Medieval

Anthony Bryer describes how, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, between Turks and Byzantines, Armenian kingdoms led a perilous life. 

Having climbed from partisan leader to king of armies, Brian Boru eventually established himself as the first monarch of a consolidated Ireland.

Gwyn Jones remembers a great Northern historian, who met a violent death half way through the thirteenth century, and who has left us a memorable account of a famous Norwegian chieftain, murdered in 995.

James Edward Holroyd describes how, under the famous Duc de Berry, during a period of strife and trouble, the art of the French medieval miniaturist achieved a splendid flowering.

At the end of the tenth century, writes E.R. Chamberlin, a gifted French Pope aided the bold designs of an ambitious German Emperor.

C.G. Cruickshank describes bows and fire-arms in the early sixteenth century.

Philip Ziegler describes how the devastating Plague reached South-west England in the summer of 1348.

Philip Ziegler describes how, in the mid-fourteenth century, about one third of the population of Western Europe perished from bubonic plague.

J.J.N. McGurk describes how vanity and the ambitions of families and religious houses prompted the widespread invention of documents upon property and genealogy.

During the first half of the thirteenth century, Matthew Paris recorded in words and drawings the events of world history. W.N. Bryant tells his story.