Norah Lofts

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

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

“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.”....

“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"....

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....

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

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

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

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....

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

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....

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....

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....

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....

No one at Gad’s Hall could admit what they knew about the room in the attic....

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....

In the autumn of 1817, the arrival of the Ipswich coach and its occupants – a strange, ill-assorted company – changed the lives of those who lived at the Fleece Inn forever....

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