Edited highlights:

Jones covers an enormous amount of ground: eight generations of kings and queens from 1120 to 1399. The risk with a long dynastic history is that it becomes just one damn thing after another, and the reader gets lost in a snowstorm of names and events. Jones avoids this with a combination of gripping storytelling and pin-sharp clarity… I was grateful to be kept on track by a text that is simple and direct without leaving me feeling patronised…

Yet The Plantagenets is not just a collection of great stories. Woven into the drama of the narrative we see the transformation of the office of kingship, the growth of a refined political philosophy that defined the king’s duties to the realm and vice versa, and the development of a body of common and statute law that underpinned how England was governed. The evolving symbolism of kingship, the changing architectural landscape, and the emerging use of the English language in government and poetry are also addressed. This ensures that The Plantagenets is a satisfying as well as an enjoyable read. There is no need for added goblins in this real life game of thrones.

You can buy The Plantagenets here.

Extract:

In 1066, as the “long-haired star” of Halley’s Comet blazed through the skies above England, William the bastard of Normandy mustered an invasion fleet off the coast of Normandy. At the end of summer he set sail — around 700 ships containing perhaps as many as 7,000 men landing at Pevensey Bay in Sussex on either September 28 or 29.

On October 14, William’s army was engaged by that of Harold Godwinson a few miles up the coast: the battle of Hastings, as it became known, resulted in the death of poor King Harold, and a decisive victory for the Normans. It began a period in which England was rapidly and violently conquered, subdued, reorganised, measled with fearsome castles, divvied up for rule by William’s friends and surveyed in the Domesday Book.

For the next three centuries England would be governed by Francophone or Francophile kings, and 1066, from which date the regnal numbers of all our monarchs are still taken, is to this day still regarded as English history’s year dot…

Marc Morris’s lively new book retells the story of the Norman invasion with vim, vigour and narrative urgency.

Read the full review here.

…this is a rich, meticulously plotted field guide to the surviving architectural treasures of Tudor England: the houses, fortresses, palaces and battlefields that were trodden by our most famous royal dynasty, from Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle to Kett’s Oak and Burghley House (pictured).But it is more than just historical I-Spy. Lipscomb is an eloquent tour-guide, and each of her 50 destinations allows her deftly to unfold a different chapter of Tudor history.

And here’s the review, from this week’s Spectator.

Thomas Becket… fell out with Henry II and was murdered in his cathedral in 1170. Canonised in 1173, for more than 350 years he was a national saint, his tomb visited by pilgrims of every rank, from kings to paupers. Becket’s shrine at Canterbury Cathedral was destroyed, but what survives of the man is one of the richest bodies of contemporary writing concerning anyone in the Middle Ages. So vicious was Becket’s breach with Henry II, and so shocking his death, those who knew him strove to preserve (and gloss) his life story. Their extensive, detailed lives of the “precious martyr” allow for that rarest of things: a medieval biography that can attempt serious psychological analysis. This is what John Guy has written, and his new study of Becket is a triumph: a beautifully layered portrait of one of the most complex characters in English history, which gives a new narrative coherence to a very peculiar life.

It really is a terrific book. You can buy it on Amazon, here.

‘The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England’ is published on May 17 by HarperPress. You can order it on Amazon (don’t be put off by the old cover/title currently on the site - it’s the same book). Or at WH Smith.

Exciting, right?

Extract:

It’s a life-changing roll call. As the admissions tutor reads out names, the men and women gathered around the table reply crisply to each one: “Yep … yep … yep.” Each “yep” is actually a no. It’s a rejection of a candidate who has applied for a place at the University of Cambridge.

The weakest of the field have already been sifted out; up to a fifth of applications are declined before the interview stage. Now the tutors are gathered to consider the results of those interviews. Five women and seven men are gathered at a table, in a light-filled, rectangular room at Churchill College to discuss admissions to study natural sciences.

The easy ones go first. These are the candidates whose academic track record is – by Cambridge standards – marginal, and whose performance at interview has been disappointing. As one candidate’s name is read out, one of the academics notes that he got an interview score of two, out of a possible 10. “Oh dear,” says Richard Partington, the senior admissions tutor, who sits at the head of the table. Next to Partington is a steel trolley with the applicants’ files.

