They also helped invent the idea of England, an idea that has as much importance today as it ever has before. The Plantagenet kings did not just invent England as a political, administrative, and military entity. Nearly all of them were men of great and varied powers.” Seventy years ago, in a very popular volume called The Plantagenets, John Harvey didn’t hesitate to claim that the dynasty “gave England its form and character.” Around the turn of the 20th century, the irresistibly readable Thomas Costain wrote some of his best books about them: The Conquering Family (1949), The Magnificent Century (1951), and The Three Edwards (1958).And now historian Dan Jones, despite having been born at roughly 10:45 this morning, has published the single best one-volume general introduction to the Plantagenets ever written, and he agrees with his predecessors as to the centrality of his subject: In the Edwardian era, the great Kate Norgate (a trailblazer whose mighty books really ought to be in print) lavished unstinting – if slightly ominous – praise on the Plantagenets, telling her readers that “whatsoever their hands found to do, whether it were good or evil, they did it with all their might. The New Release tables at your nearest evil chain bookstore are piled high with Tudor histories, Tudor biographies, and most of all Tudor fiction Netflix and Hulu have countless Tudor offerings, whether you incline toward the bee-sting lips of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers or the wasp-sting wit of David Starkey the general populace is so passingly familiar with those key showboating five figures that hardly any room is left on stage for anybody else (unless it’s the well-meaning Windsors, whenever one of them cavorts with James Bond, or insults an entire nationality, or impregnates his wife).And yet, as historians have pointed out fairly regularly for a fairly long time, the tempestuous Tudors and the spaniel-eyed Stuarts and the hefty Hanoverians and all the rest wouldn’t have had a stage to hog if it hadn’t been built by the Plantagenets, the longest-ruling British dynasty, who held power for more than two centuries in an extravagantly violent age.

The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England By Dan JonesViking, 2013It seems almost impertinent these days to mention English monarchs who aren’t Tudors.

Dan jones the plantagenets review