Peter Ackroyd
The History of England, Volume 1: Foundation
Macmillan; 2011
This is the first in a series by Peter Ackroyd in which he charts the history of England (and he does mean England, not Britain). The already available subsequent two volumes cover the Tudors and the Civil War.
It is a thick tome — running to just shy of 450 pages of text, plus bibliography, index and colour plates — which charts the rise of England from about the year zilch up to the end of the Wars of the Roses and the accession of Henry VII. This is, I think, too much, because in that space it is almost impossible to cover the ground in any great depth — although Ackroyd struggles manfully to do so, and almost pulls it off.
Most of the book is political history: the rise and demise of kings, rebellion, war, parliament and tax; with each period (pretty much each monarch) being given its own, often long chapter. But in between there are short cameos, often just 3 or 4 pages, of social history on subjects such as the rise of the town, the family of a medieval merchant or ancient roads.
Even having read this book, I still struggle with sorting out who was who, who fought who, and why, during medieval times. For me this just does not hang together as a narrative, the sequence of kings is obscure and all the various plots and wars are just too unmemorable. So I found the social history cameos the most interesting parts of the book and wanted more of them and longer.
But that likely says more about me, than about Ackroyd’s writing, for he lays out, often in quite some detail, the machinations surrounding the rule of each of the monarchs from the late Saxons onwards. This is a discursive history which seeks to try to understand — using existing material — how each monarch got to where they were and stayed there (or didn’t); it is not a book of new material, hitherto unknown research, or amazing revelations. It is very much a synthesis of what we already know, perhaps approached from a slightly different angle, and to that extent it is an easy read.
In other ways this is not an easy read. While Ackroyd writes well, and I often found it hard to put the book down, the text is dense and it isn’t always easy to keep track of the dramatis personae. Which Earl of Warwick are we talking about? The one who has just had his head removed? Or his son? Or his father? Which is, I think, why I find this such a difficult period of English history to get a grip on.
So is this a book worth reading? Yes, I think it is if you want a good overview of how England got from the Romans to the beginning of the Tudors, and can manage to keep straight in your head who begat who; who married who; and whose head was removed and why. I was very confused about this period of English history before I started on the book. I’m a little less confused now; but it is still not crystal clear, which I hoped it would be. Which, as I said earlier, probably says more about me than about the book.
Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