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The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England QUOTES

The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England QUOTES

1 " (During his trial he claimed that his pet cat had become possessed by the devil and incited him to his crimes. The cat was also hanged.) "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

2 " Believing that Edward’s men were at a safe distance in Worcester, Simon’s men were unprepared for attack. They did not realize that Edward and Gloucester had spies among them, including a female transvestite called Margoth "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

3 " Early in 1203 John sent instructions to the royal servant Hubert de Burgh, who was serving as Arthur’s jailer, demanding that he should blind and castrate his prisoner. Fortunately for Arthur, de Burgh felt a pang of conscience and could not carry out the grisly sentence on the sixteen-year-old, who pleaded for pity. "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

4 " He was munificent and liberal to outsiders, but a plunderer of his people, trusting strangers rather than his subjects. . . . [H]e was eventually deserted by his own men and in the end, little mourned. "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

5 " [T]hose who are afraid can stay at home. "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

6 " Had Henry III been richer, less beset by other problems and a more competent military strategist, securing Sicily for his second son might have resembled the masterful pan-European geopoliticking in which his grandfather Henry II might have specialised. Unfortunately, he was none of those things. He was a naive fantasist with a penchant for schemes. "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

7 " eagle chicks left in the same nest would soon come to vicious fighting. "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

8 " parents were summoned for interrogation, and he was tried and hanged at Northampton on July 23. (During his trial he claimed that his pet cat had become possessed by the devil and incited him to his crimes. The cat was also hanged.) "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

9 " The nobility of the kingdom grieved at being reduced to such ruin by the supine simplicity of one man, "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

10 " would simply not be possible in a volume light enough to read in bed. "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

11 " On December 29 four heavily armed men smashed through a side door to Canterbury Cathedral with an ax. The archbishop of Canterbury was waiting for them inside. They were angry. He was unarmed. They tried to arrest him. He resisted. They hacked the top of his head off and mashed his brains with their boots. "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

12 " A typical plague victim developed large, tumorlike buboes on the skin; they started the size of almonds and grew to the size of eggs. They were painful to the touch and brought on hideous deformities when they grew large. A bubo under the arm would force the arm to lurch uncontrollably out to the side; sited on the neck, it would force the head into a permanently cocked position. The buboes were frequently accompanied by dark blotches, known as God’s tokens, an unmistakable sign that the sufferer had been touched by the angel of death. Accompanying these violent deformities, the victim often developed a hacking cough that brought up blood and developed into incessant vomiting. He gave off a disgusting stench, which seemed to leak from every part of his body—his saliva, breath, sweat, and excrement stank overpoweringly—and eventually he began to lose his mind, wandering around screaming and collapsing in pain. "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

13 " Henry I was, as one contemporary chronicler put it, “the man against whom no one could prevail except God himself.” The fourth son of William the Conqueror, he enjoyed an exceptionally long, peaceful, and prosperous reign of thirty-five years, in which royal authority in England reached new heights. After his father’s death in 1087, England and Normandy had been split apart. Henry ruthlessly reunited them. "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

14 " The Canterbury cleric and biographer William Fitzstephen wrote a famously wide-eyed description of the twelfth-century city: [London] is fortunate in the wholesomeness of its climate, the devotion of its Christians, the strength of its fortifications, its well-situated location, the respectability of its citizens, and the propriety of their wives. Furthermore it takes great pleasure in its sports and is prolific in producing men of superior quality. . . . On the east side stands the royal fortress [i.e. the Tower of London], of tremendous size and strength, whose walls and floors rise up from the deepest foundations—the mortar being mixed with animal’s blood. "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

15 " he was tried and hanged at Northampton on July 23. (During his trial he claimed that his pet cat had become possessed by the devil and incited him to his crimes. The cat was also hanged.) But "

― Dan Jones , The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England