What is England, and who are the English? The man who first posed and answered these questions lived 1,200 years ago in Northumberland. The Venerable Bede spent almost his whole life in two monasteries looking over the North Sea, far from the centres of civilisation. Yet he became the foremost scholar of the first millennium, […]
The Battle of Hatfield in 632
17 November is St Hilda’s feast day. Who better to write about the 7th-century Abbess of Whitby’s world than Nicola Griffith, whose novel Menewood, the second in her retelling of Hilda’s (or Hild’s) life, has just been published in paperback? Here she looks at the battle which opens her book: Hatfield, in 632. Menewood is […]