Aethelred the Unready (Penguin Monarchs) PDF Download

Author: Richard Abels
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014197950X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
A major new title in the Penguin Monarchs series In his fascinating new book in the Penguin Monarchs series, Richard Abels examines the long and troubled reign of Aethelred II the 'Unraed', the 'Ill-Advised'. It is characteristic of Aethelred's reign that its greatest surviving work of literature, the poem The Battle of Maldon, should be a record of heroic defeat. Perhaps no ruler could have stemmed the encroachment of wave upon wave of Viking raiders, but Aethelred will always be associated with that failure. Richard Abels is Professor Emeritus at the United States Naval Academy. He is the author of Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England and Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Author: Richard Abels
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0141979496
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A major new title in the Penguin Monarchs series In his fascinating new book in the Penguin Monarchs series, Richard Abels examines the long and troubled reign of Aethelred II the 'Unraed', the 'Ill-Advised'. It is characteristic of Aethelred's reign that its greatest surviving work of literature, the poem The Battle of Maldon, should be a record of heroic defeat. Perhaps no ruler could have stemmed the encroachment of wave upon wave of Viking raiders, but Aethelred will always be associated with that failure.

Author: Tom Holland
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241187826
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
The formation of England occurred against the odds: an island divided into rival kingdoms, under savage assault from Viking hordes. But, after King Alfred ensured the survival of Wessex and his son Edward expanded it, his grandson Athelstan inherited the rule of both Mercia and Wessex, conquered Northumbria and was hailed as Rex totius Britanniae: 'King of the whole of Britain'. Tom Holland recounts this extraordinary story with relish and drama, transporting us back to a time of omens, raven harbingers and blood-red battlefields. As well as giving form to the figure of Athelstan - devout, shrewd, all too aware of the precarious nature of his power, especially in the north - he introduces the great figures of the age, including Alfred and his daughter Aethelflaed, 'Lady of the Mercians', who brought Athelstan up at the Mercian court. Making sense of the family rivalries and fractious conflicts of the Anglo-Saxon rulers, Holland shows us how a royal dynasty rescued their kingdom from near-oblivion and fashioned a nation that endures to this day.

Author: Edmund King
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141978996
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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'To be a medieval king was a job of work ... This was a man who knew how to run a complex organization. He was England's CEO' The youngest of William the Conqueror's sons, Henry I came to unchallenged power only after two of his brothers died in strange hunting accidents and he had imprisoned the other. He was destined to become one of the greatest of all medieval monarchs, both through his own ruthlessness, and through his dynastic legacy. Edmund King's engrossing portrait shows a strikingly charismatic, intelligent and fortunate man, whose rule was looked back on as the real post-conquest founding of England as a new realm: wealthy, stable, bureaucratised and self-confident.

Author: Levi Roach
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300225202
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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divAn imaginative reassessment of Æthelred "the Unready," one of medieval England’s most maligned kings and a major Anglo-Saxon figure The Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred "the Unready" (978–1016) has

Author: Harriet O'Brien
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596918705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
A stunning history of power, love and greed in 11th-century England - the remarkable story of Queen Emma and the Vikings 'Harriet O'Brien recreates this intriguing and complex world with skill and imagination' Daily Telegraph 'O'Brien's story is a dramatic one, and her Queen Emma a commanding, shrewd and manipulative figure ... genuinely powerful' Guardian Emma was one of England's most remarkable queens: a formidable woman who made her mark on a Europe beset by Vikings. By birth a Norman, she married and outlived two kings of England and witnessed the coronations of two of her sons: Harthcnut the Viking and Edward the Confessor. She became an unscrupulous political player and was diversely regarded as a generous Christian patron, the admired co-regent of the nation, and a ruthlessly Machiavellian mother. She was, above all, a survivor: her life was punctuated by dramatic falls, all of which she overcame. Her story is one of power, politics, love, greed and scandal in an England caught between the Dark Ages and the Norman invasion of 1066.

Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241248116
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
King of Britain for sixty years and the last king of what would become the United States, George III inspired both hatred and loyalty and is now best known for two reasons: as a villainous tyrant for America's Founding Fathers, and for his madness, both of which have been portrayed on stage and screen. In this concise and penetrating biography, Jeremy Black turns away from the image-making and back to the archives, and instead locates George's life within his age: as a king who faced the loss of key colonies, rebellion in Ireland, insurrection in London, constitutional crisis in Britain and an existential threat from Revolutionary France as part of modern Britain's longest period of war. Black shows how George III rose to these challenges with fortitude and helped settle parliamentary monarchy as an effective governmental system, eventually becoming the most popular monarch for well over a century. He also shows us a talented and curious individual, committed to music, art, architecture and science, who took the duties of monarchy seriously, from reviewing death penalties to trying to control his often wayward children even as his own mental health failed, and became Britain's longest reigning king.

Author: David Horspool
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141979399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Although he styled himself 'His Highness', adopted the court ritual of his royal predecessors, and lived in the former royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court, Oliver Cromwell was not a king - in spite of the best efforts of his supporters to crown him. Yet, as David Horspool shows in this illuminating new portrait of England's Lord Protector, Cromwell, the Puritan son of Cambridgeshire gentry, wielded such influence that it would be a pretence to say that power really lay with the collective. The years of Cromwell's rise to power, shaped by a decade-long civil war, saw a sustained attempt at the collective government of England; the first attempts at a real Union of Britain; the beginnings of empire; a radically new solution to the idea of a national religion; atrocities in Ireland; and the readmission to England of the Jews, a people officially banned for over three and a half centuries. At the end of it, Oliver Cromwell had emerged as the country's sole ruler: to his enemies, and probably to most of his countrymen, his legacy looked as likely to last as that of the Stuart dynasty he had replaced.

Author: Tom Licence
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300255586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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An authoritative life of Edward the Confessor, the monarch whose death sparked the invasion of 1066 One of the last kings of Anglo-Saxon England, Edward the Confessor regained the throne for the House of Wessex and is the only English monarch to have been canonized. Often cast as a reluctant ruler, easily manipulated by his in-laws, he has been blamed for causing the invasion of 1066—the last successful conquest of England by a foreign power. Tom Licence navigates the contemporary webs of political deceit to present a strikingly different Edward. He was a compassionate man and conscientious ruler, whose reign marked an interval of peace and prosperity between periods of strife. More than any monarch before, he exploited the mystique of royalty to capture the hearts of his subjects. This compelling biography provides a much-needed reassessment of Edward’s reign—calling into doubt the legitimacy of his successors and rewriting the ending of Anglo-Saxon England.

Author: Marc Morris
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014197785X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
On Christmas Day 1066, William, duke of Normandy was crowned in Westminster, the first Norman king of England. It was a disaster: soldiers outside, thinking shouts of acclamation were treachery, torched the surrounding buildings. To later chroniclers, it was an omen of the catastrophes to come. During the reign of William the Conqueror, England experienced greater and more seismic change than at any point before or since. Marc Morris's concise and gripping biography sifts through the sources of the time to give a fresh view of the man who changed England more than any other, as old ruling elites were swept away, enemies at home and abroad (including those in his closest family) were crushed, swathes of the country were devastated and the map of the nation itself was redrawn, giving greater power than ever to the king. When, towards the end of his reign, William undertook a great survey of his new lands, his subjects compared it to the last judgement of God, the Domesday Book. England had been transformed forever.