By Vincent, Nicholas

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From the conflict of Hastings to the conflict of Bosworth box, Nicholas Vincent tells the tale of ways Britain used to be born.

When William, Duke of Normandy, killed King Harold and seized the throne of britain, England�s language, tradition, politics and legislation have been remodeled. Over the subsequent 400 years, lower than royal dynasties that seemed mostly to France for idea and concepts, an English identification used to be born, dependent partly upon fight for keep an eye on over the opposite elements of the British Isles (Scotland, Wales and Ireland), partly upon contention with the kings of France. From those struggles emerged English legislation and an English Parliament, the English language, English humour and England�s first in a foreign country empires.

In this exciting and available account, Nicholas Vincent not just tells the tale of the increase and fall of dynasties, yet investigates the lives and obsessions of a bunch of lesser women and men, from archbishops to peasants, and from infantrymen to students, upon whose firm the social and highbrow foundations of Englishness now rest.

This the 1st publication within the 4 quantity short historical past of england which brings jointly a number of the best historians to inform our nation�s tale from the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the present-day. Combining the most recent examine with obtainable and interesting tale telling, it's the excellent creation for college kids and normal readers.

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Additional resources for A brief history of Britain 1066-1485 : the birth of the nation

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Edward the Exile, the son of Edmund Ironside, was invited back to England from his refuge in Hungary, but died in 1057, only a few days after his return. Some have suspected the Godwins of poisoning him. Edward the Exile left a son, Edgar the Aetheling, a mere boy, perhaps, five or six years old, now brought up at court, living in what appears to have been close contact with the King, but without any real power and without lands. There was certainly no official proclamation that Edgar was to be regarded as Edward’s heir.

Any idea that England had been welded into a united nation was given the lie by this division, as late as the 1040s and 50s, into a series of local earldoms themselves tracing their roots as far back as the divided kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex, Bernicia and Deira. Moreover, and as with any Mafia-style division of authority between a few oligarchic families of rich and powerful bosses, the fewer the families the greater the storms and hatreds brewed up amongst the elite, and the more vicious the jockeying for position.

It was this potential bounty, over and above any other considerations, that first drew foreign invaders, Phoenicians and Romans of antiquity, Angles, Saxons and Jutes of the fifth century, Vikings of the ninth and tenth, and Normans and Frenchmen of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to stake their claims to rule or own the land. There is every sign that England was extremely wealthy. There is very little proof of the source from which this prosperity derived. It came perhaps from the mining of metals, above all tin, but lead too, and gold and silver, which, though now confined to a single gold mine in Wales, were in the early Middle Ages possibly abundant in the Mendips and the hills of Cumberland.

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