If I've got the right book its


Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World
by Brian M Fagan

ISBN: 0500051305
Format: Hardcover, 304pp
Pub. Date: November 2004
Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Has a list price of $44 US, but Barnes and Noble retails it for $24 through their web site.

Exeter, 1195: At a local jousting day, there's a serious altercation between Hugh Peverel, lord of Sampford Peverel, near Tiverton, and a stranger by the name of Reginald de Charterai. Two days later, Hugh's body is found in a barn, stabbed in the back. Is de Charterai to blame? The county coroner, Sir John de Wolfe, soon finds plenty of other suspects for the killing of the almost universally hated Hugh Peverel. All three of his brothers had a motive: two for the succession and the third to steal Hugh's attractive young wife, Beatrice. It's no secret that Beatrice herself detested her adulterous husband, as did his mother-in-law, Adelina. Another suspect is Godwin Thatcher, a Saxon villager whose two sons were hanged some months earlier, being arbitrarily sentenced by Hugh at his manorial court. Then there's the manor reeve, Warin Fishacre, who harboured a deep grudge against his master for taking the virginity of his daughter, Maud, just before her marriage. With so many suspects to choose from, Sir John is confronted with one of the most difficult cases of his distinguished career.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Bestseller Cornwell leaps back a millennium from his Richard Sharpe series to tell of the consolidation of England in the late ninth century and the role played by a young (fictional) warrior-in-training who's at the center of the war between Christian Englishmen and the pagan Danes. (Most of the other principal characters—Ubba, Guthrum, Ivar the Boneless and the like—are real historical figures.) Young Uhtred, who's English, falls under the control of Viking über-warrior Ragnar the Fearless when the Dane wipes out Uhtred's Northumberland family. Cornwell liberally feeds readers history and nuggets of battle data and customs, with Uhtred's first-person wonderment spinning all into a colorful journey of (self-)discovery. In a series of episodes, Ragnar conquers three of England's four kingdoms. The juiciest segment has King Edmund of East Anglia rebuking the Viking pagans and demanding that they convert to Christianity if they intend to remain in England. After Edmund cites the example of St. Sebastian, the Danes oblige him by turning him into a latter-day Sebastian and sending him off to heaven. Uhtred's affection for Ragnar as a surrogate father grows, and he surpasses the conqueror's blood sons in valor. When father and adopted son arrive at the fourth and last kingdom, however, the Danes meet unexpected resistance and Uhtred faces personal and familial challenges, as well as a crisis of national allegiance. This is a solid adventure by a crackling good storyteller.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
You will look in vain for burnt oatcakes in this novel of King Alfred the Great; like Bernard Cornwell's brilliant trilogy of novels on King Arthur, which lacked both Holy Grail and enchanted sword, The Last Kingdom caters to those of us whose appetite for rehashed legends was satisfied long ago. In addition to providing thrilling combat action and satisfying details of material life, military accoutrement and battle tactics, Cornwell's best historical fiction pleases us mightily in the way his renditions of the great actors and events of yore stray from received versions. Such contrariness is partly the product of meticulous research and partly of a mischievous sense of humor. Happily, both inform The Last Kingdom throughout.
The Alfred of history and fable was learned and just, a pious man of delicate health who saved 9th-century England from being entirely colonized by pagan Danes and was elevated to sainthood after his death. Indeed, W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman identified him as England's first "Good King" in 1066 and All That -- which peerless repository of mangled historical cliché went on, naturally enough, to confound him with Arthur. The Alfred whom Cornwell sets before us is also learned and just, and he's pious in spades, always "wearing out his knees" in prayer and cherishing such relics as "a feather from the dove that Noah had released from the ark" and "a toe ring that had belonged to Mary Magdalene." But he is also a compulsive, if remorseful, fornicator, a martyr to hemorrhoids and intestinal distress and, at times, a hard-nosed conniver.

