Contents

List of Illustrations

1. Hymns of stone

2. The Roman way

3. Climate change

4. Spear points

5. The blood eagle

6. The measure of the king

7. The coming of the conquerors

8. The house

9. Devils and wicked men

10. The road

11. The law is lost

12. The names

13. The turbulent priest

14. The lost village

15. The great charter

16. Crime and punishment

17. A simple king

18. The seasonal year

19. The emperor of Britain

20. The hammer

21. The favourites of a king

22. Birth and death

23. The sense of a nation

24. The night schools

25. The commotion

26. Into the woods

27. The suffering king

28. Old habits

29. The warrior

30. How others saw us

31. A simple man

32. Meet the family

33. The divided realm

34. The world at play

35. The lion and the lamb

36. The staple of life

37. The king of spring

38. Come to town

39. The zealot king

40. The king of suspicions

41. A conclusion

Further reading

Index

List of Illustrations

1. Stonehenge, from an illuminated manuscript (© akg-images/British Library)

2. A silver relief of Cernunnos, the horned god of Iron Age worship (© akg-images/Erich Lessing)

3. A mosaic from the Roman villa at Bignor in West Sussex (© akg-images/Florian Monheim/Bildarchiv Monheim)

4. A stylized depiction of some protagonists in the Roman conquest of Britain (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

5. The helmet of a great Germanic overlord, from Sutton Hoo (© akg-images/British Museum)

6. A nineteenth-century print of a Saxon manor (© akg-images/North Wind Picture Archives)

7. Saxon soldiers about to engage in battle (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

8. ‘Alfred in the Danish Camp’ (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

9. Aethelbert, the great king of Kent (© akg-images)

10. The Venerable Bede in his scriptorium (© akg-images/British Library)

11. The incipit of the Gospel of Saint Matthew from the Lindisfarne Gospels (© akg-images/British Library)

12. A Viking ship (© akg-images/British Library)

13. An image of Ethelred, commonly known as ‘the unready’ or ‘the ill-advised’ © akg-images/British Library)

14. Edward the Confessor, king of England from 1042 to 1066 (© akg-images/British Library)

15. The Normans crossing the Channel for the invasion of 1066 (© Getty Images/Bibliothèque Nationale)

16. The death of Harold in battle, from the Bayeux Tapestry (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

17. A man wielding an axe, taken from Topographia Hibernica (© akg-images/British Library)

18. An image of man and dogs from the Luttrell Psalter (© akg-images/British Library)

19. A nineteenth-century woodcut of a medieval manor (© akg-images/North Wind Picture Archives)

20. An image of Matilda, de facto queen of England from March to November 1141 (© akg-images/British Library)

21. Henry II confronting Thomas Becket (©akg-images/British Library)

22. Richard I, more commonly known as ‘Richard the Lionheart’ (© akg-images/Erich Lessing)

23. ‘John Lackland’ on horseback (© akg-images/British Library)

24. The season of March as seen in The Bedford Book of Hours (© akg-images/British Library)

25. The varied labours of the agricultural year (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

26. The abbots, and monks, of a medieval monastery (© akg-images/British Library)

27. The building of a monastery (© akg-images)

28. Edward I addressing one of his parliaments (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

29. A view of Harlech Castle (© IAM/akg-images)

30. Queen Isabella, errant wife of Edward II (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

31. The Black Death (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

32. A woman who has contracted leprosy (© akg-images/British Library)

33. A bloodletting (© akg-images/British Library)

34. The Battle of Crécy (© akg-images/British Library)

35. The tomb of the Black Prince (© akg-images/Erich Lessing)

36. The image of Richard II from the ‘Wilton Diptych’ (© akg-images/Erich Lessing)

37. A page from Wycliffe’s Bible (© IAM/akg-images)

38. The cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral (© akg-images/Bildarchiv Monheim)

39. A scene from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (© akg-images/British Library)

40. The coronation of Henry IV in Westminster Abbey (© IAM/(akg-images)

41. The Battle of Agincourt (© akg-images/Bibliothèque Nationale)

42. The wedding of Henry V and Katherine of Valois (© akg-images/British Library)

43. Joan of Arc (© akg-images/Archives Nationales, Paris)

44. Henry VI in full martial array (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

45. The Warwick family tree, from John Rous of Warwick’s De Regius Angliae (© akg-images/British Library)

46. Edward IV (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

47. Elizabeth Woodville (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

48. Edward V (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

49. Richard III standing on a white boar (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

50. Elizabeth of York and Henry VII, from a nineteenth-century illustration (© Sarah, Countess of Essex/Getty Images)

51. An allegory of the Tudor dynasty (© akg-images/British Library)

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Hymns of stone