Medieval Nonfiction

What if everything you were told about Viking democracy was a lie sold by men with swords? The bestselling myth says the Vikings built one of history's first parliaments. The evidence says they built a protection racket and called it law. In Outlaw Country, historian and narrative nonfiction author Tomas Somerled delivers a cynical, ferociously researched investigation into the real Viking legal system — the chieftains who bought their authority like livestock, the witnesses bribed at feasts the week before trial, the blood feuds that incinerated entire families across generations, and ...

We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward, and unchanging time characterized by violence, ignorance, and superstition. By contrast, we believe progress arose from science and technological innovation, and that inventions of recent centuries created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong.

From the schism between Rome and Constantinople to the rise of the T'ang Dynasty, from the birth of Muhammad to the crowning of Charlemagne, this erudite book tells the fascinating, often violent story of kings, generals, and the peoples they ruled.

A third of Europe. Five years. One disease that changed everything. In 1347, twelve ships limped into the harbor at Messina carrying cargo no customs official could inspect. Within days, the port city was dying. Within five years, the Black Death had killed somewhere between a third and half of everyone alive in Europe, an event with no equal in the entire span of recorded human history. THE PLAGUE takes readers inside that catastrophe and, crucially, behind it. This is not simply a chronicle of suffering. It is a full investigation into how a fourteenth-century world of crowded wooden ...

The Wolf Age takes listeners on a thrilling journey through the bloody shared history of England and Scandinavia, and on across early medieval Europe, from the wild Norwegian fjords to the wealthy cities of Muslim Andalusia. Warfare, plotting, backstabbing, and bribery abound as Tore Skeie skillfully weaves sagas and skaldic poetry with breathless dramatization as he entertainingly brings the world of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to vivid life.

The millennium between the breakup of the western Roman Empire and the Reformation was a long and hugely transformative period - one not easily chronicled within a single book. Yet distinguished historian Chris Wickham has taken up the challenge in this landmark book, and he succeeds in producing the most riveting account of medieval Europe in a generation.

In a single lifetime, a starving outcast on the Mongolian steppe built the largest contiguous land empire in history—and stitched the medieval world together for the first time. We call it the Pax Mongolica: a century when a rider could travel from the Yellow Sea to the gates of Europe under one law, on one network of roads. Goods, gunpowder, paper money, printing, and ideas moved faster and farther than ever before. So did the Black Death. The first true world-system was not built by Europe. It was built by nomads on horseback—and it carried both prosperity and plague along the same ...

For 700 years, Japan was ruled by military commanders who waged war against one another incessantly. Shogun tells the fascinating story of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the man who finally unified and brought lasting peace to the nation. He established a new central government which enabled his descendants to rule Japan for the next 260 years—a period in which Japanese culture as we know it today flourished.

What was it really like to live in the Middle Ages? Forget the polished myths of knights in shining armor and fairy-tale castles. The reality was far grittier, harsher, and endlessly more fascinating. Beneath the Crown: The Untold Stories of Medieval Life and Power takes you on an unflinching journey into the everyday struggles of medieval Europe. From waking in bug-ridden straw beds to eating week-old pottage and trudging barefoot through mud-soaked streets, this book reveals the raw truth of survival in a world defined by disease, superstition, and unrelenting toil. Life was brutal, but ...

Why would a stranger let you sleep under their roof? For four thousand years, someone has had to answer that question every night — and the answers built the world's inns, hotels and motels. VACANCY is a global history of the room you sleep in when you are a long way from home. It runs from a Babylonian law code that ordered a tavern keeper to seize the outlaws drinking under her roof, to a platform where a numerical score decides whether a stranger in Lisbon will open her door to a stranger from Osaka. Along the way: The Greek conviction that the beggar at the door might be a god — and...

They weren't just raiders. They reshaped the world. In 793 AD, Norse warriors attacked a monastery on the coast of England, and Christendom was terrified. But raiding was only the beginning. Over the next three centuries, Scandinavians founded Russia, conquered a third of England, settled Iceland and Greenland, reached North America 500 years before Columbus, served as the elite bodyguard of the Byzantine Emperor, besieged Paris, conquered Sicily, and carved out the Duchy of Normandy — whose descendants conquered England in 1066. What you'll find inside: The longship revolution — the ...

