Foundation: The History of England Volume I

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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”. William Rufus (William II) begins English colonialism. The King’s highways were built to the width of two wagons side by side (thirty feet). Such was English hospitality at the time that when strangers came to your house. they got two free nights there and a free washing of their feet and hands, all for the trade-off of news of the outside world. When kings died, the realm seemed lawless until the next king was installed. The umbrella gets introduced to England. Before 1066, English had names like Leofwine, Aelfwine, Siward and Morcar. Now after Normans names became Robert, Walter, Henry and William. The majority of the country took to the new names. Surnames don’t become popular until the 14th century. Some indicated your profession like the last names of Cook, Barber, Sawyer, Miller, Smith, Brewer, and Carpenter. Other surnames described you: Fitzmorris meant bastard son of Morris. All the Kings from Henry II to Richard III were Plantagenet. The Plantagenet dynasty is replaced by the Tudors. Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter A" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Retrieved 1 April 2011. Elizabeth I to her credit though did not like war; as she said, “My mind was never to invade my neighbors.” The English possession of 211 years on port of Calais is lost. It had cost a fortune to upkeep. Elizabeth I spoke Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, German, and English. She was rarely (if ever) alone. She restored debased coinage to its real value. Mary is forced to abdicate in Scotland and is replaced by James VI. Timber and clay houses are replaced by stone and plaster. Elizabeth I wore the first wristwatch in 1572. The French could be violent douchebags too: “Count Orsini had told the French king that not one Huguenot should be left alive in France.” The Anabaptists are tortured during Elizabeth’s reign for saying Christians shouldn’t be carrying swords. Getting tortured for believing in Christian non-violence. Torture was a royal prerogative in matters of the state. In an exceedingly rare appearance by the real God, on January 12, 1583, the stand of a bear-pit collapses killing many spectators (one hopes the bears dined well that night and the meat wasn’t too tough).

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.) We are led from the very early days of the native peoples right through a series of conquests and colonisation, wars, famous battles and rivalries, mythical figures and folklore, up until the end of Henry VII. Though he claims it's a history of England and the people, it more honestly a history of the Kings of England during this period, each chapter taking them one at a time. I have to say, that suits me fine but it seems to have annoyed some. We do start to get a sense of England as it develops, slowly, usually through inconsequential turns of events and chance occurrences but it's far from the main focus. Between the main chapters are shorter vignettes into various aspects of daily life, the food, agriculture, playthings etc. that make up life. They're good but over too soon. 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.The book is quite startlingly inaccurate on dozens of occasions. George VI became king in 1936, not 1937. The famous 1933 Oxford Union motion about not fighting for king and country is significantly misquoted. How Elgar could be regarded as one of the two most successful British composers in the 1930s escapes me: he wrote nothing of any importance after 1919 and was painfully out of fashion by the time he died in 1934. Mrs Thatcher didn’t ‘form a new acquaintance, one Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev’, at Yuri Andropov’s funeral in 1984. She wanted to meet him, but was rebuffed. She first met him on his trip to the UK at the end of the year, three months before he became General Secretary. It wasn’t the ‘leader of East Germany’ who announced the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 but an ill-informed Günter Schabowski, by mistake. The novel of Kingsley Amis’s that Thatcher was so dismissive about (‘Huh! Get another crystal ball!’) is not about ‘a communist take-over of Britain’ but a Russian occupation — communism having long been replaced by feudalism. And so on.

I enjoy it, I suppose, but I never thought I'd be a novelist. I never wanted to be a novelist. I can't bear fiction. I hate it. It's so untidy. When I was a young man I wanted to be a poet, then I wrote a critical book, and I don't think I even read a novel till I was about 26 or 27. [5] 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. 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’.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.

The History of England, v.3 Civil War (also available as Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution) 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. 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. 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.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] The houses of York and Lancaster were in fact two sides of the same ruling family. The house of Lancaster was descended from the fourth son of Edward III, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster; the house of York was descended from the fifth son of the same king, Edmund, duke of York, whose youngest son had married the great-granddaughter of the third son. They are sometimes describes as the third and fourth sons respectively, but this omits one male child who lived for six months. Their closeness, however, bred only enmity and ferocity. Blue blood was often bad blood. The author writes with wit and great insight. I love the details of history and the amazing connections that if I made up in one of my novels readers would say I was over the top-- but in this book they're the real deal. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. 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+. 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.

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? 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. 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. 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.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. The Book of Common Prayer effectively set the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England for the future. Powerful theologians such as Thomas Cranmer worked on standardised forms of liturgy which were to be used in all churches throughout England. The Mass was said in English, not Latin. An authorised translation of the Bible into English was placed in all churches. For the first time people could understand the words of the religious services and engage with the scriptures themselves. 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: