Short History Of England

The story of England—exhilarating and empowering and eventful, from the time when Germanic Angles and Saxons first pushed westward across ancient Britain after the Romans withdrew—is a stage set crowded with dazzling tableaux: the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, Charles I, the Industrial Revolution, and war against Hitler.

In A Short History of England, Guardian columnist and former editor of The Times Simon Jenkins shows how the English were, on any showing, a remarkable people, asserting their power and spreading their culture first across the British Isles and then round the world.

Yet close to home, the western and northern boundaries of England reached the line of Offa’s Dyke, Hadrian’s Wall, and the Irish Sea in the Dark Ages, and have hardly moved since. Saxons, Normans, and Tudors could conquer the British Isles, but they could never suppress the Welsh, Scots, or Irish—or their desire for greater self-government—any more than the British Empire at the height of its powers could ever repress the desire for self-government among its colonies.

Running through this story is the drama of money—needed because England’s rulers had to pay for their almost continuous wars, first against the French and the Scots, then for an empire, and then as guarantor of European and world peace. But the belligerence of England’s rulers was ironically the engine of early rule by consent.

For all England’s glittering royals and proud generals, the one overriding hero is Parliament, which emerged from the early Saxon witans. It never lost its centrality in the constitution. It has steered England through its greatest agonies and to its most redoubtable triumphs, a creation of political genius.

A beautiful, magisterial overview, written with flair and authority and adorned with more than a hundred color illustrations, A Short History of England will be the standard work for years to come.