbulent history of Europe with everyday life in the village?
For that purpose, I introduced a family of estate stewards employed by the Masters of Bouchove. After all, ‘masters come and go, but stewards stay’. Besides clerks, marketers and a villain.
Thus, I got a storyline and could start processing the numerous bits and pieces of information into three volumes that give the rich history of Bouchove.

The author was born in Maastricht, Netherlands, before WW2. After secondary school, he moved to Wageningen to study at the Wageningen Agricultural University. That laid the basis for working in two dozen countries all over the world in the company of his wife, who gave him two girls and a boy. In 1968, he purchased a châtelet in the village of Bokhoven, that inspired him to take up local history, laying the basis for this historical novel. He stopped working in 2009 and sold the châtelet to move with his wife to a penthouse.