The many influences of the past on our diet make the concept of 'British food' very hard to define. The Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans each brought ingredients to the table, and the country was introduced to all manner of spices following the Crusades. The Georgians enjoyed a new level of excess and then, of course, the world wars forced us into the challenge of making meals from very little. The history of cooking in Britain is as tumultuous as the times its people have lived through. Tasting the Past: Recipes from the Middle Ages to the Civil War documents the rich history of our food, its fads and its fashions, combined with a practical cookbook of over 120 recipes from the early Middle Ages up to the Civil War. Jacqui Wood guides us through the recipes brought ashore by the Normans, the opportunities brought by the food harvested in the New World during the Renaissance, and the decadent meals of the Royalist gentry outlawed by the puritanical Parliamentarians.

Throughout recorded history Yorkshire has been a setting for warfare of all kinds - marches, skirmishes and raids, pitched battles and sieges. And it is the sieges of the Civil War period - which often receive less attention than other forms of combat - that are the focus of David Cooke's new history. Hull, York, Pontefract, Knaresborough, Sandal, Scarborough, Helmsley, Bolton, Skipton - all witnessed notable sieges during the bloody uncertain years of the Civil Wars. His vivid reconstructions allow the reader to visit the castles and towns where sieges took place and stand on the ground where blood was spilt for the cause - for king or Parliament. Using contemporary accounts and a wealth of maps and illustrations, his book allows the reader to follow the course of each siege and sets each operation in the context of the Civil Wars in the North.

The mythic status of the Oxbridge man at the height of the British Empire continues to persist in depictions of this small, elite world as an ideal of athleticism, intellectualism, tradition, and ritual. In his investigation of the origins of this myth, Paul R. Deslandes explores the everyday life of undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge to examine how they experienced manhood. He considers phenomena such as the dynamics of the junior common room, the competition of exams, and the social and athletic obligations of intercollegiate boat races to show how rituals, activities, relationships, and discourses all contributed to gender formation. Casting light on the lived experience of undergraduates, Oxbridge Men shows how an influential brand of British manliness was embraced, altered, and occasionally rejected as these students grew from boys into men.

The story of the reign of Charles I - told through the lives of his people. Prize-winning historian David Cressy mines the widest range of archival and printed sources, including ballads, sermons, speeches, letters, diaries, petitions, proclamations, and the proceedings of secular and ecclesiastical courts, to explore the aspirations and expectations not only of the king and his followers, but also the unruly energies of many of his subjects, showing how royal authority was constituted, in peace and in war - and how it began to fall apart. A blend of micro-historical analysis and constitutional theory, parish politics and ecclesiology, military, cultural, and social history, Charles I and the People of England is the first major attempt to connect the political, constitutional, and religious history of this crucial period in English history with the experience and aspirations of the rest of the population. From the king and his ministers to the everyday dealings and opinions of parishioners, petitioners, and taxpayers, David Cressy re-creates the broadest possible panorama of early Stuart England, as it slipped from complacency to revolution.

The Wars of the Roses (c. 1455-1487) are renowned as an infamously savage and tangled slice of English history. A bloody thirty-year struggle between the dynastic houses of Lancaster and York, they embraced localised vendetta (such as the bitter northern feud between the Percies and Nevilles) as well as the formal clash of royalist and rebel armies at St Albans, Ludford Bridge, Mortimer's Cross, Towton, Tewkesbury and finally Bosworth, when the usurping Yorkist king, Richard III, was crushed by Henry Tudor. Powerful personalities dominate the period: the charismatic and enigmatic Richard III, immortalized by Shakespeare; the slippery Warwick, the Kingmaker', who finally over-reached ambition to be cut down at the Battle of Barnet; and guileful women like Elizabeth Woodville and Margaret of Anjou, who for a time ruled the kingdom in her husband's stead. David Grummitt places the violent events of this complex time in the wider context of fifteenth-century kingship and the development of English political culture.Never losing sight of the traumatic impact of war on the lives of those who either fought in or were touched by battle, this captivating new history will make compelling reading for students of the late medieval period and Tudor England, as well as for general readers.

