Great Tales from English History takes the reader on an exhilarating tour of the greatest landmarks in English history, from Julius Caesar’s arrival on British shores on 26 August 55 BC to the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick nearly 2,000 years later.

This superb illustrated edition unites 101 key tales from Robert Lacey’s acclaimed three-volume series, in a new selection containing famous events, such as the Great Fire of London, as well as others that are less well known – for example, the exploits of the 15-year-old Nelson in the Arctic. Here is King Canute’s attempt to turn back the waves; the mysterious murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral; Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt; Thomas Clarkson and his fight against slavery; the dramatic religious conversion of John Wesley; and the heroism shown at Dunkirk in 1940.

In the brilliant storytelling tradition of Our Island History, combined with the latest and most accurate research, this is history as it should be told. Read this outstanding book and experience the drama of English history through the great personalities, battles, discoveries, dramas and tragedies that have moulded the nation.

Putting the Story Back into History - ROBERT LACEY

From the arrival of Caesar on Britain’s shores to the discovery of DNA, popular historian Robert Lacey has sought the Great Tales from English History and examined just what it is that makes a tale ‘Great’.

Who are the men and women from history that have made England – and hence Britain – great? For the past five years I’ve been researching and writing their stories: the Venerable Bede in his monkish cell at Jarrow, talking Geordie, writing magic and dreaming of the swift flight of sparrows; those very different Henries, V, VII and VIII, not to mention the last one’s six wives; nimble Mary Anning, wandering the Lyme Regis landslip with her faithful dog, chipping away at dinosaur fossils to reveal a prehistory no one had dreamt of.

These authentic, red-blooded characters are role models for a nation. We used to call them ‘heroes’ and ‘heroines’. And marching beside them are the somewhat less authentic heroes of legend – King Arthur, Robin Hood, Dick Whittington and Dick Turpin. Their stories may not be ‘true’ in the historical sense, but they contain a truth. So I have included them in my Great Tales, in a category all their own.

Take, for example, the story of England’s alternative national anthem, Jerusalem, based on the extraordinary idea that Jesus, ‘the Holy Lamb of God’, actually set foot in ‘England’s pleasant pastures’ at some time during his thirty-three years on earth. It’s a mad notion – totally lacking in historical evidence – which was cultivated for centuries by the monks of Glastonbury to attract tourists (in the Middle Ages they were called pilgrims). But then it caught the imagination of William Blake, the visionary artist and poet, yearning for escape from his grimy engraver’s workshop among the ‘dark Satanic mills’ of early nineteenth-century London:

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariots of fire!

Just over a century later, during the horrors of World War I, the composer Hubert Parry set Blake’s words to music, so the stirring strains of Jerusalem were heard in public for the first time at a ‘Votes for Women’ concert in 1916.

That’s the detail I like – the rabble-rousing concert. Jerusalem is the anthem of the troublemakers. Woven out of little more than fantasy, it has become part of England’s heritage, giving wing to the sense of hope and shared endeavour on which every community rests. Things may be good, but let us not get complacent.

I date my own love of history back to a stout, blue, exuberantly triumphalist saga, Our Island Story by H. E. Marshall, that was accompanied by an even more politically incorrect companion volume, Our Empire Story, relating how Britain’s heroes and heroines ventured round the world to create the famous empire on which the sun never set (because, as David Frost puts it, you can never trust an Englishman in the dark).

The first of these heroes was, in fact, an Italian, the Genoese navigator Zuan Caboto ( John Cabot), whose little ship, the
Matthew, was described by Marshall as sailing out from Bristol harbour one bright May morning in 1497, ‘followed by the wishes and prayers of many an anxious heart . . . until it was but a speck in the distance’.

That was my first lesson in the imperfections of history. Old H. E. – who, I later learned, was an Edwardian lady, Henrietta Elizabeth, living in Australia – was evidently not aware that the port of Bristol is several muddy miles inland from the Bristol Channel. So if there had been a crowd waving goodbye to Cabot that day, they would have lost sight of the Matthew as the vessel tacked round the first corner of the Avon Gorge.

I could have told her that. In 1950 I was a pupil at Clifton National Infants School, a few hundred yards from the Bristol
docks. I still remember my sense of puzzlement at this factual mistake in a proper ‘history’ book. But it was the beginning of my deeper understanding that one of the glories of history is its un-reliability.

There may be such a thing as pure, true history. If God had an all-seeing video camera, we might find out what actually, really, definitely happened in the past – but gods we are not. And if we did get to see the video, we would have to edit it down. We could not watch it all in real time. So willy-nilly the historian is an editor, patching together a hotch-potch of fallible facts that have to be assessed and shaped into a credible and engaging story.

That’s why I was not, ultimately, disillusioned by H. E. Marshall’s mistake. She told such a cracking good yarn. ‘History’ and ‘story’ derive from the same linguistic root, and I greatly regret that so much recent history teaching has lost sight of that connection – the importance and appeal of good, old-fashioned narrative. It is what inspired me to embark on my Great Tales, to stir the blood with the old stories, as checked against the latest evidence.

History gives us a sense of perspective. I conclude my book with the tale of the scientists Francis Crick and James D. Watson, the brilliant, tousled Anglo-American team who decoded the secret of DNA in 1953, then went out to the pub. ‘We’ve discovered the secret of life!’ announced Crick, the brash Englishman, as they walked into the Eagle, the old Cambridge coaching inn.

Crick and Watson’s ‘discovery’ has transformed the way we look at the world, from genetic modification to the cloning of life. The rules of religion, philosophy, law – and, yes, quite certainly history – have yet to adapt. If we happen to be genetically programmed to eat, procreate or lose our temper to an excessive degree, how can our greed, lust, or anger be condemned as sins or crimes? ‘It wasn’t me, Guv’: it was my DNA’. To paraphrase that greatest of all history books, 1066 and All That, DNA confronts us with ‘the cause of nowadays’, bringing history ‘to a full stop’. So that’s where I stop my own Great Tales. I hope you enjoy them.

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