Foundation
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16. The death of Harold in battle, from the Bayeux Tapestry. Once the king had been slain, all was lost.
17. A man wielding an axe, taken from Topographia Hibernica. The work was written by Gerald of Wales in 1188, and includes the remark that the native Irish allow ‘their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner’.
18. An image of man and dogs from the Luttrell Psalter, an illuminated manuscript that was written and illustrated at Lincoln at some point in the decade after 1325.
19. A nineteenth-century woodcut of a medieval manor, with the lord’s demesne, the village and the church all neatly outlined. Note the areas of ‘waste’ just beyond the fields.
20. An image of Matilda, de facto queen of England from March to November 1141, holding a charter. The illumination comes from The Golden Book of Saint Albans by Thomas Walsingham, circa 1380.
21. Henry II confronting Thomas Becket. The soldiers beside them are an apt reminder of those who killed the archbishop on 29 December 1170.
22. Richard I, more commonly known as ‘Richard the Lionheart’, watching the execution of the 3,000 prisoners, whom he had captured at the siege of Acre in the Gulf of Haifa during the Third Crusade.
23. ‘John Lackland’ (otherwise known as King John) on horseback. He is here seen riding out against a castle with sword in hand. He was also known as ‘John Softsword’.
24. The season of March as seen in The Bedford Book of Hours, an exquisite and lavish manuscript dating from the early fifteenth century. The farm animals of the medieval period were smaller, and the productivity of the soil inferior, to their modern counterparts.
25. The varied labours of the agricultural year. The scythe and the sickle, the flail and the winnowing fan and the plough, are to be seen in many medieval illuminations.
26. The abbots, and monks, of a medieval monastery. The monks of England were the historians and illuminators who helped to preserve the continuities of the country.
27. The building of a monastery, taken from a miniature of the fourteenth century.
28. Edward I addressing one of his parliaments. The first parliament of his reign, assembled in 1275, had some 800 representatives. Once they had obeyed his will, he dismissed them.
29. A view of Harlech Castle, one of the Welsh castles created for Edward I by Master James of St George; he was the master-builder of the age. The castle itself might seem to have been fashioned out of the rock on which it sits.
30. Queen Isabella, errant wife of Edward II, being received by her brother Charles le Bel in France.
31. The Black Death, reaching England in the autumn of 1348, killed approximately 2 million people. There had never been mortality on such a scale, nor has there been since.
32. A woman who has contracted leprosy. The leper would carry a clapper and bell to warn of her approach.
33. A blood-letting. The doctor would taste the blood of his patient. Healthy blood was slightly sweet.
34. The Battle of Crécy, which took place on 26 August 1346, was one of the most important engagements of the Hundred Years War, when the army of Edward III effectively crushed the French. This was the battle in which gunpowder cannon were first employed.
35. The tomb of the Black Prince behind the quire of Canterbury Cathedral. Its epitaph begins, ‘Such as thou art, sometime was I. Such as I am, such shalt thou be.’
36. The image of Richard II from the ‘Wilton Diptych’. Standing around him are King Edmund (saint and martyr), Edward the Confessor (saint), and John the Baptist (saint). He considered these to be his forebears and protectors.
37. A page from Wycliffe’s Bible. This translation into Middle English is not the work of Wycliffe himself, but of several authors inspired by Wycliffe’s example.
38. The cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral, with the earliest and perhaps the best fan-vaulted roof in England, were built in the latter half of the fourteenth century. The cathedral itself is of Norman origin based on an Anglo-Saxon original. In this, it does not differ from many other English cathedrals.
39. A scene from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. It marked the greatest rebellion of the people against their masters in English history.
40. The coronation of Henry IV in Westminster Abbey, October 1399. Since he had gained the crown by conquest, it always lay uneasily upon his head.
41. The Battle of Agincourt, fought in the autumn of 1415, was an overwhelming victory for Henry V against the French. On his return from the field he was hailed by the English as ‘lord of England, flower of the world, soldier of Christ’.
42. The wedding of Henry V and Katherine of Valois, daughter of the King of France, in the summer of 1420 at Troyes Cathedral. Henry died a little over two years later, but Katherine had given birth to a male heir.
43. An image of Joan of Arc, or ‘the Maid of Orleans’, whose victories in 1429 anticipated the English expulsion from the towns and cities of France two decades later.
44. Henry VI in full martial array. In truth he was not a very good soldier, and not a very able king.
45. The Warwick family tree, from John Rous of Warwick’s De Regius Angliae, showing Richard Neville, 16th Earl, his wife Anne Beauchamp, their daughter Isabel Spencer and her husband George, Duke of Clarence.
46. An image of Edward IV, whose greatest achievement was to consolidate royal authority after the weak and vacillating rule of Henry VI.
47. Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV. Unlike most royal brides she was English and, at the time of her marriage, already a widow with two children.
48 (left). Edward V, the unfortunate boy-king who reigned for just two months before being murdered in the Tower of London. He was never crowned.
49. Richard III standing on a white boar; the white boar was his personal badge or ‘livery badge’. It may derive from the Latin name of York, Eboracum, since he was known as Richard of York.
50. Elizabeth of York and Henry VII, from a nineteenth-century illustration. From their union the rest of the Tudor dynasty sprang.
51. An allegory of the Tudor dynasty. The red dragon on the left represents the Welsh ancestry of Henry VII, for example, while the white greyhound on the right is taken from his father’s coat of arms as first earl of Richmond. Surmounting all is the Rose of Tudor, incorporating the white rose of Yorkshire within the red rose of Lancashire.
FOUNDATION. Copyright © 2011 by Peter Ackroyd. All rights reserved.
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St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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“First published in Great Britain by Macmillan”—T.p. verso.
First published in Great Britain by Macmillan,
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
eISBN 9781250013675
First eBook Edition : September 2012
The list of illustrations here constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ackroyd, Peter, 1949 –
Foundation : the history of England from its earliest beginnings to the Tudors / Peter Ackroyd.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-250-00361-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-01367-5 (e-book)
1. Great Britain—History—To 1485. 2. Great Britain—History—Henry VII, 1485 – 1509. I. Title.
DA130.A45 2012
942—dc23
2012028305
First U.S. Edition: October 2012
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