Great Tales from English History: The Truth About King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Richard the Lionheart, and More: 1

by Robert Lacey

  Auguste Rodin’s melodramatic bronze makes up the curious quintet of historical monuments around the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. To the north, Boadicea, galloping beside the Thames in her scythe-wheeled chariot. To the west, Oliver Cromwell, looking stern. In the car park, Richard the Lionheart, with his sword raised towards Palestine. And to the south, in the public gardens, not far from the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, the six haggard burghers, dressed in rags and with ropes around their necks - six self-important Frenchmen decisively put in their place. The French clearly have a different view: the town of Calais commissioned Rodin to create the group of life-sized burghers in 1885, and the original casting stands outside the town hall - an enduring reminder of French fortitude in the face of English beastliness.

  Sumption, Jonathan, The Hundred Years War: Trial by Battle (London, Faber), 1990.

  AD 1347–1347: The Fair Maid of Kent and the Order of the Garter

  Every June the Queen processes through Windsor Castle with her modern fraternity of knights - who are not so Arthurian these days, counting politicians among their numbers and even a supermarket magnate, Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover. At any time of year you can view the splendours of St George’s Chapel and the rest of Windsor Castle, which started as a wooden motte-and-bailey structure. After centuries of embellishment, it is the finest actively functioning royal complex in the world: www.royal.gov.uk.

  Collins, Hugh, The Order of the Garter: Chivalry and Politics in Late Medieval England (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 2000.

  AD 1348–1348: The Great Mortality

  Philip Ziegler has written the definitive study of the Black Death with his usual erudition and grace. Norman Cantor’s more recent study concentrates on the consequences. Rosemary Horrox offers a fine array of contemporary sources - not least the complaints that the plague reflected God’s anger at indecent clothes and the disobedience of the young.

  Cantor, Norman F., In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (London, Pocket Books), 2002.

  Horrox, Rosemary (ed.), The Black Death (Manchester, Manchester University Press), 1994.

  Ziegler, Philip, The Black Death (London, The Folio Society), 1997.

  AD 1376: The Bedside Manner of a Plague Doctor

  You can see examples of John Arderne’s medical drawings for the removal of fistulae in ano and the gruesome surgical instruments he employed in Peter Murray Jones’s well illustrated book.

  Murray Jones, Peter, Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts (London, The British Library), 1998.

  AD 1377: The Dream of Piers the Ploughman

  Set aside a day to read this rambling epic right through from beginning to end - preferably on a summer’s afternoon, on a bank beside a stream in the Malvern Hills.

  Langland, William, Piers the Ploughman, trans. and intro. J. F. Goodridge (London, Penguin Books), 1966.

  AD 1381: The ‘Mad Multitude’

  Walk around the echoing arcades of modern Smithfield, and you can imagine under your feet the open meadow where Wat Tyler rode out on his pony to meet Richard II. If you get there early enough in the morning you can observe the porters and butchers of the modern meat-market, which will also, presumably, become part of history one day. Alastair Dunn’s recent account of the Peasants’ Revolt covers the ground of Melvyn Bragg’s Radio 4 series. Dobson’s classic volume presents readable extracts from all the main contemporary sources.

  Dobson, R. B., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London, Macmillan), 1983.

  Dunn, Alastair, The Great Rising of 1381: The Peasants’ Revolt and England’s Failed Revolution (Stroud, Tempus), 2002.

  EXPLORING THE

  ORIGINAL SOURCES

  I hope this book leaves you with a curiosity - perhaps even a passion - for the original and earliest written sources on which our history is based. Julius Caesar relating his first sight of the white cliffs, Bede and his sparrow, Orderic Vitalis describing the survivors of the White Ship clinging to the wreckage in the night sea - these centuries-old writings need not be intimidating. To convey their flavour, I have tried to quote from the chronicles at some length, and I have also listed in the source notes the many lucid and accessible modern translations available, often in paperback.

  But in recent years we have gained a still more accessible resource. Most of the great historical and classical texts are now available, free and on-line, via university websites. On www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/oe/oe-texts.html, for example, you can find an index of sites that host electronic editions of Old English texts, translations and images of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. By clicking on the listed links you can then access complete texts of works such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Piers the Ploughman and various versions of Beowulf - your own desktop digital scriptorium.

