Hachette India

Hudson's English History

Roger Hudson

Flitting happily from period to period at will you can alight on a note on the royal hounds and huntsmen in 1136 be equipped to discuss siege warfare (using the correct vocabulary) choose a destination for a pilgrimage or a religious order to join. The working methods of the Exchequer are usefully explained and you are duly warned as to what behaviour would have landed you in the pillory in London in 1419. The intricacies of the Tudor Court are plotted the Anglo-Scottish border clans mapped and the Armada fleets anatomised. Seventeenth-century banquet menus including boiled teats and seagulls are pored over and Charles II's bastards catalogued. Euphemisms for gin and the evocative names of strong beers and of Nelson's gunboats are listed. You will learn how to live as a clerk on 50 a year in London in 1767 what and for what offences you will be fined as a cotton spinner in one of the new factories around 1800 and the chances of being hanged in the 1820s and 30s. There are nineteenth-century 'rich lists' a breakdown of life below stairs in a stately home around 1900 and much much more.

Roger Hudson

From his earliest lucid moments Roger Hudson was quite clearly infected with the bacillus of history. After Cambridge and a spell in a publishing house - publishing history - he has researched for edited or otherwise worked with many historians on their books amongst them: David Newsome's books on Victorian England Charles Allen's on nineteenth-century India Adam Zamoyski's on Poland Jonathan Spence's on China Philip Mansel's on Constantinople and Paris James Buchan's on 18th-century Edinburgh Martin Gilbert's on Jewish history Alan Palmer's on the Napoleonic period Tom Pocock's on Nelson's navy and Michael Hickey's on Gallipoli and the Korean War. In the last thirteen years he has compiled a series of books largely on history for the Folio Society: THE GRAND QUARREL - the English Civil War through women's eyes; THE GRAND TOUR; NELSON and EMMA; WILLIAM RUSSELL; SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THE TIMES - the war reporting of William Howard Russell; LONDON: PORTRAIT OF A CITY; THE JUBILEE YEARS 1887; THE RAJ - an eyewitness history of British India.