The Plantagenets
The Plantagenets

Author: Dan Jones

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014-03-25

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 0143124927

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The New York Times bestseller, from the author of Powers and Thrones, that tells the story of Britain’s greatest and worst dynasty—“a real-life Game of Thrones” (The Wall Street Journal) The first Plantagenet kings inherited a blood-soaked realm from the Normans and transformed it into an empire that stretched at its peak from Scotland to Jerusalem. In this epic narrative history of courage, treachery, ambition, and deception, Dan Jones resurrects the unruly royal dynasty that preceded the Tudors. They produced England’s best and worst kings: Henry II and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, twice a queen and the most famous woman in Christendom; their son Richard the Lionheart, who fought Saladin in the Third Crusade; and his conniving brother King John, who was forced to grant his people new rights under the Magna Carta, the basis for our own bill of rights. Combining the latest academic research with a gift for storytelling, Jones vividly recreates the great battles of Bannockburn, Crécy, and Sluys and reveals how the maligned kings Edward II and Richard II met their downfalls. This is the era of chivalry and the Black Death, the Knights Templar, the founding of parliament, and the Hundred Years’ War, when England’s national identity was forged by the sword.

The Plantagenets
The Plantagenets

Author: Dan Jones

Publisher: Collins

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780007213948

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This is the story of England's greatest royal dynasty. The Plantagenets ruled England through eight generations between 1154 and 1399, and produced some of the most famous - and infamous - kings this country has ever seen.

The Anglo-Saxons
The Anglo-Saxons

Author: Marc Morris

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 164313535X

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A sweeping and original history of the Anglo-Saxons by national bestselling author Marc Morris. Sixteen hundred years ago Britain left the Roman Empire and swiftly fell into ruin. Grand cities and luxurious villas were deserted and left to crumble, and civil society collapsed into chaos. Into this violent and unstable world came foreign invaders from across the sea, and established themselves as its new masters. The Anglo-Saxons traces the turbulent history of these people across the next six centuries. It explains how their earliest rulers fought relentlessly against each other for glory and supremacy, and then were almost destroyed by the onslaught of the vikings. It explores how they abandoned their old gods for Christianity, established hundreds of churches and created dazzlingly intricate works of art. It charts the revival of towns and trade, and the origins of a familiar landscape of shires, boroughs and bishoprics. It is a tale of famous figures like King Offa, Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor, but also features a host of lesser known characters - ambitious queens, revolutionary saints, intolerant monks and grasping nobles. Through their remarkable careers we see how a new society, a new culture and a single unified nation came into being. Drawing on a vast range of original evidence - chronicles, letters, archaeology and artefacts - renowned historian Marc Morris illuminates a period of history that is only dimly understood, separates the truth from the legend, and tells the extraordinary story of how the foundations of England were laid.

How England Made the English
How England Made the English

Author: Harry Mount

Publisher: Viking

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780670919147

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Harry Mount's How England Made the English: From Why We Drive on the Left to Why We Don't Talk to Our Neighbours is packed with astonishing facts and wonderful stories. Q. Why are English train seats so narrow? A. It's all the Romans' fault. The first Victorian trains were built to the same width as horse-drawn wagons; and they were designed to fit the ruts left in the roads by Roman chariots. For readers of Paxman's The English, Bryson's Notes on a Small Island and Fox's Watching the English, this intriguing and witty book explains how our national characteristics - our sense of humour, our hobbies, our favourite foods and our behaviour with the opposite sex - are all defined by our nation's extraordinary geography, geology, climate and weather. You will learn how we would be as freezing cold as Siberia without the Gulf Stream; why we drive on the left-hand side of the road; why the Midlands became the home of the British curry. It identifies the materials that make England, too: the faint pink Aberdeen granite of kerbstones; that precise English mix of air temperature, smell and light that hits you the moment you touch down at Heathrow. Praise for Harry Mount: 'Highly readable, encyclopeadic, marvellous, illuminating. Mount portrays England via dextrous excavations of its geography, geology, history and weather' Independent 'Fascinating. Mount's an intelligent, funny and always interesting companion' Daily Mail 'Charming and nerdily fact-stuffed' Guardian Harry Mount is the author of Amo, Amas, Amat and All That, his best-selling book on Latin, and A Lust for Window Sills - A Guide to British Buildings. A journalist for many newspapers and magazines, he has been a New York correspondent and a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph. He studied classics and history at Oxford, and architectural history at the Courtauld Institute. He lives in north London

