Foundation: The History of England Volume I

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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. 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. 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: 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] I found the section on Elizabeth I's reign more interesting. I knew about her early life, plus the defeat of the Armada, and the problem of Mary Queen of Scots, but this filled out the reign more fully and put things more into context.

The main focus of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, ignoring the brief interlude of Lady Jane Grey, is centred on the reformation of the English church and the slow demise of the feudal society. These issues are brought to the fore in 'Tudors'. It was taken for granted that every man must have a lord. Lordship was no longer dependent upon tribal relations, but on the possession of land. Mastery was assumed by those who owned the most territory. No other test of secular leadership was necessary. Land was everything. It was in a literal sense the ground of being. Land granted you power and wealth; it allowed you to dispense gifts and to bend others to your will." 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. 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.

Publication Order of Ackroyd's Brief Lives Books

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. Now William had no claim to the throne, not even such a weak connection as Henry VII(1457-1509). Henry’s claim to the throne was that his paternal grandfather secretly married the widow of Henry V, Catherine of Valois. What he and Henry VII had in common was that they both took the crown at the point of their sword. 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’.

Henry VIII began the process of breaking away from Rome for political and dynastic reasons, not because he was swayed by the new teachings of Luther or Calvin. By the end of his reign, the monasteries were destroyed, much of the church lands and treasure confiscated and the monarch was head of the Church in England. Separated from Catholic Europe, the idea of Englishness began to form during this period, and Catholics were excluded from it under the Protestant regimes.Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter A" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Retrieved 1 April 2011. 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. 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. However, it was his bad attitude towards parliament that resulted in the deep divisions that almost tore the country apart during the reign of Charles I, his heir. The shifts of religious practice, decreed from the centre, were fiercely resisted. Rebellions broke out. Charges of heresy were levelled by each side against the other; when religion was so tightly tied to politics and power, being declared a heretic could be seen as treason. The punishment for heresy was burning at the stake; that for treason was to be hung, drawn and quartered (no, I’m not going into details), or beheaded if you were an aristocrat.