Medieval History

I am eager to read this book, part of me hopes it is a lot like Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. The book praises the rebels and the downtrodden, and without them the world would unmistakably be a very different place. It is the courage of the ‘rebels’ that produce change in any country in the world throughout history.

Review by Jackie Wullschlager

History belongs to the victors – or as Sir John Harington put it in 1618: “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? / For if it prosper none dare call it treason”. Rebels who fail tend not to build the monuments – castles, palaces, civic squares – that are our visible heritage. Yet, says David Horspool in this vivid, lucid chronicle, rebels have shaped England’s character as incontrovertibly and effectively as the monarchs and law-givers they challenged.
Beginning with the Norman conquest and closing with Arthur Scargill, Horspool argues in The English Rebel that England’s role as coloniser – of its own island, then its archipelago, eventually of a third of the world – shrouds the significance of the rebel tradition at home. Anglo-Saxon uprisings led by “woodsmen” who attacked Norman strongholds, then melted into forests and marshes, belong to a lineage running from the Robin Hood myth to today’s eco-warriors. Five centuries before America’s Bill of Rights, English barons forced King John to accept the Magna Carta, sowing the seeds of constitutional reform. Generations ahead of the French Revolution, the English executed Charles I in favour of a radical government.

Source Review Here.