1066 and All That

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. 1066 and All That turns English history into a brilliantly unreliable "memorable history," where invasions, kings, saints, and schoolbook facts are reduced to jokes, slogans, and absurdly tidy "Good Things." From Caesar and the painted Ancient Britons through Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and the legendary Alfred the Cake and King Arthur, the book mocks the way the past survives as fragments of patriotic myth, comic names, and half-remembered lessons. It then races through Norman conquest and medieval rule, with William, Rufus, Henry I, Stephen, Henry II, King John, Magna Carta, Robin Hood, and Simon de Montfort all recast as figures in a farcical struggle between power, chaos, and piety. The satire continues through Joan of Arc, the Wars of the Roses, and the Tudors, as Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I become larger-than-life caricatures of statecraft, religion, vanity, and spectacle. Mock exams, mistaken identities, and patriotic legends keep puncturing seriousness, making this a sharp, playful comic history of England from antiquity to the Elizabethan age.