The story of the reign of Charles I - through the lives of his people. Prize-winning historian David Cressy mines the widest range of archival and printed sources, including ballads, sermons, speeches, letters, diaries, petitions, proclamations, and the proceedings of secular and ecclesiastical courts, to explore the aspirations and expectations not only of the king and his followers, but also the unruly energies of many of his subjects, showing how royal authority was constituted, in peace and in war - and how it began to fall apart. A blend of micro-historical analysis and constitutional theory, parish politics and ecclesiology, military, cultural, and social history, Charles I and the People of England is the first major attempt to connect the political, constitutional, and religious history of this crucial period in English history with the experience and aspirations of the rest of the population. From the king and his ministers to the everyday dealings and opinions of parishioners, petitioners, and taxpayers, David Cressy re-creates the broadest possible panorama of early Stuart England, as it slipped from complacency to revolution.

In a world of conflicting nationalist claims, mass displacements and asylum-seeking, a great many people are looking for 'home' or struggling to establish the 'nation'. These were also important preoccupations between the English and the French revolutions: a period when Britain was first at war within itself, then achieved a confident if precarious equilibrium, and finally seemed to have come once more to the edge of overthrow. In the century and a half between revolution experienced and revolution observed, the impulse to identify or implicitly appropriate home and nation was elemental to British literature. This wide-ranging study by international scholars provides an innovative and thorough account of writings that vigorously contested notions and images of the nation and of private domestic space within it, tracing the larger patterns of debate, while at the same time exploring how particular writers situated themselves within it and gave it shape.

England's Islands in a Sea of Troubles examines the jurisdictional disputes and cultural complexities in England's relationship with its island fringe from Tudor times to the eighteenth century, and traces island privileges and anomalies to the present. It tells a dramatic story of sieges and battles, pirates and shipwrecks, prisoners and prophets, as kings and commoners negotiated the political, military, religious, and administrative demands of the early modern state. The Channel Islands, the Isle of Wight, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Man, Lundy, Holy Island and others emerge as important offshore outposts that long remained strange, separate, and perversely independent. England's islands were difficult to govern, and were prone to neglect, yet their strategic value far outweighed their size. Though vulnerable to foreign threats, their harbours and castles served as forward bases of English power. In civil war they were divided and contested, fought over and occupied. Jersey and the Isles of Scilly served as refuges for royalists on the run. Charles I was held on the Isle of Wight. External authority was sometimes light of touch, as English governments used the islands as fortresses, commercial assets, and political prisons. London was often puzzled by the linguistic differences, tangled histories, and special claims of island communities. Though increasingly integrated within the realm, the islands maintained challenging peculiarities and distinctive characteristics. Drawing on a wide range of sources, and the insights of maritime, military, and legal scholarship, this is an original contribution to social, cultural, and constitutional history.

The ways in which women have historically authorized themselves to write on war has blurred conventionally gendered lines, intertwining the personal with the political. Women on War in Spain's Long Nineteenth Century explores, through feminist lenses, the cultural representations of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish women's texts on war. Reshaping the current knowledge and understanding of key female authors in Spain's fin de siecle, this book examines works by notable writers - including Rosario de Acuna, Blanca de los Rios, Concepcion Arenal, and Carmen de Burgos - as they engage with the War of Independence, the Third Carlist War, Spain's colonial wars, and World War I. The selected works foreground how women's representations of war can challenge masculine conceptualizations of public and domestic spheres. Christine Arkinstall analyses the works' overarching themes and symbols, such as honour, blood, the Virgin and the Mother, and the intersecting sexual, social, and racial contracts. In doing so, Arkinstall highlights how these texts imagine outcomes that deviate from established norms of femininity, offer new models to Spanish women, and interrogate the militaristic foundations of patriarchal societies.

