A fascinating depiction from award-winning author, Adam Nicolson,
of a family and a country on the hinge of modernisation. Was our
country once a better place? Has modernisation destroyed as much as
it has improved? And can we see in an earlier Britain a way of
living, an Arcadia, which now seems both ideal and remote? Through
16th- and 17th-century England, the changes of an approaching
modernity accelerated. With the growing power of the state, the
disruption of the traditional bonds of society, the breaking of
communities and the marginalisation of the great families who had
once balanced the power of the crown, the new mercantile,
individualist world increasingly clashed with the communal and
chivalric ideals of the old. To tell this story from the 1520s to
the 1640s, Adam Nicolson takes a single great family, the Earls of
Pembroke, their wives, children, estates, tenants and allies, and
follows their high and glamorous trajectory across three
generations of change, nostalgia, ambition, resistance and war.
'Arcadia' is a rich and detailed evocation of England on the hinge
of medieval and modern, and in this wide-ranging book Adam Nicolson
explores a world in transition, moving from the intrigues,
alliances and vendettas of the court to the intricate, everyday
business of rural communities managing their affairs in times of
stress. It was an England caught up in its first taste of
modernity, yet divided over how to react to it, split between the
old and the new, the moment at which the world we have lost turned
into the world it has now become.
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