The Long-Lost Secret Diary of the World’s Worst Knight

The Long-Lost Secret Diary of the World's Worst Knight is written by a boy who is not a knight and would very much like you to think otherwise.

What happens

He is Roderick, squire to Sir Lionel at Doddingford Castle, and by his own reckoning he is at least three years off the real thing. His great feat of courage on day two of the diary is scrubbing pigeon droppings off the east wall. He falls off the ladder doing it, because he wore his fashionable pointed shoes.

The diary is the whole joke. Roderick writes up each disaster as a triumph, gets about two sentences in, and then gives up and tells you what actually happened.

Sword training is the high point. Handed a sword almost as big as he is, he spins himself round and round to get it above his head, crosses the entire courtyard without noticing and buries the blade in a spinning wheel. Everyone dives for cover. He decides this counts as striking fear into his enemies.

Then he tries a quarterstaff and takes his own feet out from under him. Then he throws a rock as far as he can and it lands on his foot.

So how does a boy like this get knighted? By emptying a sick bucket at precisely the right moment. A visiting knight eats his way through a banquet, spends the next day being violently ill, and sits up mid-heave to see Roderick standing at the window with the sun blazing behind him. Saint Stephen has sent a vision, apparently. Roderick very sensibly keeps his mouth shut.

Your reader should know there is a fair amount of vomit in that stretch. It is played for laughs rather than for horror, but it does go on for a page or two.

Scattered through the diary are short GET REAL boxes with the real history. What squires actually trained at. What went on at a medieval banquet. Why knights cared so much about King Arthur, and whether he existed at all. They run two or three sentences and never stop the story, which is the trick most funny history books miss.

What makes Roderick good company is that he can see himself clearly and then chooses not to. He knows the other squires are better with a sword. He admits it, on the page, and then talks himself round again by the next entry.

Your reader may notice this is the American edition. It is armor and practicing rather than armour and practising.

What to read next

The same diary treatment lands on a Victorian fossil hunter in the World's Worst Dinosaur Hunter, which is in the library too. Anne finds the bones and her father sells them to holidaymakers off a stall outside the house, as lucky charms that cure colds and bad backs.