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Roger
Hudson.
Hudson's
English History: A Compendium.
Orion,
2005.
ISBN
0297844156.
Hardback.
185 x
112 mm.
160pp.
Publisher's
recommended price £9.99
Eight hundred years of
English history served up by the quirky mind of Roger Hudson. Flitting
happily from
period to period at will, you can alight on a note on the royal hounds
and huntsmen in 1136, be equipped to discuss siege warfare (using the
correct vocabulary), choose a destination for a pilgrimage or a
religious order to join. The working methods of the Exchequer are
usefully explained and you are duly warned as to what behaviour would
have landed you in the pillory in London in 1419. The intricacies of
the Tudor Court are plotted, the Anglo-Scottish border clans mapped,
and the Armada fleets anatomised. Seventeenth-century banquet menus,
including boiled teats and seagulls, are pored over and Charles II's
bastards catalogued. Euphemisms for gin, and the evocative names of
strong beers and of Nelson's gunboats are listed. You will learn how to
live as a clerk on £50 a year in London in 1767, what, and for
what offences, you will be fined as a cotton spinner in one of the new
factories around 1800, and the chances of being hanged in the 1820s and
30s. There are nineteenth-century 'rich lists', a breakdown of life
below stairs in a stately home around 1900, and much, much more.
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