The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

作者：Dan Jones 

出版社: Penguin Books; Revised (2014年3月25日)

平装: 560页

语种： 英语

ISBN: 0143124927

条形码: 9780143124924

商品尺寸: 14 x 2.8 x 21.3 cm

商品重量: 431 g

内容简介

The New York Times bestseller that tells the story of Britain’s greatest and worst dynasty—“a real-life Game of Thrones” (The Wall Street Journal)

From the author of Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty

The first Plantagenet kings inherited a blood-soaked realm from the Normans and transformed it into an empire that stretched at its peak from Scotland to Jerusalem. In this epic narrative history of courage, treachery, ambition, and deception, Dan Jones resurrects the unruly royal dynasty that preceded the Tudors. They produced England’s best and worst kings: Henry II and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, twice a queen and the most famous woman in Christendom; their son Richard the Lionheart, who fought Saladin in the Third Crusade; and his conniving brother King John, who was forced to grant his people new rights under the Magna Carta, the basis for our own bill of rights. Combining the latest academic research with a gift for storytelling, Jones vividly recreates the great battles of Bannockburn, Crécy, and Sluys and reveals how the maligned kings Edward II and Richard II met their downfalls. This is the era of chivalry and the Black Death, the Knights Templar, the founding of parliament, and the Hundred Years’ War, when England’s national identity was forged by the sword.

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Praise for The Plantagenets

“Like the medieval chroniclers he quarries for juicy anecdotes, Jones has opted for a bold narrative approach anchored firmly upon the personalities of the monarchs themselves yet deftly marshaling a vast supporting cast of counts, dukes, and bishops. . . . Fast-paced and accessible, The Plantagenets is old-fashioned storytelling and will be particularly appreciated by those who like their history red in tooth and claw. Mr. Jones tackles his subject with obvious relish.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Delicious . . . Jones has produced a rollicking, compelling book produced a rollicking, compelling book about a rollicking, compelling dynasty, one that makes the Tudors who followed them a century later look like ginger pussycats. . . . The Plantagenets is told with the latest historical evidence and rich in detail and scene-setting. You can almost smell the sea salt as the White Ship sinks, and hear the screams of the tortured at the execution grounds at Tyburn.”

—USA Today

“Jones has brought the Plantagenets out of the shadows, revealing them in all their epic heroism and depravity. His is an engaging and readable account—itself an accomplishment given the gaps in medieval sources and a 300-year tableau—and yet researched with the exacting standards of an academician. The result is an enjoyable, often harrowing journey through a bloody, insecure era in which many of the underpinnings of English kingship and ¬Anglo-American constitutional thinking were formed.”

—The Washington Post

“Brilliant and entertaining . . . a set of fine vignettes relating dynastic life, death, war, peace, governance, and palace intrigues. The result is a history book that frequently reads like a novel and can be opened to any chapter.”

—Tampa Bay Times

“Blood-soaked medieval England springs to vivid life in Jones’s highly readable, authoritative, and assertive history.”

—Publishers Weekly

“They may lack the glamour of the Tudors or the majesty of the Victorians, but the Plantagenets are just as essential to the foundation of modern Britain. . . . The great battles against the Scots and French and the subjugation of the Welsh make for thrilling reading but so do the equally enthralling struggles over succession, the Magna Carta, and the Provisions of Oxford. . . . Written with prose that keeps the reader captivated throughout accounts of the span of centuries and the not-always-glorious trials of kingship, this book is at all times approachable, academic, and entertaining.”

—Booklist

“A novelistic historical account of the bloodline that ‘stamped their mark forever on the English imagination’ . . . Perhaps Jones’ regular column in the London Standard has given him a different slant on history; however he manages, it’s certainly to our benefit. . . . For enjoyable historical narratives, this book is a real winner.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“A riveting portrait of the royal lineage from Henry II through Richard II . . . Despite the density caused by any attempt to cram centuries of English history into one volume, Jones manages to create a work that is highly accessible to readers with only a basic knowledge of this era. . . . This is an excellent study of the period, both an overview and a series of character studies. It will be thoroughly enjoyed by Anglophile history buffs and others who love popular history or even historical fiction.”

