Bernard Cornwell is a British-American author of historical novels and a history of the Waterloo Campaign. He is best known for his novels about Napoleonic Wars rifleman Richard Sharpe. He has also written The Saxon Stories, a series of 13 novels about the making of England.

Thundersley is a town in the Castle Point borough of southeast Essex, England. It sits on a clay ridge shared with Basildon and Hadleigh, 31 miles (50 km) east of Charing Cross, London. In 2011 it had a population of 24,800.