Foundation: The History of England Volume I

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It would be difficult to find a more informative and entertaining volume. You are drawn into the barbarity of much of English history and entertained by the more whimsical descriptions of life, particularly in the middle ages.

He then explores the reign of Elizabeth I which had much stability even if it was plagued by plots against the queen, civil strife and an invasion force. Above all, it is the story of the making of the Anglican Church and the English Reformation. It would go on to become a critically acclaimed series which was peculiar as such readers are not known for loving history. For his work early on he got a nomination from the Royal Society of Literature.He recounts the foreign wars, the civil strife and warring kings. He also offers a vivid sense of how life was in England from the jokes people told, the houses they built, the food they ate and the clothes they wore. Growing up, his mother was employed in the human resources department of an engineering organization. He never saw his father as he had abandoned the family when he was but a baby. By the time he was five years old, he was reading newspapers and wrote a play inspired by Guy Fawkes by the time he was nine. Why do we need another book about the big gun Tudors? You might as well ask why we need another book about Shakespeare for the answer to both questions is the same. When the first sarsen stone was raised in the circle of Stonehenge, the land we call England was already very ancient. Close to the village of Happisburgh, in Norfolk, seventy-eight flint artifacts have recently been found; they were scattered approximately 900,000 years ago. So the long story begins."

Their faith under Henry and Elizabeth, but the numbers don’t hold up b/c Mary reigned for a scant five years compared to Elizabeth’s 45 years and Henry’s 39+. This book covers from Stonehenge to the end of the Plantagenet rule with the death of Richard III in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field. I also had a relative that fought on the side of the Tudor usurpers (well how they are referred to in my household anyway) he was knighted on the battlefield by Henry VII for his role in helping to slay Richard. The Book of Common Prayer effectively set the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England for the future.After Edward’s early death, his deeply conservative Catholic eldest sister, Mary, came to the throne. Under her rule, Protestants were ruthlessly pursued and thousands were burned at the stake as heretics. Calvin is partly responsible for this sadistic religious crap; Calvin had declared that Christian had a duty to “destroy” false gods. Let’s look at linear progress: under Henry VIII Catholics were burned, while under Elizabeth “some 200 Catholics were strangled or disemboweled.” Vive la difference. Whether your Tudor monarch was a man or woman, looked like Bette Davis or not, you still had to live in fear in a sadistic land. And that violence wasn’t confined to royalty: the stone throwers at executions and that “the people would rather go a bear-baiting than to attend a divine service”. Most of her works usually have something to do with the complex interaction between space and time and what he loves to call the spirit of place. He usually traces the changing nature of London and explores this through its artists and especially the authors. Easy: This is without a doubt a book written for the masses. It was very well written, easy to follow and not bogged down by descriptions or tangents.

I put those words in quotes because I think they're imaginary, foul concepts. Obviously, I recognize that such classes were created and had a monumental impact, and I'm fascinated by them, but I sure don't recognize them as "noble," much less royal.) It is probably not easy to write an account of English history that would satisfy both the layman and the expert and that would cover all the aspects and choose the vantage point every potential reader could wish for, and so all I can say is that if you want to read a history focusing on the monarchy and its representatives and adding vignettes of everyday history in between, this is the right book for you. Most of these works are little read now, from David Hume’s 1750s The History of England all the way through to Winston Churchill’s idiosyncratic A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the 1950s. The grand sweep has a tendency to define the significant in advance. Many of these histories can explain a sequence of legislation, such as the Factory Acts, but are incapable of really evoking the texture of the times or the tenor of minds. At best, they are a useful framework — I mean, who doesn’t mentally place events of the past against the dates of rulers, thinking of Victorian and Edwardian architects as subtly different in some way?These astonishingly frequent errors clearly undermine the general authority of the book; but even cleaned up, I think it would fail to convince. And Innovation is an odd title to choose when you have so little interest in technology and scientific breakthroughs. The internet, the discovery of antibiotics, nuclear power and many other things with specific English connections are passed over either in silence or with the briefest possible mention.

Each of the Tudor monarchs approached religion in different ways. Henry’s son Edward VI ruled only for a few years, but during that time England shifted significantly to the Calvinist position. A new Treason Act was introduced in 1563, passed specifically to protect the religious changes; it was a ‘considered a serious offence question the royal supremacy or to dissent from the articles of faith that the English Church now enjoined’. I've never really 'done' any history - my ideas of the Tudors until recently were Henry VIII = a sort of half-timbered shouting Brian Blessed and Elizabeth I = Miranda Richardson - so I guess I'd probably have liked any book which told their crazy stories fairly competently. Hawksmoor, winner of both the Whitbread Novel Award [4] and the Guardian Fiction Prize, was inspired by Iain Sinclair's poem "Lud Heat" (1975), which speculated on a mystical power from the positioning of the six churches Nicholas Hawksmoor built. The novel gives Hawksmoor a Satanical motive for the siting of his buildings, and creates a modern namesake, a policeman investigating a series of murders. Chatterton (1987), a similarly layered novel explores plagiarism and forgery and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. London: The Biography is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages. In 1994 he was interviewed about the London Psychogeographical Association in an article for The Observer, in which he remarked:He takes his readers from the construction of Stonehenge to the establishment of cathedrals and common law, which were two of the great glories of medieval England. He takes us to the most distant past of England to a medieval manor house, a Saxon tomb, a Roman fort and a Neolithic stirrup that was discovered in an ancient grave. Conservative: A lot of newer research, theories and interpretations are overlooked here or dismissed without ceremony in favour of more conservative and traditional ideas. People like Anne Boleyn, who has been the subject of serious rehabilitation during the last 50 years, is once again reduced to a power hungry flirt. It was sad to read. I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory, the place, the past speaks. ... Just as it seems possible to me that a street or dwelling can materially affect the character and behaviour of the people who dwell in them, is it not also possible that within this city (London) and within its culture are patterns of sensibility or patterns of response which have persisted from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and perhaps even beyond? [6]