England, Arise

Juliet Barker’s thorough, clear-eyed and intelligent new volume adds much to the field: packed with vivid pen portraits of the rebels and the men they hunted … a vivid and exciting portrait of a country in angry upheaval. It is as timely subject matter as ever – Dan Jones * Sunday Times *A richly detailed account of the England of 1381 based on painstaking detective work * The Times *Fine and thoughtful … Barker brilliantly picks through the toxic brew of grievances that would, in 1381, boil over … a serious and valuable book – Helen Castor * Literary Review *Timely and comprehensive … We could argue all day over our favourite turning points in England’s history. Barker shows that, without doubt, the turmoil of 1381 cannot be left off anyone’s list – Paul Kingsnorth, Booker-nominated author of The Wake * New Statesman *

Barker brings order to the patchwork of uprisings England, Arise purposely slows down the vertiginous speed of the revolt’s progression to a more deliberate pace, in order to explore not that main events of the rebellion but their hinterland. In this, it is a considerable achievement, a meticulous anatomy of this most resonant of uprisings

Born in Yorkshire, Juliet Barker was educated at Bradford Girls’ Grammar School and St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she studied history. Widely acclaimed for setting new standards of literary biography, she is also an expert on chivalry and the world authority on medieval English tournaments. Her books include The Brontes, Conquest and the bestselling Agincourt. In 1999 she was one of the youngest ever recipients of an honorary Doctorate of Letters, awarded by the University of Bradford in recognition of her outstanding contribution to literary biography, and in 2001 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is married, with two children, and lives in the South Pennines.