Warner, Kathryn – The Bell Bookshop

The rise and fall of a medieval family

Emma — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Despensers were a baronial English family who rose to great prominence in the reign of Edward II (1307-27) when Hugh Despenser the Younger became the king’s chamberlain, favourite and perhaps lover. He and his father Hugh the Elder wielded great influence, and Hugh the Younger’s greed and tyranny brought down a king for the first time in English history and almost destroyed his own family. _Rise and Fall of a Medieval Family_ tells the story of the ups and downs of this fascinating family from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, when three Despenser lords were beheaded and two fell in battle. We begin with Hugh the justiciar, who died rebelling against King Henry III and his son in 1265, and end with Thomas Despenser, summarily beheaded in 1400 after attempting to free a deposed Richard II, and Thomas’s posthumous daughter Isabella, a countess twice over and the grandmother of Richard III’s queen. From the medieval version of Prime Ministers to the (possible) lovers of monarchs, the aristocratic Despenser family wielded great power in medieval England. Drawing on the popular intrigue and infamy of the Despenser clan, Kathryn Warner’s book traces the lives of the most notorious, powerful and influential members of this patrician family over a 200-year span.

Long live the king

Emma — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Edward II’s murder at Berkeley Castle in 1327 is one of the most famous and lurid tales in all of English history. But is it true?

?For over five centuries, few people questioned it, but with the discovery in a Montpellier archive of a remarkable document, an alternative narrative has presented itself: that Edward escaped from Berkeley Castle and made his way to an Italian hermitage.

In Long Live the King, medieval historian Kathryn Warner explores in detail Edward’s downfall and forced abdication in 1326/27, the role possibly played by his wife Isabella of France, the wide variation in chronicle accounts of his murder at Berkeley Castle and the fascinating possibility that Edward lived on in Italy for many years after his official funeral was held in Gloucester in December 1327.

Richard II

Emma — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Richard II is a figure famous in England’s national myths – the king who went insane, the narcissist, the tyrant of Shakespeare’s play. History regards his rule either as that of a superhuman monarch or a crazed and vicious ruler. But Richard II was a complex and conflicted man – a person with faults and shortcomings thrust into a role that demanded greatness. In this book, Kathryn Warner returns with the first modern biography of Richard II in decades, to paint a portrait of the king with all of his strengths and imperfections left in the picture. An aesthete and patron of the arts as well as a person troubled by a much-maligned ‘personality disorder’, Richard II here emerges from behind the mask of a theatrical character.