When War comes to Winchester and Siege to Shrewsbury

I think my adult interest in history can be explained as the 'enabled expression of an appetite'.  In case you think that is pompously academic and unworthy of your reading further, let me hasten to explain just what I mean by it.

I recall in my teens hearing - I know not whence - the expression, 'History ended in 1914'.  I guess that, down the ages, it had to end somewhere, and there are significant dates that separate one book from another on my bookshelves. (If you are able to enlarge the picture sufficiently, you may be able to pick out 1485, 1648, 1789, 1832, 1848, 1918 ... and you might be able to recognise the significance of at least some of those.)

My 'history library'

Similarly, history has to have begun somewhere, too.  1066 is a good starter for England, 1603 for 'modern English' history.  When I was in primary school, I remember we had books that were slightly bigger than A4, with a red and black cover, and these were followed by a second volume in yellow and black.  Each double page covered a distinct period and, I suppose those two books fed us with a year's history.  At high school, it was assumed we had learned no history at all and we began with Greeks and Romans.  Very quickly (it now seems, looking back over half a century) we moved on to the Tudor and Stuart periods and then the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for 'O'-Level.

Hence, in adult life, I've found I have appetites to learn more about the earlier part of the twentieth century and also the two centuries or so on either side of the Norman Conquest.  Over the last twenty or thirty years I've had the opportunity to satisfy some of those yearnings or, at least, have acquired several shelves of books that remove the veracity of any complaint that that chance has been denied me.

Starting sometime before lock-down, I decided that I would read the whole canon of Ellis Peters' Cadfael books, alternating these with something else that takes my fancy.  Having finished earlier this week Laurie Lee's three-volume autobiography with 'A Moment of War', describing a few very cold months in Spain in 1938, I'm now back in the twelfth century as I start on the second half of the Cadfael series.

I find that I'm learning a lot of history from these.  Although not overtly a series of 'history books', the author has very skilfully woven her tales around the events of a period of which I remember only two pages from those primary school history lessons.  The Victorians, apparently, gave this period the name 'The Anarchy' to distinguish it from later civil wars.  

Imagine, if you will, a time in the middle of this present century.  William is happily established as our king, and suddenly out of nowhere, Princess Beatrice (daughter of the duke of York) has turned up with an army, has invaded the west country and half of Wales, and has set up her court in Bristol, claiming that she should be queen in William's place.  

It's unthinkable, of course.  But it was in the midst of that sort of quarrel that England and her people found themselves between 1137 and 1153 and I'm now learning what was going on then, but at the speed of horse-borne messengers rather than TV newscasts, alongside of the mysteries that Cadfael, the one-time crusader and now monk-cum-detective, is trying to solve. 

It's thrilling!  My only fear is worrying what happens when I get to the end of book 20!