This is a book about England. We shan’t venture north of Hadrian’s Wall – for didn’t Scotland’s own king, Alexander II, say that ‘ungovernable, wild men dwell there, who thirst after human blood, and whom I myself cannot tame’? He did indeed, in 1237, to a papal legate in England on pontifical business. Nor shall we stray too far west, into Wales – the kingdom known to the Romans as ‘Britannia Secunda’, or ‘secondary Britain’.
No, we shall remain in England – that land known to seventeenth-century Italians as ‘the paradise of women, the purgatory of servants, and the hell of horses’ – the country of St George, Richard the Lionheart and Queen Victoria (except that Victoria was mostly German, Richard entirely French, and St George Palestinian, if indeed he existed at all).
It’s also a book about the English; those fine, upright people in whom Pope Gregory the Great famously saw ‘not Angles, but Angels’ – an observation made, by the by, while he was eyeing up slave boys in one of Rome’s marketplaces.
Most of all, this is a book of stories. Some are gruesome. Some are funny. Most are unbelievable. All are true. This is what history gets up to when it thinks no one’s looking.