Norah Lofts

“At the age of seven I was a skilful pickpocket. I could sew neatly, write a tolerable hand, make a curtsey and a correct introduction, dance a little and play simple tunes on the harpsichord.”....

She was the daughter of a preacher and a gypsy. A strange and elusive child with powers of prophecy, she grew into an even stranger woman....

“It was in the first week of October in the year 1391 that I first came face to face with the man who owned me"....

Sir Godfrey Tallboys had come home from the Crusades....

The Wars of the Roses were over, but for Henry Tallboys the battle for survival went on....

The House at Old Vine is the second in a trilogy of novels by Norah Lofts about the inhabitants of a Suffolk house from the late 14th century to the middle of the 20th....

Sir Godfrey Tallboys was a knight-errant, famous for his success at tourneys....

“All eyes and hair” a courtier had said disparagingly of her...

Out of the courts of 12th-century England strode the legendary figure of Richard of England leading his knights onto the Saracen battlefields, inspired by a vision of the Holy Land....

Forced to flee Revolutionary France after the brutal guillotining of her beloved father....

The house was built in the Old Queen's time: built for an Elizabethan pirate who was knighted for the plunder he brought home....

Julia Ashley was born to a life of dramatic twists and tragedy. Her future and any possible lasting happiness depended entirely on a "glove marriage"....

Thus the future of Caroline Matilda, youngest sister of George III....

When William the Conqueror wished to reward his armourer, he made him a grant of land - land worked by freemen and already belonging to a Saxon lord....

Ataxerxes, king of Persia, needed a wife. This powerful warrior lord picked the one girl who would have given anything to have been passed over....

A Wayside Tavern tells the story of a Suffolk drinking place from the end of the Roman occupation of Britain, until the present day....

When young John Vincent died, the outward respectability of the Cornwall household was undermined....

Eleanor…young, high-spirited, supremely intelligent, heiress to the vast Duchy of Aquitaine – at a time when a woman’s value was measured in terms of wealth....

Over two generations, and throughout the turbulent years of the Civil War, Pargeters comes to stand as a symbol of unity for a household divided by conflicting political loyalties and abandoned by its menfolk....

For the Spender family, the ancient, beautifully kept house had seemed a godsend....