  Three of these sites are particularly helpful. The Online Medieval and Classical Library at the University of California at Berkeley wwwsunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL includes the complete text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. At Fordham University, the Internet History Sourcebooks project, www.fordham.edu/halsall, covers ancient, medieval and modern history, arranging all the texts by topic. By looking under, say, ‘slavery’, or ‘Roman sport and games’, you can find a selection of texts on each subject. When you know what you are looking for, MIT’s Classics website at http://classics.mit.edu is extremely fast, with over four hundred texts, mainly Graeco-Roman works, all in English translation and very clearly set out.

  The on-line ventures of British universities cannot compare with the generously financed facilities of the US. But Reading University hosts a simply laid out, beginner-friendly site on www.library.rdg.ac.uk/subjects/ir/irclas.html, and the Institute of Historical Research at London University has an interesting, subject-based, on-line resources index which you can consult on www.history.ac.uk/ihr/resources/index.html.

  Lege Feliciter, as the Venerable Bede would say - May you read happily!

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  History has been compared by the polymath Felipe Fernández-Armesto to ‘a nymph glimpsed between leaves: the more you shift perspective, the more is revealed. If you want to see her whole you have to dodge and slip between many different viewpoints.’ Peering through those leaves has been a consuming passion of my life, and my first thanks must be to the generations of historians and archaeologists whose research and analysis have parted so many branches. In the preceding source notes I set out the books on which I have relied, but I owe a particular debt to the historians on whose personal expertise and kindness I have drawn - Richard Eales, Dr David Hill, John McSween, Dr Simon Thurley, Professor Lynne Vallone and Yvonne Ward. Warm thanks to Patrick Wormald for the lunch and tea seminars at the Randolph, and to Professor Alfred Smyth for his unfailing elf-wisdom. Thanks to Elizabeth Finn in the archives at Canterbury and to Margaret Sparks, the cathedral historian; also to Dr Tony Trowles in the Muniments Room at Westminster Abbey. Nigel Rees helped me track down some elusive quotations through his newsletter. Philip Revill has dug out and explained the details of the National Curriculum. Thanks, as ever, to the partners of the John Sandoe bookshop and to the librarians and archivists at the London Library, the Public Record Office, and at my own, local, public library in the west minster.

  There is a sense in which Peter Furtado, the editor of History Today, initiated this project by inviting me to contribute to his column on historical beginnings, ‘Point of Departure’. It made me realise there was nothing I would enjoy more than re-examining the stories on which I was brought up - and it has reminded me of the debt I owe to the history teachers who encouraged me at Bristol Grammar School: Charles Peter Hill, Maurice Isaac, John Millward and Roy Avery. There were others, I might add, whose teaching and seminars my love of history survived.

  I have written this book for adults - or, perhaps, for children of my own age - and I am grateful for the constructive criticism of certain younger readers: Rhian Carr, Jack George and, most of all, my younger son Bruno, who emailed me unsparin
g criticism while on his gap year in the Himalayas. This book is dedicated, however, to his elder brother Sasha - my wise, quiet and solid one. With three children I love and admire, and three volumes to offer in return for all the pride and delight they have given me, we shall proceed in order of seniority.

  It has been a pleasure to write this book on my daily excursions to the kitchen table of Moyra Ashford who has researched, typed, checked and tried her best to keep me down to earth. As with other books, Jacqueline Williams has come to my rescue with the organising of the bibliography and many other areas of research. At Time Warner, my publishing team headed by David Young and Ursula Mackenzie has once again coped with a ferocious deadline. My special thanks to Peter Cotton, Sue Phillpott, Viv Redman, Tim Whiting - and to Roger Cazalet, inspirer of the woad plant, the cud-chewing cow and the other illustrations so brilliantly realised by Fred van Deelen.

  This is my last book launched by my agent of so many years, Michael Shaw, but how kind of him to groom such an able successor in Jonathan Pegg. My greatest debt, as ever, is to my wife Sandi, support and critic, truest friend. If you like the little rose on the jacket - that was one of her ideas.

  Robert Lacey, June 2003