Foundation – The History of England from its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors

 

Foundation – The History of England from its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors – by Peter Ackroyd

Volume one of a six volume set.  If the other volumes are as strong as this one, I would highly recommend the entire series.  A history geek like me, in fact, wishes such a series were available for every country in the history of civilization.  Of course, I would also need about 100 extra years to read them all.  Ahhhh…one certainly can imagine and fantasize.

Technically, this book covers thousands and thousands of years of history, but like most retrospectives, we zoom through the earliest periods rather quickly since so little is known.  Still though, this is an awful lot of history to pack into one book. An arduous task, but author Peter Ackroyd succeeds magnificently. I was a bit surprised that some events of England’s history were only briefly skimmed – such as the Viking invasions during in the 10^th century – yet I’m sure this was the author’s intent since he couldn’t go too crazy.  Even a six-volume set demands a bit of brevity.  So if you’re wanting an in depth volume of any point in the history of England pre 1500, you might be a tad disappointed with what is here.

This book isn’t entirely ‘history’ either. Ackroyd alternates each ‘history’ chapter with a chapter on the different aspects of life during the periods; whether diet, the town layouts, fashions, education, pets, leisure, etc.  These diversions were well researched and informative, yet I think I would have preferred straight history. Fortunately (for me) these alternate chapters were very brief; maybe 3-5 pages.  I must confess, though, that even though I loved this book (especially the history), if one were to ‘test’ me on the facts that were covered in this compendium, I would have easily failed.  In other words, there wasn’t much of this book that stayed with me once I finished reading.  I’ll try to explain…

Once the history of this book gets to William the Conqueror during the 11^th century, the book slows down a bit and breathes (a good thing).  Yet the history of England is awfully repetitive. This isn’t the author’s fault.  He even states such sentiments several times throughout.  We learn, for example, that in order for a king to be “successful”, he can’t be loving, kind, altruistic and diplomatic.  Instead, he must conquer, destroy, and constantly wage war against neighboring countries.  So yes, there’s a lot of that. An awful lot.  It seems that every king’s reign was highlighted by a war with France, Scotland, or some other neighboring province.  Of course, wars cost money, so taxes are always being imposed on the peasants who are pretty destitute even without such financial constraints.  So, no, life was never pretty in ‘merry old England’.

We then come to the fact that, for whatever reason, people weren’t quite as creative when naming their offspring.  So this book features several Edwards, Henrys, and Roberts.  Every female seems to be named Elizabeth, Margaret, or Anne.  I also lost track of how many kings of France that were named ‘Charles’.  So if you were to now ask me on a test to differentiate Henry II from Henry VI, I would easily fail.  In spite of the repetition, however, I found all of the history incredibly captivating. Because so much history is covered, each dynasty only warrants about 25 pages or so.  I confess if I were to read an entire biography of one of these monarchs, I might have let my attention wander somewhat. Brief chapters can prevent such diversions of interest.

I also couldn’t keep track of all the relations and rival factions.  There were an awful lot of cousins, nephews, earls, dukes and many of these individuals seemed to always be attempting to usurp the throne. I simply couldn’t keep track.  One criticism of this book is that it could have greatly benefitted with a diagram of a family tree.  A map of England and France would have been very helpful as well.   I must again say, though, that these gripes I’m listing are minor, and I still really loved the book (volume 2 is currently on order from Amazon).

So if you read this book, go slow.  Take notes.  Illustrations are included, but these are crude drawings and paintings consistent with the time period. You may want to imagine what each leader looks like and make mental pictures ensuring you have them all looking somewhat different. This will help keep, for example, all 8 ‘Henrys’ somewhat straight in your mind. 

There’s so much more I wanted to explore after reading this book.  I wanted to learn more about Joan of Arc, the Magna Carta, and was even briefly tempted to read all of Shakespeare’s histories that dealt with the many monarchs.  Briefly.    If you love history, this is a great starting place to tackle the long history of England. Very very thorough, but not morosely overbearing.