Thomas explored why so many of the greatest thinkers were Nonconformists and the rise of the rejection of orthodox religion and the rise in literacy and role of women in spreading reading are the subjects of her book. She explores the evolution of dissenting thought and how Nonconformity shaped the transformation of England from a rural to an urban, industrialised society. The foundations for the Industrial Revolution were in place from the late Middle Ages when the early development of manufacturing processes and changes in the structure of rural communities began to provide opportunities for economic and social advancement. Successive waves of Huguenot migrants and the influence of Northern European religious ideology also played an important role in this process. The Civil Wars provided a catalyst for the dissemination of new ideas and helped shape the emergence of a new English Protestantism and divergent dissident sects. The persecution which followed strengthened the Nonconformist cause, and for the early Quakers it intensified their unity and resilience, qualities which would prove to be invaluable for business. In the years following the Restoration, Nonconformist ideas fuelled enlightened thought creating an environment for enterprise but also a desire for more radical change. Reformers seized on the plight of a working poor alienated by innovation and frustrated by false promises, the vision which was at first the spark for innovation would ignite revolution. B/w illus. 280 pages.

Seals tell us so much about the status of the owner, give historical information around their imagery and can help date a document. Through this combination of text, image and material form, they encrypt aspects of identity and are miniature marvels and glimpses into other world of art, thought, humour, trade, labour, majesty and power. Royal Seals is an introduction to the seals of the kings and queens of England, Scotland and latterly the United Kingdom, as well as the Church and nobility. Ranging from Medieval times to modern day, it uses images of impressive wax seals held at The National Archives to show the historical importance of these beautiful works of art whether royal, personal or ecclesiastical. Included are features on the great seals of famous monarchs like Richard III, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and 20th century monarchs, as well as insights on the role of seals in treaties and foreign policy. With seals of the nobility and lower orders included, there are plates such as an Oath of Supremacy Christ Church Cathedral 1534 in a burnt orange colour and Lion rampant emblem of Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk 1301 in emerald green. Published in association with The National Archives. 168 pages.

Love's labours in the fair game of making matches, marriage contracts, courting and getting caught, the wedding day, the paradise of married women, slender maintenance, careless domineering, curious wits and courtly nymphs, Sweet Bessie and Robert the Other Robert, and Essex is not the way. This entertaining and informative book explores the surprisingly varied and energetic sex and love lives of the women and men of Queen Elizabeth's England. A range of writers, from the famous, such as Shakespeare, John Donne and Ben Jonson, and lesser-known figures popular in their time, provide, in their witty stories, poems and plays, vivid pictures of Elizabethan sexual attitudes and experiences, while sober reports from the church courts tell of seductions, adulteries and rapes. Here we also encounter private journals and scenes from ordinary marriages, with complaints of women's fashions, bossy wives and domineering husbands. Besides this, there are accounts of the busy whores of London brothels, homosexual activity and the Court's amorous carousel of predatory aristocrats, promiscuous ladies and hopeful maids of honour. We conclude with the frustrations of The Virgin Queen herself. Peek beneath the bedsheets of 16th century England in this affectionate, informative and fascinating look at "ramping" and sex and sexuality on a range of topics, from religious and moral beliefs to homosexuality and prostitution. Sir Francis Bacon wrote "Nuptial love maketh mankind: friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love embaseth it." Quotes directly from poems, journals, plays, letters, sermons (mostly in modern spelling). B/w illus. 176 pages.