A brilliant appraisal of the Civil War and its long-term consequences, by an acclaimed historian. The political upheaval of the mid-seventeenth century has no parallel in English history. Other events have changed the occupancy and the powers of the throne, but the conflict of 1640-60 was more dramatic: the monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished, to be replaced by a republic and military rule. In this wonderfully readable account, Blair Worden explores the events of this period and their origins - the war between King and Parliament, the execution of Charles I, Cromwell's rule and the Restoration - while aiming to reveal something more elusive: the motivations of contemporaries on both sides and the concerns of later generations.

The battlefields of Edgehill, Newbury and Marston Moor are superlatives with the middle of the 17th-century conflict known as the English Civil War, and whilst their importance to the conflict is undeniable, they detract from the power struggle that occurred between the Royalists and Parliamentarians in the towns and cities throughout the land. This power struggle culminated in the construction of siege batteries and fortifications. Focusing on the Severn Valley region of England, this book examines, through archaeological, topographic, cartographic and historical research, the sieges of Bristol, Gloucester, Worcester, Bridgnorth and Shrewsbury, demonstrating how siege techniques and this style of warfare impacted on the outcome of the conflict that set brother against brother and father against son.

In the seventeenth century Bristol was the second city of England. It was the main west coast port, an internationally important entrepot and rich trading centre. Industry flourished, too, with manufacturing and processing industries like soap making and gunpowder production responsible for Bristol's considerable wealth. In consequence, control of the town became one of the chief objectives of both armies during the civil war which raged in England in the 1640s. Beginning the war under Parliamentarian control, the city changed hands twice, with each transfer having a major effect of the war effort of both sides. This new study argues that when the Royalists captured Bristol in July 1643 they gained not only the city, but also the materials and facilities that literally allowed them to remain in the war. Under Royalist rule Bristol became a vital centre for military and government activities, as well as a centre for importing arms from Europe and becoming almost the alternative Royalist capital. The loss of Bristol in 1645 was therefore a huge blow to the Royalist cause. This book is surely one of the most important written on the civil wars in recent times. Its radical reinterpretation of the pivotal role of England's second city will ensure it a place on bookshelves of anyone interested in the most turbulent years of the seventeenth century.

Few works of history have succeeded so completely in forcing their readers to take a fresh look at the evidence as Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down – and that achievement is rooted firmly in Hill's exceptional problem-solving skills.

Traditional interpretations of the English Civil War concentrated heavily on a top-down analysis of the doings of king and parliament. Hill looked at ‘history from below,’ focusing instead on the ways in which the people of Britain saw the society they lived in and nurtured hopes for a better future. Failing to understand these factors – and the impact they had on the origins and outcomes of the wars of the 1640s – means failing to understand the historical period. In this sense, Hill's influential work is a great example of the problem-solving skills of asking productive questions and generating alternative possibilities. It forced a generation of historians to re-evaluate the things they thought they knew about a key pivot point in British history – and went on to influence the generations that came after them.

