To this day The White Hart and The Red Lion are two of the most popular names for a public house in England – both talismans that served as the insignia for Richard II and the banished Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, who usurped the throne in 1399. Nick Asbury acted in the Royal Shakespeare Company's famed Histories cycle which staged Shakespeare's vision of the deposition of Richard II through to the notorious Battle of Bosworth in 1485. With fellow RSC actors for company,Nick travels the country visiting the buildings, landscapes and former sites of war and intrigue that feature in the plays, and asks the question: what is it about the England of Shakespeare's Histories that continues to fascinate? From Alnwick to Eastcheap, Windsor Castle to a Leicester car park, this is his snapshot of England and its people, then and now.

The first volume of Sir George Clark's Oxford History of England was published in 1934. Over the following 50 years that series established itself as a standard work of reference, and a repertoire of scholarship. The New Oxford History of England, of which this is the first volume, is its successor. Each volume will set out an authoritative view of the present state of scholarship, presenting a distillation of the knowledge built up by a half-century's research and publication of new sources, and incorporating the perspectives and judgements of modern scholars.