In 1535, a French official in English service, Jean de Rinel, explained that it was universally acknowledged that 'For 100 years, by battles and other deeds, evils and irreparable damages have continually multiplied both by sea and on land.' The war was 'over the right and title to the Crown of France'. The term Hundred Years War came into use in the 19th century and for the sake of this book the conflict is focussed on the years 1337-1453 between England and France. The war was brutal. Towns were sacked, villages burned, crops destroyed, political life punctuated by assassinations. This was an age of Orders of Knighthood, of grand tournaments and magnificent displays. Chivalry was an aristocratic ethos and individual deeds of arms had significant implications for the conduct of war. Yet for many it was a business with the potential of making huge profits from ransoming prisoners and recent work has brought this aspect of the conflict into sharper focus. A bitter dynastic fight between Plantagenet and Valois, the war was fought out on the wider stages with battles often epic in scale. This vivid new history involves its large and charismatic individuals - Edward III, claimant to the French throne; his son Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince; Condottiere John Hawkwood, Commander of the White Company who exported the war to Italy; wily architect of the first French victories Bertrand du Guesclin; inspirational leader Henry V, the unlikely winner at Agincourt (1415), who so nearly succeeded in becoming King of France; and the martyred Maid of Orleans, Joan of Arc, thought to be divinely inspired. Offering a bold new analysis of military strategy and tactics including the deadly power of English archery, Michael Prestwich sets the wider politics in a masterful account of the war as a whole, from English victory at Sluys in 1340, to the turn of the tide and French revival as the invader was driven back across the Channel. 226 page paperback, illus. and maps and genealogical tables and Timeline.

King John of England was married to two women: Isabella of Gloucester and Isabelle of Angoulême. The two women were central to shaping John and his reign, each in her own way moulding the unpopular king and each other over the course of their lives. Little is known about Isabella of Gloucester and she has largely become a historical footnote. She was the daughter of nobleman William FitzRobert second Earl of Gloucester and her marriage to King John in 1189 granted him rights over her substantial property as he was positioning himself as heir to Richard I (the Lionheart). Isabelle of Angoulême has a reputation as a witch and a poisoner. She was the great grand-daughter of King Louis VI of France, whose vast land holdings in France made her an attractive asset. Chapters cover childhood and education, the role of women and queens, John Plantagenet, changing roles and representation in literature. However, both were products of their time, victims and pawns of the powerful men whose voices overwrote the experiences of women. Taking a feminist light, McQuinn brightly shines it on both England's least well-known consort, Isabella of Gloucester, the king's first wife, and one of its least popular, Isabelle of Angoulême, his child bride. 8 pages of illus. 208 pages.

In Georgian England, few men were more fashionable or more eligible than George, Prince of Wales, heir to one of the most powerful thrones in the world. Wild, glamorous, and with a penchant for beautiful women, the 57 year marriage of George III and Queen Caroline was by far the most fruitful of any of the kings of Georgian Britain. From the birth of George IV in 1762 to that of princess Amelia in 1783, Queen Charlotte was either carrying a child or recovering from a birth for more than 20 years. Maria Fitzherbert was a twice-widowed Roman Catholic with a natural aversion to trouble. When she married the prince in a secret ceremony conducted in her Mayfair sitting room, she opened the door on three decades of heartbreak. Cast aside by her husband one minute, pursued tirelessly by him the next, Maria's clandestine marriage was anything but blissful. It was also the worst kept secret in England. Caroline of Brunswick was George's official bride. Little did she know that her husband was marrying for money and when she reached her new home in England, she found him so drunk that he couldn't even walk to the altar. Caroline might not have her husband's love, but the public adored her. In a world where radicalism was stirring, it was a recipe for disaster. Maria and Caroline never met but navigated the choppy waters of marriage to a capricious, womanising king-in-waiting. With a queen on trial for adultery and the succession itself in the balance, Britain had never seen scandal like it. The King's two marriages provided acres of newsprint and oceans of gossip. 32 illus. 201 pages.

England's most controversial King was Richard III. Forever associated with the murder of his nephews, the Princes in the Tower, he divides the nation. As spectacular as his death at Bosworth in August 1485, the last King of England to die in battle, the astonishing discovery of his bones under a Leicester car park five centuries later renewed interest in him and re-opened old debates. Is he the world's most wicked uncle or is he in the words of the man who most smeared him 'a prince more sinned again than sinning'? Richard was not born in the north and neither did he die there, but this detailed look at his life retraces his steps over the 33 years that he lived, and focusses on the area that he loved and made his own. He had castles at Middleham and Sheriff Hutton, Penrith and Sandal; he fought the Scots along the northern border and on their own territory; his son was born at Middleham and was invested as Prince of Wales at York Minster where Richard planned to set up a college of 100 priests. His white boar device can be found in obscure corners of churches and castles; his laws, framed in the single parliament of his short reign, gave rights to the people who served him and loved him north of the Trent. And when he felt threatened or outnumbered by his enemies during those turbulent years of the Wars of the Roses, it was to the men of the North that Richard turned for support and advice. They became his Knights of the Body; members of the Council of the North which outlived Richard by 150 years. They died with him at Bosworth. The story is not divorced from the violent politics of the day or from events that happened far to the south, but the North was Richard's home and the place he loved. Best known for his true crime and crime fiction works, M. J. Trow was educated as a military historian at King's College, London. 176pp, gazetteer, battle maps, castle plans and photographs this is a full re-examination of the Tudor bias, culminating in Shakespeare's play which continues to distort the truth until today.

