One Family's Journey Through Ten Centuries

A social history of the second millennium – Book One

William Lilly

• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Year: 2024
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781035800490
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

We trace one family, generation by generation, throughout the one thousand years of the second millennium. The trilogy sets the family within its social environment, describing its migration from the continent, and across England, Scotland, and Ireland to settle in the New World. From that we get a vivid picture of what affected, motivated, worried, and encouraged this Saxon family and how they coped. Since the migration of this family was typical for the time, this study is relevant to millions of people in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, whose ancestors followed the same general migratory path. Book I specifically covers the feudal period in the Middle Ages (1000 – 1560), where a feudal autocrat and an avaricious pope, between them, owned and controlled everything. Throughout, the family became our witnesses to many of the historic events of the feudal period: the Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon resistance, the plague, the Little Ice Age, the Great Starvation, Guilds, the building of great cathedrals and castles, and the gradual decline in the king's power and control. In 1067 William the Conqueror appointed Honfroi de Insula de L'lle as the Dominus of the area around the feudal village of Combe, Wiltshire. He permitted Honfroi to live and build a motte and bailey castle there to assist in keeping the peace. The front image is Castle Combe as it appears today.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Copyright Information ©
• Acknowledgement
• Preface
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two Age of Feudalism
• Chapter Three A Feudal Knight’s Life of Anxiety and Insecurity
• Chapter Four The Norman Invasion, 14 October 1066
• Chapter Five The Next Twenty Years for Honfroi and Raoul
• Chapter Six The Norman Life in Anglo-Saxon England
• Chapter Seven Dominus de Castle Combe
• Chapter Eight Primogeniture, Heresy and Anarchy
• Chapter Nine A Surge of Investment in Scotland
• Chapter Ten Westward Ho
• Chapter Eleven Henry II’s Boyfriend
• Chapter Twelve Dominus, Churches and Universities
• Chapter Thirteen Magna Carta and Climate Change
• Chapter Fourteen Anti-Semitism and Banking
• Chapter Fifteen Wars of Independence and the Little Ice Age
• Chapter Sixteen The Maverick
• Chapter Seventeen The Great Starvation (1315–1322)
• Chapter Eighteen The Plague, and Reinventing Duchal
• Chapter Nineteen Recovering from the Plague
• Chapter Twenty Unstable Environment as Feudalism Splutters
• Chapter Twenty-One Four Hundred and Forty Thousand Acres
• Chapter Twenty-Two The Glue That Binds, and Two Kings
• Chapter Twenty-Three Every Aspect of the Old-World Collapses
• Chapter Twenty-Four Lazy Days, a Fiendish Relative, Desperation and Defeat
• Chapter Twenty-Five Master James and the English Reformation Legislating Rational Doctrinal Changes