Power can be seized through force, inherited by birth, or manufactured through alliance, but it survives only as long as it is perceived as legitimate. In The Right to Rule, Jenny Crossan examines the lives of six historically consequential women to explore how authority is constructed, defended, challenged, and ultimately lost. From Eleanor of Aquitaine and Empress Matilda to Margaret of Anjou and Marie Antoinette, each chapter reveals the fragile relationship between power and legitimacy within unstable courts, contested dynasties, and fractured political systems. This is not simply a ...

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Justin Avoth and Laurence Dobiesz. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Christopher Rowe read by Justin Avoth. 'Consider just this, and give your minds to this alone: whether or not what I say is just' Plato's...

Shatter the Myths of Valhalla and Discover the Blood-Soaked Reality of Viking Medicine For centuries, the history of Norse healers has been sanitized, replacing the grim reality of battlefield triage with romantic tales of ethereal maidens and mystical forest herbs. In The Butcher's Apothecary: Blood, Fat, and the Brutal Reality of Viking Medicine, Tomas Somerled expertly dismantles this historical propaganda to reveal the horrific, unsterilized mechanics of ancient survival. This immersive and deeply visceral exploration of medieval combat medicine leaves the polite academic distance ...

Step into the darkest corners of history in 21 Gripping True Crime Stories of Brutal Murders and Infamous Killers from the 16th Century. What murder was solved when a corpse began to bleed at the touch of its killer? Which teenager changed the course of French history with two murders and a single gunshot? What serial murderer met his end beneath the executioner's wheel in a German town? And what poisoner committed a crime so horrifying that King Henry VIII changed English law simply to devise a more terrible death for him? The answers lie within these pages. Journey into the violent heart ...

The romanticized Viking saga is a comforting lie. Discover the brutal reality of the 793 AD Lindisfarne raid. In Wolves on the Tide: The Slaughter of Lindisfarne, Tomas Somerled dismantles the heroic myths of the Norsemen to present a gritty, historically uncompromising autopsy of the attack that ignited the Viking Age. For the monks of St. Cuthbert’s sanctuary, the ocean was an impenetrable divine wall. They possessed no early warning systems and no defensive naval patrols. On June 8, 793, that profound geographical delusion invited their total annihilation. Introducing The Asymmetric ...

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is narrated by Singer/Songwriter and folk-punk icon Frank Turner. Frank Turner has released eight solo studio albums, the most recent of which was No Man's Land, which contained songs celebrating some of the most important women throughout history...

A Waterstones Best History Book 2025 A BBC History Magazine Book of the Year 2025 ‘Learned, entertaining and highly approachable’ BOB MORTIMER ‘A treat’ ALICE LOXTON ‘Five stars from me…’ AL MURRAY An unmissable collaboration between two comedy legends – an irresistible...

Unearth the Gritty, Squalid Reality Behind the Myth of the Clean Northman For too long, the modern imagination has been hijacked by a sanitized, impossibly clean vision of the Viking Age. Popular culture has painted the Northman as a proto-metrosexual warrior who bathed weekly and smelled of pine needles. Winter's Itch: The Filth, Frost, and Fleas of the Real Viking Age shatters this comforting illusion. Author Tomas Somerled employs a rigorous "Pathology of the Hearth" framework to treat the medieval living conditions not as polite history, but as a biological crime scene. Prepare for a ...

The shocking, brutal truth behind Viking history that the sagas refused to show you. Are you tired of sanitized tales of majestic warriors? Smothered in the Hall: The Brutal Reality of Viking Sleep uncovers the terrifying, untold history of how the Norsemen actually lived and barely survived the Scandinavian night. Step inside the Iron Age longhouse, not as a cozy sanctuary, but as a compromised containment vessel of overlapping hazards. Through the rigorous "Nocturnal Biocontainment Framework," this book exposes how the architecture of the Viking home actively weaponized the winter against...