Crispin's Crispian, the dog who belongs to himself, shares his home with a little boy.

Asta's son has no name. And, after the death of his mother, no family to protect him when he is accused of a crime he didn't commit. Declared a 'wolf's head' - meaning that anyone who catches him can kill him - he has no choice but to leave his village. All he can take with him on the journey is his newly revealed name - Crispin - and his mother's cross of lead. Travelling without purpose, through a countryside still ravaged by the effects of the plague, Crispin stumbles upon a juggler, giant of a man known as Bear. Crispin becomes Bear's servant but the juggler is a stange master offering both protection and encouraging Crispin to think for himself. But Crispin is not safe and it becomes clear he is being relentlessly pursued. Why are his enemies so determined to kill him? Will the lessons Bear has taught him be enough to safeguard all that he now holds so dear... Avi brings the full force of his storytelling powers to the world of medieval England.

This book visits the fact that, in the pre-modern world, saints and lords served structurally similar roles, acting as patrons to those beneath them on the spiritual or social ladder with the word "patron" used to designate both types of elite sponsor. Chapman argues that this elision of patron saints and patron lords remained a distinctive feature of the early modern English imagination and that it is central to some of the key works of literature in the period. Writers like Jonson, Shakespeare, Spenser, Drayton, Donne and, Milton all use medieval patron saints in order to represent and to challenge early modern ideas of patronage -- not just patronage in the narrow sense of the immediate economic relations obtaining between client and sponsor, but also patronage as a society-wide system of obligation and reward that itself crystallized a whole culture’s assumptions about order and degree. The works studied in this book -- ranging from Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, written early in the 1590s, to Milton’s Masque Performed at Ludlow Castle, written in 1634 -- are patronage works, either aimed at a specific patron or showing a keen awareness of the larger patronage system. This volume challenges the idea that the early modern world had shrugged off its own medieval past, instead arguing that Protestant writers in the period were actively using the medieval Catholic ideal of the saint as a means to represent contemporary systems of hierarchy and dependence. Saints had been the ideal -- and idealized -- patrons of the medieval world and remained so for early modern English recusants. As a result, their legends and iconographies provided early modern Protestant authors with the perfect tool for thinking about the urgent and complex question of who owed allegiance to whom in a rapidly changing world.

The association of shoemakers (cordiners in Scotland) with St Crispin, their patron saint, remained so strong that, at least until the early twentieth century, a shoemaker was popularly called a “Crispin” and collectively “sons of Crispin”. Medieval Scottish cordiners maintained altars to St Crispin and his brother St Crispianus and their cult can be traced to France in the sixth century. In the late sixteenth century, an English rewriting of the legend achieved immediate popularity and St Crispin’s Day continued to be remembered in England throughout the seventeenth century. Journeymen shoemakers in Scotland in the early eighteenth century commemorated their patron with processions; and the appellation “St Crispin Society” appeared in 1763. Shaped by collections held by Scottish museums and archives, the longevity of the shoemakers’ attachment to St Crispin is investigated, as are the origin, creation, organisation, development and demise of the Royal St Crispin Society and the network of lodges it created in Scotland in the period 1817–1909. Although showing the influence of freemasonry, the Royal St Crispin Society devised and practised rituals based on shoemaking legends and traditions; and this study affords a rare insight into the “secret” associational life of a group of Scottish working men in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

'In March 2015, I was tasked by Pravin Gordhan, the minister responsible for local government, to root out corruption in the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality in the Eastern Cape. Over the following eighteen months, I led the investigations and orchestrated the crackdown as the "hatchet man" for the metro's new Mayor, Danny Jordaan. This is my account of kickbacks, rigged contracts and a political party at war with itself.' How to Steal a City is the gripping insider account of this intervention, which lays bare how Nelson Mandela Bay metro was bled dry by criminal syndicates, and how factional politics within the ruling party abetted that corruption. As a former senior state official and local government 'fixer', Crispian Olver was no stranger to dodgy politicians and broken organisations. Yet what he found in Nelson Mandela Bay went far beyond rigged contracts, blatant conflicts of interest and garden-variety kickbacks. The city's administration had evolved into a sophisticated web of front companies, criminal syndicates and compromised local politicians and officials. The metro was effectively controlled by a criminal network closely allied to a dominant local ANC faction. What Olver found was complete state capture – a microcosm of what has taken place in national government. Olver and his team initiated a clean-up of the administration, clearing out corrupt officials and rebuilding public trust. Then came the ANC's doomed campaign for the August 2016 local government elections. Having lost its way in factional battles and corruption, the divided party went down to a humiliating defeat in its traditional heartland. Olver paid a high price for his work in Nelson Mandela Bay. Intense political pressure and even threats to his personal safety took a toll on his mental and physical health. When his political support was withdrawn, he had to flee the city as the forces stacked against him took their revenge. This is his story.

This new edition of Shakespeare's most celebrated war play points to the many inconsistencies in the presentation of Henry V. Andrew Gurr's substantial introduction explains the play as a reaction to the decade of war which preceded its writing, and analyses the play's double vision of Henry as both military hero and self-seeking individual. Professor Gurr shows how the patriotic declarations of the Chorus are contradicted by the play's action. He places the play's more controversial sequences in the context of Elizabethan thought, in particular the studies of the laws and morality of war written in the years before Henry V. He also studies the variety of language and dialect in the play. The appendices summarise Shakespeare's debt to his dramatic and historical sources, while the stage history shows how subsequent centuries have received and adapted the play on the stage and in film.