1066
1066

Author: Andrew Bridgeford

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2009-05-26

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0802719406

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For more than 900 years the Bayeux Tapestry has preserved one of history's greatest dramas: the Norman Conquest of England, culminating in the death of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Historians have held for centuries that the majestic tapestry trumpets the glory of William the Conqueror and the victorious Normans. But is this true? In 1066, a brilliant piece of historical detective work, Andrew Bridgeford reveals a very different story that reinterprets and recasts the most decisive year in English history. Reading the tapestry as if it were a written text, Bridgeford discovers a wealth of new information subversively and ingeniously encoded in the threads, which appears to undermine the Norman point of view while presenting a secret tale undetected for centuries-an account of the final years of Anglo-Saxon England quite different from the Norman version. Bridgeford brings alive the turbulent 11th century in western Europe, a world of ambitious warrior bishops, court dwarfs, ruthless knights, and powerful women. 1066 offers readers a rare surprise-a book that reconsiders a long-accepted masterpiece, and sheds new light on a pivotal chapter of English history.

The Norman Conquest
The Norman Conquest

Author: Marc Morris

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-09-13

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 1639364005

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A riveting and authoritative history of the single most important event in English history: The Norman Conquest. An upstart French duke who sets out to conquer the most powerful and unified kingdom in Christendom. An invasion force on a scale not seen since the days of the Romans. One of the bloodiest and most decisive battles ever fought. This new history explains why the Norman Conquest was the most significant cultural and military episode in English history. Assessing the original evidence at every turn, Marc Morris goes beyond the familiar outline to explain why England was at once so powerful and yet so vulnerable to William the Conqueror’s attack. Morris writes with passion, verve, and scrupulous concern for historical accuracy. This is the definitive account for our times of an extraordinary story, indeed the pivotal moment in the shaping of the English nation.

Decoding the Bayeux Tapestry
Decoding the Bayeux Tapestry

Author: Arthur Colin Wright

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1526741113

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For the first time, a scholar reveals the meaning of the marginal images on the Bayeux Tapestry, unlocking a completely new meaning of the work. The story of the Norman Conquest and the Battle of Hastings as shown in the Bayeux Tapestry is arguably the most widely-known in the panoply of English history, and over the last 200 years there have been hundreds of books on the Tapestry seeking to analyze its meanings. Yet, there is one aspect of the embroidery that has been virtually ignored or dismissed as unimportant by historians—the details in the margins. The fables shown in the margins are neither just part of a decorative ribbon, nor are they discontinuous. They follow on in sequence. When this is understood, it becomes clear that they must relate to the action shown on the body of the Tapestry. After careful examination, the purpose of these images is to amplify, elaborate, or explain the main story. In this groundbreaking study, Arthur Wright reveals the significance of the images in the margins. Now it is possible to see the “whole” story as never before, enabling a more complete picture of the Bayeux Tapestry to be constructed. Wright reexamines many of the scenes in the main body of the work, showing that a number of the basic assumptions, so often taught as facts, have been based on nothing more than reasoned conjecture. It might be thought that after so much has been written about the Bayeux Tapestry there was nothing more to be said, but Decoding the Bayeux Tapestry shows how much there is still to be learned.

1066
1066

Author: David Howarth

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 9780141391052

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While the date 1066 is familiar to almost everybody as the year of the Norman conquest of England, few can place the event in the context of the dramatic year in which it took place. In this book, David Howarth attempts to bring alive the struggle for the succession to the English crown from the death of Edward the Confessor in January 1066 to the Christmas coronation of Duke William of Normandy. There is an almost uncanny symmetry, as well as a relentlessly exciting surge, of events leading to and from the Battle of Hastings.

King John
King John

Author: Marc Morris

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-10-15

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1605988863

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King John is one of those historical characters who needs little in the way of introduction. If readers are not already familiar with him as the tyrant whose misgovernment gave rise to Magna Carta, we remember him as the villain in the stories of Robin Hood. Formidable and cunning, but also cruel, lecherous, treacherous and untrusting. Twelve years into his reign, John was regarded as a powerful king within the British Isles. But despite this immense early success, when he finally crosses to France to recover his lost empire, he meets with disaster. John returns home penniless to face a tide of criticism about his unjust rule. The result is Magna Carta – a ground-breaking document in posterity, but a worthless piece of parchment in 1215, since John had no intention of honoring it. Like all great tragedies, the world can only be put to rights by the tyrant’s death. John finally obliges at Newark Castle in October 1216, dying of dysentery as a great gale howls up the valley of the Trent.

Edward the Confessor
Edward the Confessor

Author: Frank Barlow

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 0300071566

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Frank Barlow's magisterial biography, first published in 1970 and now reissued with new material, rescues Edward the Confessor from contemporary myth and subsequent bogus scholarship. Disentangling verifiable fact from saintly legend, he vividly re-creates the final years of the Anglo-Danish monarchy and examines England before the Norman Conquest with deep insight and great historical understanding. "Deploying all the resources of formidable scholarship, [Barlow] has recovered the real Edward." -- Spectator

Mysteries of the Norman Conquest
Mysteries of the Norman Conquest

Author: Robert Allred

Publisher: Frontline Books

Published: 2022-07-20

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1399088041

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Recent challenges to the traditional site of the Battle of Hastings have led to a surge of interest in the events surrounding England’s most famous battle. This, in turn, has increased speculation that the titanic struggle for the English crown in 1066 did not take place on the slopes of what is today Battle Abbey, with a number of highly plausible alternative locations being proposed. The time had clearly come to evaluate all these suggestions, and Robert Allred decided to take on that task. Taking nothing for granted, Robert hiked round the sites of the three battles of 1066 – Fulford, Stamford Bridge and Hastings. Armed with the medieval sources and much of the current literature, he set out to appraise the evidence and to draw his own unbiased conclusions. Following in the footsteps of the Viking warriors of Harald Hardrada, the knights of William of Normandy and the Anglo-Saxon soldiers of King Harold, the reader is taken on a journey from Yorkshire to the South Coast and down through the ages to re-examine what has been written about that momentous year – the intrigues, preparations and manoeuvres – which culminated on 14 October 1066, on a bloody hill somewhere in Sussex. Whether this will settle the debate over the site of the Battle of Hastings or prompt further investigations remains to be seen, but it will be a book which cannot be ignored and which the reader will be unable to put down!

A Life in Secrets
A Life in Secrets

Author: Sarah Helm

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2008-12-10

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 0307487474

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From an award-winning journalist comes this real-life cloak-and-dagger tale of Vera Atkins, one of Britain’s premiere secret agents during World War II. As the head of the French Section of the British Special Operations Executive, Vera Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored special operatives whose job was to organize and arm the resistance in Nazi-occupied France. After the war, Atkins courageously committed herself to a dangerous search for twelve of her most cherished women spies who had gone missing in action. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Sarah Helm chronicles Atkins’s extraordinary life and her singular journey through the chaos of post-war Europe. Brimming with intrigue, heroics, honor, and the horrors of war, A Life in Secrets is the story of a grand, elusive woman and a tour de force of investigative journalism.