So, when I saw the television series featured a fair bit of history around Wiltshire, I started watching it. Since then, I've been interested in history and pre-history.
This book is a great introduction to the history of the British Isles from 'the ice age to the industrial revolution'. It's too short (paperback 316 pages) to be anything but an introduction. The selling point of the book is that it focusses on the normal people that don't often make history, but still had to live with it and the consequences. However, while I agree that the book does focus on normal people, living normal everyday lives, I disagree that they didn't make history. If they didn't, then this would be an even shorter book!
The stories told have been well chosen and the normal people made history in their own ways everyday. Whether it was the peasants revolt, or the beginning of mining, or even the invention of flint tools - it wasn't kings and queens that started these things. It was normal people just looking for a way to slightly improve their lives. This improvement in the early days tended to be slightly changing the environment, from using wood from trees to make semi-permanent houses all the way to later times with cutting down vast tracts of woodland over generations to enable full-scale farming to develop.
I read this book for the first time in 2007 and have recently finished reading it for the second time. I've found it to be a really readable book and if anything it provides enough information to allow the reader to either be happy with what they now know, or to go and research each topic in further detail.
As I say, it's an introductory text, but it's not just for newcomers to history, but will perhaps provide a different viewpoint for people that have been deeply into our British history for years.
I so much agree about the importance of 'ordinary' people and how they are often neglected in our histories. When it says a King or Tzar or anyone else built a palace - it doesn't mean that. 'Ordinary' people built it. When there's a war between countries - the politicians are rarely killed - once again - it's the 'ordinary' people who die.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with your thoughts, Lucy. Especially when you see things like 'Roman' roads, which were built by British people in forced labour - and mostly over existing British roads!
DeleteI think it's really fascinating to learn of the lives of "ordinary" people in historical times. We were rarely taught that side of history in school; if we had been, it would have seemed more real, more engaging.
ReplyDeleteI think you're exactly right. I was never much interested in the wives of Henry VIII, but if we'd have been taught what life would have been like for us under Tudor rule, for example, that would have been, like you say, much more engaging.
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