What we see of him in this, the first volume of a projected sequence, comes through the eyes of one Uhtred, whose tale, narrated from the vantage of old age, this really is. Born of noble stock in Northumbria, Uhtred is only 10 in 866, when he witnesses the battle that brings death to his father, "a morose man, expecting the worst and not fond of children." Captured and adopted by the far more congenial Ragnar, a fearless, high-spirited Danish lord, Uhtred embarks upon a perfect pagan boyhood, freed of the trammels of Christianity. He spends his hours burning "green muck" off the hulls of Danish ships, shield painting, cattle slaughtering, house thatching, tending charcoal burns and practicing with his sword, all admirably described -- and, eventually, in youthful sexual dalliance, not described, but which would have brought fire and brimstone down on his head in a Christian community.

The boy does not miss his father, or monkish censure or the noxious grind of learning to read, and becomes quite the pagan Dane in most ways. Uhtred's great object in life is to fight in a "shield wall" -- one of Cornwell's specialties (whereby warriors advance in a row, shields overlapping) -- and to reclaim his inheritance, the family domain and stronghold in Northumbria. His uncle has taken possession of both, cementing his hold by marrying Uhtred's father's widow. Vexed loyalties begin to proliferate in Uhtred's youthful bosom: toward England, toward the good-natured Danish lord, against a treacherous Danish villain, toward Danish paganism and against English Christian morality. Treacheries and prevarications abound, fortunes reverse, battles rage, and soon enough the youth ends up back with the English -- and his loyalties, well shuffled, begin to gravitate toward Alfred. This feeling turns to rueful wonder when he realizes that the great man has sent him on a mission meant to kill him, a breach of saintliness Alfred commits more than once.

This is a most enjoyable novel, and Cornwell has seasoned it with dashes of intoxicating pedantry. He shuns the word "Viking" (which "describes an activity rather than a people or a tribe. To go viking meant to go raiding") and eliminates horned helmets ("for which there is not a scrap of contemporary evidence"). His prose is not always the equal of his historical imagination and sense of character: He does not, for instance, achieve Patrick O'Brian's marriage of language and vision. Still, he does convey the disquiet of change and the melancholy of extinction as few historical novelists manage to.

The England of the 9th century conjured up here is a palimpsest, an ancient isle giving ghostly testimony to successive civilizations. Prehistoric forts, "old when the world was young," still exist, moldering and growing into the land. So, too, Roman roads continue to bear traffic and Roman structures still stand, left behind almost five centuries ago and inherited by peoples lacking the engineering and architectural capability or understanding to repair them. Here and there these marvels of imperial technology, materials and manpower provide the foundations for crude Saxon building, as in London, "where huge Roman buildings were buttressed by thatched wooden shacks." Meanwhile, the city's great bridge is falling down, and the old wharves and quays are "long rotted so that the waterfront east of the bridge was a treacherous place of rotted pilings and broken piers that stabbed the river like shattered teeth."

Place names are abundant in this peripatetic adventure, and in their Saxon forms we find the weird, almost ectoplasmic predecessors of today's tame locutions: Lundene, Eoferwic (York), Suth Seaxa (Sussex), Thornsaeta (Dorset), Defnascir (Devonshire) and Snotengaham. Cornwell wouldn't be his merry self if he didn't teach us that Nottingham was once bountiful Snotengaham, "the Home of Snot's people." Nor would he be his generous and indefatigable self if he did not promise us that this story "is far from over."

Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Outnumbered Saxon forces continue battling Danish invaders in this rousing sequel to the bestselling The Last Kingdom. It's A.D. 877, and the dispossessed Northumbrian noble Uhtred has just routed the Danes in a battle at Cynuit in southern England. Logically, Uhtred should now ally himself with Alfred, whose Wessex kingdom alone has successfully resisted Danish control. But Uhtred sees a better chance of recovering his lost estate if he finds a way to join the Danes, who raised him and whose simple life of "ale, women, sword, and reputation" he finds more congenial than Alfred's Christian piety and military caution. But when the Danes invade Wessex, Uhtred's loyalties are further divided. His Celtic mistress foretells victory for Alfred, but Uhtred can scarcely believe that the bedraggled king, camped in isolated marshes with a handful of supporters, can repel the invaders and unite England. Yet pride grows in Uhtred: "I understood that among the Danes I was as important as my friends, and without friends I was just another landless, masterless warrior. But among the Saxons I was another Saxon, and among the Saxons I did not need another man's generosity." Uhtred demonstrates his newfound patriotism in the book's climactic battle at Edington. Filled with bawdy humor, bloodlust, treachery and valor, this stirring tale will leave readers eager for the next volume in this Alfred the Great series. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Bernard Cornwell's voluminous body of work is notable for its detailed, authoritative portraits of a wide variety of historical epochs. His more than 40 novels range in setting from the Napoleonic era (the Richard Sharpe series) to the American Revolution (Redcoat) to the dawn of prehistory (Stonehenge, 2000 B.C.). Cornwell's latest, a multi-volume work-in-progress set in the 9th century in the embattled England of Alfred the Great, began in rousing fashion with The Last Kingdom (2005) and continues in this equally compelling sequel, The Pale Horseman. Together, these novels showcase Cornwell's substantial gifts as historian and storyteller, recreating, with great immediacy, one of the defining periods of English history.
Alfred (849-899) was the only British monarch to be designated as "the Great." His first major achievement lay in protecting his kingdom (Wessex) from falling to the hordes of Danish Vikings that dominated the surrounding kingdoms of Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia. At the same time, he began the complex process of uniting these fractious, independent realms into the single nation ultimately known as England. This is the overarching story that Cornwell addresses in these novels, and he presents it through the conflicted perspective of a Northumbrian nobleman (and natural-born warrior) named Uhtred.

As a child, Uhtred watches while his father is killed by a party of Viking raiders. Afterward he is captured and raised by a Danish warlord named Ragnar, a surrogate father who instills in Uhtred a fierce affection for the freebooting life of the warrior and an abiding belief in the pagan mysteries that suffuse the Viking universe. These acquired loyalties are constantly at odds with the deeper ties of blood and history that bind him to his Saxon heritage. His unique experiences enable Uhtred to describe both sides of this protracted conflict with absolute authority, while his divided loyalties lend the narrative an effective dramatic tension.

By the time The Pale Horseman opens, Uhtred has distanced himself from his Danish cohorts, played a crucial role in the pivotal battle of Cynuit Hill (in which British troops successfully repelled a major Danish incursion) and offered both his services and sacred oath to Alfred. From this point on, Uhtred's personal story, which encompasses marriage, fatherhood, bitter personal rivalries and the ongoing quest to recover his family's stolen fiefdom, proceeds in parallel with the larger story of Alfred's defense of Wessex. Through Uhtred's sometimes acerbic viewpoint, we witness some of the emblematic moments of a historic struggle, including the Danish King Guthrum's violation of a formal -- if uneasy -- truce and his subsequent attack on the unprepared Saxons, Alfred's retreat to the swamps of southern England, where he rebuilds his army and prepares for war, and the climactic battle at Ethandun, where Alfred's soldiers once again defeat a numerically superior army of trained Danish warriors. (Uhtred also recounts the famous -- and probably apocryphal -- story in which Alfred, on the run and in disguise, is slapped in the face by a peasant woman for allowing her oat cakes to burn.)

The result is a superior entertainment that is both engaging and enlightening. Once again, Cornwell manages a delicate balancing act, investing each scene and set piece with a wealth of supporting detail while keeping the narrative moving at a formidable clip. It's been said before but bears repeating here: Cornwell's battle scenes (particularly those set in the bloody front line known as the Shield Wall) are superb. Among contemporary historical novelists, only Steven Pressfield (Gates of Fire) provides comparably vivid descriptions of the absolute chaos of hand-to-hand combat among great masses of men.

Like its predecessor, The Pale Horseman offers an unvarnished portrait of a world in transition, moving from the endemic savagery of the Dark Ages toward the more cohesive -- and civilized -- society that Alfred and his descendants will gradually create. Thus far, Cornwell's narrative has covered only a small part of this vast historical enterprise, so Uhtred's memoirs are likely to continue for quite some time. (A third volume, tentatively titled The Lords of the North Country, has already been announced.) Given the quality of the opening installments, this is a welcome prospect indeed. Historical adventures as smart and vigorous as Cornwell's are in short supply. It's good to know that more are on the way.

Reviewed by Bill Sheehan
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Hope others find these books as much fun as I did.