Then, they get down to business…

Source: The Guardian

Personal recollection: I interviewed at Pembroke, Cambridge in 1998, and went up in 1999. Having been to a state grammar school with virtually no record at the time of sending people to Oxbridge, I didn’t receive a great amount of guidance about the best way to approach the application/interview process. We did a mock interview with some teachers from the local public school, which I recall being a humiliating failure. Someone told me that the only wrong answer to a Cambridge interview question was ‘I don’t know’. That, pretty much, was that.

My tactics were therefore improvised. I knew I wanted to read History, and decided to apply to Pembroke because, when flicking through the university prospectus, I saw that the admissions tutor was an historian. His number was published in the prospectus, so I telephoned one afternoon, introduced myself and asked a long list of questions about what life at Pembroke was like, how the teaching worked, and whether it was the sort of place I’d fit in.

After that I went to an open day, saw the same admissions tutor and buttonholed him for another long conversation about history and the college, etc.

Subsequently, when I was called for interview, there were three sessions scheduled, each of about 20 minutes in length, one-on-one. The first two interviews were structured around discussing historical essays I’d written in school; but one of them, which started on something like the Weimar Republic, went off-track and we ended up discussing Kurt Cobain and the musical influence of Nirvana on the grunge scene.

The third interview was with the admissions tutor. It was the end of the day. I remember - although this may be fanciful - him emitting a groan when I walked into the room. We talked a bit about college and history and studying, then at the end of the interview he said he wasn’t going to ask me if I had any questions, as I’d asked quite enough previously, and he was keen to get things wrapped up so he could get off to play tennis.

On New Year’s Eve 1998 I received an offer.

Moral: I don’t know that there is a moral here, other than to say that in my case a measure of enthusiastic, precocious lobbying probably helped. Looking back, I suppose that another admissions tutor would have found it all wildly irritating, and life would have turned out differently.

(Sidebar: When I got up to Cambridge I was fortunate enough to be taught a bit by Richard Partington, who appears in the piece I linked to, above. Besides being, evidently, an open-minded and progressive admissions tutor at Churchill college, he is also a very brilliant medievalist, who knows more about Edward III than anyone else.)

An extract:

One hundred and fifty years after Anglo-Saxon England was invaded by the Normans, Anglo-Norman England was invaded by the French. On 21 May 1216 King Philip Augustus’ eldest son, Louis the Lion, landed at Stonor on the Isle of Thanet, kissed a crucifix, planted it in the ground and began an 18-month war for the English crown. He had been invited to England by a group of barons who wished to replace King John as punishment for repudiating the terms of Magna Carta. The war Louis waged, although ultimately unsuccessful, was a damned near thing.

Sean McGlynn’s new book calls this England’s ‘forgotten invasion’, although in recent years Hollywood has been trying to remind people about it. The climax to Ridley Scott’s recent Robin Hood movie had Russell Crowe mugging about on Dover beach, fighting off the French hordes; Jonathan English’s rather better Ironclad was set around the violent siege of Rochester castle the autumn before Louis’s arrival.

So it is not entirely forgotten. But 1216 is certainly neglected, given the fact that John was the only post-Conquest medieval king besides Stephen to suffer the ignominy of a full foreign invasion. (Edward II, Richard II and Richard III were overthrown by invading armies, but these were all led by returning natives.)

Glynn’s book attempts to right the historical wrong. Again, however, the title misleads. It is only on page 153 (of 241 pages of text) that Louis’s invasion actually begins. The first two-thirds of the book are a military history of John’s reign, beginning with Philip Augustus’s successful campaign to conquer Normandy between 1200 and 1204, then skipping ahead to John’s unsuccessful campaign to retake the duchy, which culminated in the monstrous battle of Bouvines in 1214.

That’s not to say this is a bad book. In fact, McGlynn tells a dashing story with gusto. His section on the siege of Château Galliard in 1203-4 is the best that has been published for a very long time. McGlynn calls it ‘arguably the most dramatic siege of the entire Middle Ages’. That’s pushing things a bit, but the author still summons up the importance and horrid excitement of the battle for Richard the Lionheart’s greatest fortress.

The question that is only partially answered, however, is why John’s reign ended in such disaster. How did he manage to rile the English barons so badly that they would rather have been ruled by a Capetian than himself?

If you want the answer, you’ll have to read the Speccie.