Nicholas Higham’s How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons has just been published.
The British royal family traces its descent from the Norman Conquest; the numbering of monarchs dates from 1066. That Charles III’s great-uncle was the eighth King Edward, for instance, ignores Edward the Confessor, despite William the Conqueror claiming the throne as his kinsman as well as by his royal gift. From this perspective, the kingdom of England began in 1066. In other...
Modern academic historians want nothing to do with King Arthur. ‘There is no historical evidence about Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our...
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