Foundation
Foundation

Author: Peter Ackroyd

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2012-10-16

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 1250013674

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The first book in Peter Ackroyd's history of England series, which has since been followed up with two more installments, Tudors and Rebellion. In Foundation, the chronicler of London and of its river, the Thames, takes us from the primeval forests of England's prehistory to the death, in 1509, of the first Tudor king, Henry VII. He guides us from the building of Stonehenge to the founding of the two great glories of medieval England: common law and the cathedrals. He shows us glimpses of the country's most distant past--a Neolithic stirrup found in a grave, a Roman fort, a Saxon tomb, a medieval manor house--and describes in rich prose the successive waves of invaders who made England English, despite being themselves Roman, Viking, Saxon, or Norman French. With his extraordinary skill for evoking time and place and his acute eye for the telling detail, Ackroyd recounts the story of warring kings, of civil strife, and foreign wars. But he also gives us a vivid sense of how England's early people lived: the homes they built, the clothes the wore, the food they ate, even the jokes they told. All are brought vividly to life in this history of England through the narrative mastery of one of Britain's finest writers.

The Story of England
The Story of England

Author: Michael Wood

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2010-09-30

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0141961155

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A VILLAGE AND ITS PEOPLE THROUGH THE WHOLE OF ENGLISH HISTORY The village of Kibworth in Leicestershire lies at the very centre of England. It has a church, some pubs, the Grand Union Canal, a First World War Memorial - and many centuries of recorded history. Bought in the thirteenth century by William de Merton, who founded Merton College, Oxford, it also lodges 750 years of village history. Michael Wood tells the extraordinary story of one English community over fifteen centuries - from the moment that the Roman Emperor Honorius sent his famous letter in 410 advising the English to look to their own defences to the village as it is today. He builds on this unique archive, enlisting the help of Kibworth's inhabitants in a village-wide archaeological dig and the first complete DNA profile of an English village. The story of Kibworth is the story of England itself, a Who Do You Think You Are? for the entire nation. 'Better than any historian for decades, Wood brings home not just the ways in which buildings, landscapes and written texts may be read, but the sensual beauty of encounters with them' TLS

Ceawlin
Ceawlin

Author: Rupert Mathews

Publisher: Casemate Publishers

Published: 2012-03-19

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1844689379

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This provocative study of medieval Britain presents a groundbreaking theory on the collapse of the post-Roman order and the formation of England. In Ceawlin: The Man Who Created England, Rupert Matthews draws on newly available evidence, including written sources and newly uncovered artifacts, to present a radically new narrative of post-Roman Britain. In place of the anarchy and mayhem that comprise conventional accounts of the period, Rupert suggests that Romanized governmental structures managed to survive the fifth century economic collapse. These, he argues, reemerged in a new form in the later sixth century. The key figure in these pivotal events was Ceawlin, King of Wessex in the 570s. It was he who finally smashed the old order with his ambitious power grab. His success opened the way to the creation of the England that we know today with its distinctive culture, language and character.

Who Made England?
Who Made England?

Author: Chip Colquhoun

Publisher: The History Press

Published: 2017-05-04

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 0750983019

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Did you know English people were around before the country of England was invented?It’s true: just over 1,000 years ago, English people lived in several smaller countries all over the island of Britain. A Saxon king called Alfred is famous for starting to bring these countries together – but who finished the job? Another Saxon king? A monk? Or was it... a Viking?In this fantastically illustrated book, storyteller Chip Colquhoun explores fact and folklore to see what they tell us about the birth of a country. After enjoying these tales of deadly battles, singing kings and miraculous queens, can you work out Who Made England?