Robert Lacey: Great tales from English History - Chaucer to the glorious revolution

Picture / Amos Chapple

About 3am on Sunday, September 2, 1666, the Lord Mayor of London was summoned from his bed.

Sir Thomas Bloodworth, for this was this mighty chap's mighty name, had been awakened by firefighters because it appeared part of London was on fire.

However the great man was barely concerned. More than a little crabby for being awakened from his kip at such an ungodly hour, Bloodworth merely gave the conflagration a perfunctory glance then returned to his bed.

"Pish!" he was heard to sniff, "a woman might piss it out!"

Rather unfortunately for the rash, unworthy Bloodworth neither a woman nor firefighters nor even King Charles II and his brother James, who both lent a hand, were able to piss it out. By the time the Great Fire of London was tamed three days later, more than 1300 houses had been destroyed, 100,000 made homeless and British history could record one of its greatest catastrophes.

Terrific yarn. And this small, magnificently vivid vignette from an episode of history otherwise utterly well known, is just one of many that infuse Robert Lacey's action-packed wee second volume of his Great Tales series. It seems Lacey, whose The Year 1000 was a damned good read, has a gift for breathing new, often amusing life into an old yarn through gossipy, sometimes vulgar, details you do not know.

Cheddar Man To the Peasants' Revolt, the first in the series (released in 2003; I haven't read it, but now want to), took English history from prehistoric times to 1381. This volume moves the story from 1387 and the cheery and companionable writing of Geoffrey Chaucer out of the Middle Ages and into the Tudors, the Reformation, the Civil War and the Restoration before ending up in 1688 and the publication of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica.

It fair rips along. Some chapters are little more than a few hundred words and cover barely two pages, though all have a small, delightfully apt illustration. It is, obviously, no weighty tome for frequent readers of English history. More a sampler, a popular, narrative-driven wrap-up of English history's
highlights based on the latest research.

But the mighty are all there; so, too, the momentous deaths, dramas and inventions of the period. However, it is the surprise of the new and the lesser-known players that provides some of the greatest pleasure.

I did not know that it was a Welshman, Robert Recorde, the writer of the first maths book in English, who invented the equals sign. Nor did I know of Queen Elizabeth's cunning plan to build up her nation's shipping capacity and its seafarers through making fish compulsory eating on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Then there was her godson, Sir John Harington, who invented the first modern water closet with the promise "your worst privy as sweet as your best chamber", while also suggesting you might like to keep your pet goldfish in the cistern.

It ain't all Elizabethan japery, however. Some of Lacey's yarns are genuinely moving, including the story of the small Derbyshire village which deliberately kept itself to itself to save the surrounding countryside from the plague (at the cost of three-quarters of the village's population).

But whatever the story, it is Lacey's eye for the gaudy and bawdy detail of history than make this small but pleasing book such terrific, affable fun.

* Greg Dixon is a freelance writer.

* Little Brown, $45