Books like The English in the Twelfth Century — picked by fans

Marc Bloch was one of the greatest historians of the 20th century. He was also hero of the French Resistance, tortured and executed by the notorious Nazi Klaus Barbie. Feudal Society (2 volumes) is perhaps his best book. 

It is often said that the past is a foreign country, and it is true that the world of the Middle Ages is alien to us in many respects. What Bloch does is to provide a systematic examination of all aspects of that world, that is he examines it it from a legal, a sociological, an anthropological, an economic, and a political perspective. 

In so doing, he paints a remarkable portrait of a coherent, self-contained society. The economy was basic, laws and politics were personalized, but it was a social and political order that made sense in its own terms. More recent historians have criticized specific aspects of Bloch's vision of… show more.

Like Marc Bloch’s book, this helped me to grasp how to take an international perspective on the history of the central Middle Ages. In this case, its central theme was that we must think about Normandy and England as politically, socially, and economically joined together after 1066. It has inspired a lot that I have written and my teaching to students. See my The Normans and Empire for personal reflections.

Nelson’s masterly biography of Charlemagne is a dense, scholarly but still gripping account of one of the most interesting and influential monarchs in European history. I struggle to think of any figure who has has a greater impact that the King of the Franks and, later, Emperor of the Romans, who drew the boundaries of the continent as we know them today. This was my most reliable go-to source on Charlemagne and his long wars with the pagan Saxons, which is the subject of my own series.

A marvellous book that explores the experience for men and women of being married during the Christian Middle Ages. It presents us with an analysis of individual lives and is a social history, a gender history, an emotional history, a sexual history, and much else besides. Among the many subjects treated are female agency within marriage, the extent to which it was possible to choose a married partner, and the history and personal experience of married clergy when such marriages were forbidden. 

Few historians have brought eighteenth-century British culture and politics alive like Linda Colley in this study of how British identity was created between the 1707 union of England and Scotland and the early nineteenth century.

This book is filled with a sense of continuing relevance as Britain continues to struggle with its identity and place in the world. In the eighteenth century this identity was built around Protestantism, commerce, empire, and the nation’s lonely struggle against Napoleon on the European continent.

But can the peripheries of in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland really be persuaded to adhere to this vision of a unified Britain? In pondering this question, Collier’s book strikes me as essential reading.

When I got wind of this book, I had just finished writing a book about gold and money in Britain from the 1750s to the 1850s. Although I knew about the long history of British money prior to the 1750s and also about its complicated history down to the present, I jumped at the chance to read the whole story laid out between two covers. Blaazer deftly accomplishes this task, with a special focus on the strikingly different paths that money took in Britain’s three corners of Ireland, Scotland, and England (not so much on Wales, as is so often the case in such histories!).

How a country manages its money, it turns out, says much about how it governs its people—ranging from willful indifference in Ireland to consistent policies in England and Scotland that favored the wealthy (and especially the bankers) over the middling classes. A final advantage of… show more.

Geoffrey’s History of the Kings is the work that picked Arthur up from the somewhat obscure backwater of Welsh story-telling and launched him onto the European stage, in the process creating a story that had an enormous influence on how the insular past was understood across the rest of the Middle Ages. Geoffrey was writing for the new Norman elite, who welcomed a view of the past which downplayed the Anglo-Saxons and centred instead on their rivals for control of ancient Britain, the Britons. He based his magnificent new work on the Historia Brittonum, a set of Welsh genealogies and various stories, all of which he embroidered from his own fertile imagination to construct a complex vision of insular history no closer to what had really happened than modern works such as Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. 

But by tapping into political and cultural needs in… show more.

Threat of exposure of a scandalous affair takes Lynley and his sidekick Havers from London into the countryside, where they reveal how a hidden past and the mistaken identity of a father by his son, led to murder. I love it for the writing style – George's later books became too big for me – the characters she creates with such clarity and passion, who are put into situations that threaten their lives, reputation, and ideals.

I’ve read it multiple times and also listened to an audiobook. Of course, there are movies, too. I read it on my own out of pure interest as a young woman and then again repeatedly as an adult.

I get wildly involved in Dickens’ plots. (Most of his novels would fulfill my category of children overcoming odds.) David is bereft, having lost his father. He has a loving but weak mother. He experiences beatings, hunger (Oh, I hate hunger), and loneliness as he is tossed about the world. And yet he never loses his humanity, that is, his native kindness.

Somehow, Dickens finds ways to leverage all the pain with comedy. Amazing. I love his strange characters (Peggoty, Mr. Dick) and thrill to his evil characters (Uriah Heep) because Dickens has the gift to often make them comic.  

We’re all familiar with wartime images of young evacuees gathered together on railway stations. But over fifty percent of children were not evacuated from British cities, and it is they that Penny Starns has studied. Once we get past the mothers’ ‘keep or send’ moral dilemma, there are the issues of discipline, education, health, food, and psychological development to consider. Starns takes these subjects chapter by chapter, relating stories of disease, poverty, criminality, and terror (including one child who spent the night in a shelter within reach of an unexploded bomb). These tales she counterpoints with examples of unexpectedly increasing emotional and physical wellbeing amongst some of the stay-behinds. This is an important record of the experiences of a demographic that war histories often ignore.