This book provides a full listing of the troop and company commanders who served in the New Model Army during the first four years of its existence. A second volume covering the final years of the army's existence is currently very close to completion. It will be published during 2016. This is the first time that the officer corps of the New Model Army has been pieced together on such a scale and with such an extensive range of source materials. Unsurprisingly it corrects numerous errors to be found in more general histories of the army. The book is therefore an essential tool for studying the officer corps of the first English army in which social status was not the prime pre-requisite for attaining a senior military rank. Additionally, it is fully indexed and referenced. This will allow readers, whether military historians, local historians or family historians, to progress their particular interests through further exploration of archival and printed sources. In part one the data concerning the careers of troop and company commanders is presented in the form of snapshots of the army taken on six occasions between April 1645 and May 1649. However, the information to be found in the very extensive footnotes will enable the reader to create a highly accurate reconstruction of the names of the troop and company commanders at any date in that period. In part two a similar exercise is conducted with respect to the junior commissioned officers. In their case the surviving documentary evidence makes a complete reconstruction impossible. It is, however, important that their names are recorded as considerable numbers went on to serve as troop and company commanders, and indeed field officers and colonels, during the last ten years of the New Model Army's existence. Finally, in appendix one regimental lists are presented for the first time of the Earl of Essex's army at the time of its incorporation into the New Model Army, thus complementing the work of Laurence Spring on the New Model's other two progenitors, the armies of the Earl of Manchester and Sir William Waller. The book is not a new history of the New Model Army, but it does include chapters on topics that are not addressed head-on in Ian Gentles, The New Model Army 1645-1653 (1992). One examines the extent to which the New Model Army was an English Army, an issue first raised by Mark Stoyle in Soldiers and Strangers (Yale, 2005). Another discusses the positions held by the officers before they became troop or company commanders in the New Model Army, and the effect this may have had on their subsequent military careers. A third explores the circumstances under which officers left the army in the period 1645-1649, whist a fourth questions the notion of pinning numbers to the New Model Army regiments as was the practice in the British Army of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

An annotated and indexed transcription of one of the primary Parliamentarian newsbooks published during the first English Civil War, 1642-1646. Volume 1 of 4.

The six wives of Henry VIII - Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr - have become defined in a popular sense not so much by their lives as by the way these lives ended. But, as Antonia Fraser conclusively proves, they were rich and feisty characters. They may have been victims of Henry's obsession with a male heir, but they were not willing victims. On the contrary, they displayed considerable strength and intelligence at a time when their sex supposedly possessed little of either.

This is the definitive military history of the Civil Wars which swept the British Isles from 1642 to 1649. The martial aspects of the wars are covered in detail along with a comprehensive overview of thereligious and political dimensions which shaped the armies involved in the conflict. This excellent single volume history is the perfectintroduction to themilitary history of this turbulent decade which shaped the destiny of the British Isles. This book is part of the 'Military History From Primary Sources' series, a new military history range compiled and edited by Emmy Award winning author and historian Bob Carruthers. The series draws on primary sources and contemporary documents to provide a new insight into the true nature of warfare. The series consultant is David Mcwhinnie, creator of the award winning PBS series 'Battlefield'.

For the first time in trade paperback-a classic memoir of Navy SEALs in action.
In gripping prose, Captain Robert A. Gormly tells about his days as a leader in the Navy SEALs- taking readers into the night, into the water, and into battle on some of the most hair-raising missions ever assigned.
Trained to a fine fighting edge just in time for Vietnam, Gormly served two tours of duty and engaged in top-secret missions in the Persian Gulf. Here, he shares his viewpoint and his experience-including what is perhaps the most graphic description ever of SEAL action in the invasion of Grenada. Gormly takes readers behind the myth of this awesome team, revealing how their lives depend on their unprecedented expertise and unparalleled courage.

Focusing on the crisis of transition marked by the English Revolution (1640-1660), this collection of essays also places it in the context of a long seventeenth century. Leading experts in the field explore this theme with special reference to developments in politics, religion and society, at both national and local levels. The volume breaks decisively with recent historiography, in emphasising both the long-term nature and revolutionary implications of the seventeenth-century events in question. Features of the crisis include the growing challenge to the confessional state from within the ranks of Protestantism itself and the enlargement of the public sphere of politics, fuelled increasingly by the role of print, along with the painful emergence of a new style parliamentary monarchy and associated fiscal-military apparatus. The explosive role of religion especially is highlighted, in chapters ranging from the popularity politics engaged in under Elizabeth I to the escalating party strife of Charles II's reign and beyond. At the same time the epicentre of the revolution is firmly located in the two tumultous decades of civil war and interregnum. The volume will be essential reading for both students and teachers working on this period.

The essays in this volume offer different perspectives on 16th-century thinking. Studying representations of geographical space, religious practices, and literary genres, the contributors explore the emergence of the early modern subject.