Ah the joys of Google and Amazon, and random discoveries of past writings! In 2000 one Mel Saxby reviewed Rosemary Sutcliff’s Knight’s Fee, urging people to read an “underrated” novel:

Knight’s Fee is one of the four or five books I’ve read in my life which alway make me cry. Though written for children, it’s completely unpatronising, always crediting the reader with intelligence and imagination, and is beautifully written. It tells the story of Randal, a half-Saxon half-Breton lad in Norman England, an orphan left to fend for himself as a dog-boy in Arundel castle, and details his gradual rise to knighthood and freedom, at a terrible price. I have only ever seen this book in hardback, in an Oxford Childrens Library edition, never in paperback, which is a great pity, as it is a vastly underrated book by this author, far better I think than her more well-known stories of Roman Britain, and deserves to be much more widely read.

Source: Mel Saxby’s review of Knight’s Fee.