—Library Journal

“Outstanding . . . Majestic in its sweep, compelling in its storytelling, this is narrative history at its best. A thrilling dynastic history of royal intrigues, violent skullduggery, and brutal warfare across two centuries of British history.”

—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography

“The Plantagenets played a defining part in shaping the nation of England, and Dan Jones tells their fascinating story with wit, verve, and vivid insight. This is exhilarating history—a fresh and gloriously compelling portrait of a brilliant, brutal, and bloody-minded dynasty.”

—Helen Castor, author of She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth

“This is history at its most epic and thrilling. I would defy anyone not to be right royally entertained by it.”

—Tom Holland, author of Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic

“Jones has written a magnificently rich and glittering medieval pageant, guiding us into the distant world of the Plantagenets with confidence. This riveting history of an all-too-human ruling House amply confirms the arrival of a formidably gifted historian.”

—Sunday Telegraph

“Entertaining and informative . . . Jones has produced an absorbing narrative that will help ensure that the Plantagenet story remains ‘stamped on the English imagination’ for another generation.”

—Sunday Times (London)

“Traditional narrative history at its best.”

—The Spectator

“Jones, a protégé of David Starkey, writes with his mentor's erudition but also exhibits novelistic verve and sympathy. . . . This is a great popular history, whether you are au fait with the machinations of medievalism or whether Magna Carta mystifies you. . . . The Plantagenets is proof that contemporary history can engage with the medieval world with style, wit and chutzpah.”

—The Observer (London)

“This action-packed narrative is, above all, a great story, filled with fighting, personality clashes, betrayal and bouts of the famous Plantagenet rage. . . . Jones is an impressive guide to this tumultuous scene. . . . The Plantagenets succeeds in bringing an extraordinary family arrestingly to life.”

—Daily Telegraph

“An excellent book . . . The Plantagenets is a wonderful gallop through English history. Powerful personalities, vivid descriptions of battles and tournaments, ladies in fine velvet and knights in shining armour crowd the pages of this highly engaging narrative.”

—The Evening Standard

作者简介

Dan Jones is an award-winning historian of the Middle Ages. A graduate of Cambridge University, where he studied under David Starkey, he is also the author of The Wars of the Roses. His four-part television series based on The Plantagenets will be broadcast in 2015. He lives in London.

文摘

French Kings, 1060–1422

House of Capet

House of Valois

Preface

Who were the Plantagenets? The name was not used by any of the characters in this book to describe themselves, with the exception of one: Geoffrey count of Anjou, a handsome, belligerent redheaded young man born in 1113, who wore a sprig of yellow broom blossom in his hat and decorated his shield with lions. It was from the Latin name (Planta genista) of the broom that the name Plantagenet derived, while lions passant guardant became the heraldic symbol of English kingship, carried before vast armies from the chilly Lowlands of Scotland to the dusty plains of the Middle East. There is some irony here: Geoffrey never visited England, took scant direct interest in the affairs of the realm, and died in 1151, three years before his eldest son inherited the English Crown.

