“found...the language unfamiliar.”
This was the problem I had with Arthur Conan Doyle’s lesser-known-to-us-but-more-famous-in-his-lifetime book “The White Company”.
It is a meticulously researched story about the 30 years war (I think, too lazy to look it up right now) and some fine fellows who go to fight in it.
It’s all taking place a very long, long time ago and the dialogue brilliantly reflects that. It really is brilliant, because you can understand every word, even though it is all very archaic. But I found it exhausting to read.
I’d like to try it again someday, but I’m thinking I might wait to read it to my grandson, it’s really a boy’s story.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/903/903-h/903-h.htm
“The great bell of Beaulieu was ringing. Far away through the forest might be heard its musical clangor and swell. Peat-cutters on Blackdown and fishers upon the Exe heard the distant throbbing rising and falling upon the sultry summer air. It was a common sound in those parts—as common as the chatter of the jays and the booming of the bittern. Yet the fishers and the peasants raised their heads and looked questions at each other, for the angelus had already gone and vespers was still far off. Why should the great bell of Beaulieu toll when the shadows were neither short nor long? “
Doyle has the clarity required of a good adventure writer. His historical novels were his first love - he wrote Sherlock Holmes to pay the bills. There is also a 'prequel' - "Sir Nigel", and several other novels set in the Regency period in England and France. The "Brigadier Gerard" stories are a hoot - Gerard is a vain, thick-headed, valorous French hussar who (like Harry Flashman) always comes out smiling.
It's the Hundred Years War - the big conflict between England and France - not the Thirty Years War, which was mostly Protestants v. Catholics, with various groups trying to take advantage of the general conflict.