Kirjahaku

Elizabeth Montagu, the lady of the manor in 1775, described Eryholme as a `perfect paradise’. Today, though but three miles south of Darlington as the crow flies, it is a small and secluded community untouched by modern industry and urban development: `a haven of peace’. Yet it has had an eventful history. Sacked by Normans in 1069 and Scots in 1319; ravaged by famine and plague in the fourteenth century and almost abandoned in the fifteenth, Eryholme was involved in rebellion in 1569 and divided by civil war in 1642. Life became more tranquil in the eighteenth century when it became a cradle of the agricultural revolution, famed for its cattle breeding. Until then, a main branch of the Great North Road, which forded the Tees to Neasham, passed through. After the building of the turnpike from York to Durham, the village was bypassed and gradually became the `rural dot’ it is today. The book tells the story of the landowners, the villagers, their changing fortunes, their religion and their engagement with the wider world over almost thirty generations.

This is the first modern scholarly study of north-eastern England during the Wars of the Roses. For a fleeting period in the late fifteenth century, the North dominated England: it was both the adopted home and the power base of Richard III. But this is more than simply an account of the rise and fall of the last Plantagenet as the Lord of the North. A. J. Pollard analyses regional politics and the interrelationship between province and centre from the beginning of the Neville-Percy feud in the 1450s to the establishment of Tudor authority by 1500. Themes explored include Anglo-Scottish relations, local government, the structure of landed society, the wealth, power, and the outlook of lords and gentry, and the economy of the region. Dr Pollard sets political history in the context of the period, and paints a detailed portrait of lay society, based on intensive research among local records. He shows that, contrary to some recent views, the North-East was in certain significant respects more feudal, more conservative and, by the early sixteenth century, poorer than the South-East of England.

Richard is well known as the most vilified of English kings, we know he had many enemies - indeed they sowed the seeds of the Richard black legend - but what about his many allies in his stronghold of power in Northern England?