Nevertheless, Plantagenet is a powerful name. The kings who descended from Geoffrey ruled England for more than two centuries, beginning with Henry II, who inherited the Crown in 1154, and ending with Richard II, who was relieved of it by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399. They were the longest reigning English royal dynasty, and during their times were founded some of the most basic elements of what we today know as England. The realm’s borders were established, as were its relationships with its neighbors—principally Scotland, Wales, France, and Ireland, but also the Low Countries, the papacy, and the Iberian states that eventually became Spain. Principles of law and institutions of government that have endured to this day were created in their essential forms—some deliberately, others either by accident or under duress. A rich mythology of national history and legend was concocted, and the cults of two national saints—Edward the Confessor and St. George—were established. The English tongue rose from an uncultured, rather coarse local dialect to become the language of parliamentary debate and poetic composition. Great castles, palaces, cathedrals, and monuments were raised; many of them still stand as testament to the genius of the men who conceived them, built them, and defended them against attack. Heroes were born, died, and became legends; so too were villains whose names still echo through the pages of history. (Some of those villains wore the crown.) Several of the most famous and dramatic battles in European history were fought, at Bouvines and Bannockburn, Sluys and Winchelsea, Crécy and Poitiers. Military tactics were revolutionized between a Norman age, in which warfare was the art of siegecraft, and the dawn of the fifteenth century, during which pitched battles were commonplace and the English, with their brave men-at-arms and deadly mounted archers, were the scourge of Europe. By the end of the Plantagenet years, the English had begun to explore the art of war on the open seas. Naval tactics lagged some way behind tactics in the field, but by the middle of the fourteenth century something resembling an English navy could be deployed to protect the coasts and attack enemy shipping. It is undeniable that during the Plantagenet years many acts of savagery, butchery, cruelty, and stupidity were committed, but by 1399, where this book ends, the chilly island realm that had been conquered by William, the bastard of Normandy, in 1066 had been transformed into one of the most sophisticated and important kingdoms in Christendom. At its heart lay the power and prestige of the royal family.

That is the process described in this book, but this is also a book written to entertain. It is a narrative history, and it tells some of the great stories of England. They include the civil war between Stephen and Matilda; the murder of Thomas Becket by Henry II’s knights; the Great War of 1173–1174; Richard I’s wars against Saladin on the Third Crusade; the Barons’ War against King John and the ratification of the Magna Carta; Henry III’s hapless attempts to deal with the barons of a later age, including his brother-in-law and nemesis Simon de Montfort; Edward I’s campaigns in Wales and Scotland; Edward II’s peculiar romance with Piers Gaveston and his dismal abdication in 1327; Edward III’s provocation of the Hundred Years War, in which he fought alongside his son the Black Prince and captured the king of France, and the subsequent institution of the Order of the Garter to celebrate England’s new martial supremacy; the scourge of the Black Death; Richard II’s heroism against Wat Tyler’s rebels during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which was followed by Richard’s tyranny and his final fall. These stories are exciting in their own right; they are also part of a historical canon that still, even in the cultural chaos of the twenty-first century, defines England as a nation and as a people. The Plantagenet kings did not just invent England as a political, administrative, and military entity. They also helped invent the idea of England, an idea that has as much importance today as it ever had before.

This is a long book, and it could have been longer still. For ease of reading I have divided the text into seven sections. Part I, “Age of Shipwreck,” illustrates the dismal state to which England had sunk by the end of its period of Norman rule, which began under William the Conqueror and continued during the reigns of two of his sons, William Rufus and Henry I. After the death of the latter, a vicious and paralyzing civil war engulfed England and Normandy. It was fought between rival claimants, the Conqueror’s grandson King Stephen and his granddaughter Empress Matilda, and it took nearly two decades to resolve it in favor of the latter. During that time England was effectively partitioned between two courts and two competing governments, leaving public authority splintered and the countryside a smoldering ruin, infested with mercenaries. Only with the accession of Matilda’s son—her eldest child by Geoffrey Plantagenet, a disheveled, quick-tempered, but brilliant boy known as Henry FitzEmpress—was the realm reunited and restored to good governance. Henry FitzEmpress became Henry II, and through a combination of some good fortune, immense personal energy, and a great deal of military capability and hardheaded purpose, Henry set about establishing himself, and by association the English Crown, as the master of a patchwork of territories reaching from the borders of Scotland to the foothills of the Pyrenees.

The story of Henry II’s rule over his vast dominions and their gradual, if unintended, coherence into a form of empire is the subject of Part II, “Age of Empire.” It charts Henry’s astonishing conquests, his catastrophic dispute with his onetime best friend Thomas Becket, and the king’s struggles with his feckless children and extraordinary wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, which some contemporaries believed were divine punishment for Becket’s death. “Age of Empire” also explores Henry’s revolutionary reforms of English law, justice, and bureaucracy, reforms that gave England legal processes and principles of government that endured for centuries.