Hertfordshire has had more that its share of history, as the author vividly reveals in this penetrating account. Here armies marched, camped, pillaged, looted and mutinied; battles were lost and won; kings and queens held court and went hunting; aristocrats and merchants had their country estates; while the common man worked, lived, loved and left his ever lasting mark on the landscape and the townscape.
In this stimulating book, a well-established authority on the county’s past traces its entire story from the geology that gave it its shape and its soils, through the succession of Prehistoric, Celtic, Roman and Saxon settlers that, with Danes over the Lea, gave it is population. Alfred fortified Hertford and gave it its name, while the Normans accepted the surrender of the English at Berkhamsted and held the first parliament at St Albans, where too, Magna Carta was drafted. The county saw much of the action in the Peasants’ Revolt, the Wars of the Roses and, as host, or hostage, the Civil War.
Cromwell or King, it mattered little the people whose army trampled their crops and ate their food; and this book above all, follows the fortunes of the ordinary ’Hertfordshire Hedgehogs’ from serfdom to commuterdon; their liberation and enfranchisement; their struggles for religious and other freedoms ... in short, the long march of every man in Hertfordshire.
First published in 1984, this book rapidly became ‘the’ basic text for local historians and a very popular purchase for a wide range of ‘general readers’ with an interest in the past of this under-rated county, whether residents of visitors. Long out of print, that highly-successful first edition is now replaced by this new and completely revised and re-set second edition which will ensure the book’s unrivalled popularity in Hertfordshire until well into the next millennium.
Contents:
List of Illustrations
List of Colour Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1. The Face of the County
2. Prehistory
3. Belgae and Romans
4. Saxon and Norman Hertfordshire
5. The Medieval Countryside
6. Church and People
7. Medieval Towns, Trade and Industry
8. Tudor and Stuart Hertfordshire
9. Canals and Turnpikes
10. Law and Order
11. The Coming of the Railways
12. Changes in the Countryside
13. Urban Life and Change
14. The Last Hundred Years
Sources
Index