When cathedrals were bright with paint... colonnettes, gables, pinnacles and statues were rich in colour. Red, blue and yellow helped the viewer to identify the holy figures and to decipher the great book of stone. The largest medieval drawing in existence, measuring more than four metres in height, provides exceptional evidence for this. Dating from c.1360-65, it represents the central part of the façade of Strasbourg Cathedral. Even now the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages overwhelm by their imagination, technical daring and sheer scale. How could such structures be built when cities had only a few thousand inhabitants, and only the most primitive machinery was available? Who initiated them? Who designed them? Who paid for them? All around the world but especially in Italy and in Gaul, each Christian community was driven by a spirit of rivalry to have a more glorious church than the others. Gothic and Romanesque building sites are shown in detail in manuscript illumination. As the Medieval town grew, buildings turned from wood to stone and grew ever higher. Patrons sought master masons, intellectuals became administrators, artists and architects established their independence and rights. Discover tracings on stone such as in the sacristy of the Roslin Chapel in Scotland where construction began in 1450, remarkable drawings from workshops, organised guilds, the octagon of Ely Cathedral 1322 and how metal became an essential material. Fully documented and splendidly illustrated throughout in colour, 176pp, paperback.

Beginning with Herodotus's 5th century BC observations of these massive monuments to Napoleon, soldiers, pioneers and adventurers, the scientific era, the cemetery complex, thesis, hypothesis and realities, Corteggiani leads the reader through the history of the Pyramids. He includes recent investigations by Egyptologists Gilles Dormion and Jean-Yeves Verd'hurt into a previously undiscovered room of the Great Pyramid. With remarkable images of early discoveries, a plan of the triangulation of the survey of 1881 of the Pyramids and Temples of Giza, chambers barely more than a metre high bearing graffiti, rare photographs in both colour and black and white and diagrams in this extremely well illustrated series. 128pp, paperback, colour.

From the Historic England popular series by the historian who has researched incredible photographic archives and who here selects 1,200 of the best images depicting the yards and alleys of Georgian and Victorian London and Britain, the maze of medieval streets, transformation of shopping areas and lost buildings. Once sleepy villages and market towns during this period were engulfed by a tide of development - Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Leeds exploded across the face of England and railways wrought massive changes as their iron tentacles spread across the landscape. By 1900 nearly 80% of England's population lived in urban areas, compared with just one third 100 years earlier. Ranging from 1870, the midpoint of Queen Victoria's reign, England was entering the Great Depression. Education became a statutory right, putting children at school desks rather than setting them to work. Women were being given control of any wages they earned and they began their long fight for equality. European rivalry accelerated and Britain's industrial and commercial pre-eminence was challenged by foreign competition. It was the age of the internal combustion engine, the telephone, radio, and aviation lay just around the corner and photographs were now able to record the moment. Most were taken to provide a permanent record of areas which were vanishing, and the quality of the images are of the highest quality of the time showing early railways, coaching inns, horse-drawn travel, the offices of the White Star Line Liverpool 1898, mock Tudor homes in Port Sunlight model village, Knebworth, fishermen's towns like Newlyn Cornwall 1907 with women and children and a man at work, New Street Station, grand civic buildings and town halls, Fry's chocolate in glamorous shop windows, tea rooms and formal gardens, back-to-backs, puppet shows and village life, markets and railway workers, Windsor Castle and Stonehenge with silk top-hatted gentlemen visiting, a windmill being demolished, watermen selling water with a bonneted child alongside her parents and his cart. The images are grouped by Northwest, Northeast, East Midlands, West Midlands, East England, South and Southeast, London, South and Southwest. A spectacular heavyweight large volume 10" x 11¾", 560 glossy pages.
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