From 500 to the Present
Fifteen centuries on one axis, with the transmission of knowledge as its own lane.
The Normans and their descendants — Møre to Normandy, Normandy to England, Sicily and Scotland — and the lines that run from them.
Fifteen centuries on one axis, with the transmission of knowledge as its own lane.
Edmund Morel (1840–1871): a young British civil engineer who, in nineteen months and while dying of tuberculosis, designed Japan’s first railway, set the gauge of its entire…
Mary Morrell (c. 1620–1704) crossed the Atlantic as a teenage indentured servant, was bought out of her bond for twenty pounds by a young Norfolk man who never regretted the price,…
In 1835 a petty Tennessee thief was turned into the secret emperor of a thousand outlaws — by a man hiding behind an invented name. The legend got more people killed than the criminal…
13 November 1002 and 13 November 1093 — ninety-one years, one date, two turning points in the history of Britain. The first St Brice's Day put the Normans in place. The second cost…
The men who held the medieval frontier were not the men whose names were on the titles. They were the stewards — and at the deep level, they were Britons coming home to ground their…
The Hautevilles — a Norman family of western-Norwegian Viking stock, from a small fief on the Cotentin — whose sons expelled the Byzantine Empire from Italy, took Sicily from…
A Northumbrian ballad of Princess Margaret, the witch-queen, and Childe Wynd — a 1778 text with deep Brittonic roots in the surname Wynne, the kingdom of Gwynedd, and the Welsh dragon tradition.
The Norwegian house of Rognvald the Wise, who named Harald Fairhair king. His six sons carried its blood to the duchy of Normandy (the outlawed Ganger-Hrólf, become Rollo), the earldom of…
A family that left Jerusalem on the eve of Babylon’s conquest and crossed an ocean to a new world; two brothers whose descendants built nations across a thousand years; a last prophet…
Four hundred years of Norman expansion — 911 to 1300
From David I’s imports to Bannockburn — 1124 to 1314
Sixty Highland clansmen, thirty against thirty, fought to the death in Perth on 28 September 1396 to settle a feud over which clan stood on the right hand of the chief. Forty-eight died.…
From Dol-de-Bretagne to Culloden — a Breton patriline across nine centuries
Thomas More — lawyer, humanist, author of Utopia, and Lord Chancellor of England — resigned his office and finally lost his head rather than swear an oath he held to be false.…