Quotes from Robert Tombs

Kings did not meet systematic opposition from barons, parliaments or peasants. With no police force or standing army, other than the household retinue, they could keep order and enforce the law only because their subjects, from earls to villeins, provided the muscle to do so.

There are a few much older states in existence, particularly ancient empires and their successor states such as China or Iran.

Thus began what was later termed the Hundred Years' War, which was soon under way from Scotland to the Pyrenees, with repercussions in Germany, Italy and even the Muslim world, as a projected Anglo-French Crusade was abandoned.66 Neither France nor England was prepared for the spiralling demands of this war. Edward

In the words of the Cambridge don Roger Ascham, Elizabeth I's tutor, one should "speak as the common people do…think as wise men do." Thomas

In Bede's account, the "English people" derived their special significance from their conversion. Their Germanic ancestors, who worshipped several deities, such as Woden, were the longest-lasting pagan peoples in the former Roman Empire. Yet during the 200 years following Augustine's arrival they went from being pagan to being Christian. This is because conversion began at the top, with kings, queens and warriors.

Geopolitical, cultural, and ideological crises were shaking confidence in the authority of established Western civilization so severely that sensible people believed that the end of the world was nigh

I don't understand the age we live in, and what I understand I don't like.

England's political history since 1066 was that of a struggle to regain the "ancient constitution" from the Crown, and even from Parliament, which some saw as the voice of Anglo-Saxon liberties, but others as merely another part of the "Norman yoke.

John Churchill, soon Duke of Marlborough, was a rare phenomenon: a brilliant English general. He

It seems better to me, if it seems so to you, that we…should translate certain books, which are most necessary for all men to know, into the language that we can all understand, and…that all the young freeborn men…may be set to study…until a time when they are able to read English writing well.