The Plantagenets Quotes

“(During his trial he claimed that his pet cat had become possessed by the devil and incited him to his crimes. The cat was also hanged.)”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“[T]hose who are afraid can stay at home.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“When a bad man has the advantage, cruelty and outrage are the consequences. —William Marshal”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“Believing that Edward’s men were at a safe distance in Worcester, Simon’s men were unprepared for attack. They did not realize that Edward and Gloucester had spies among them, including a female transvestite called Margoth”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“Early in 1203 John sent instructions to the royal servant Hubert de Burgh, who was serving as Arthur’s jailer, demanding that he should blind and castrate his prisoner. Fortunately for Arthur, de Burgh felt a pang of conscience and could not carry out the grisly sentence on the sixteen-year-old, who pleaded for pity.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“On December 29 four heavily armed men smashed through a side door to Canterbury Cathedral with an ax. The archbishop of Canterbury was waiting for them inside. They were angry. He was unarmed. They tried to arrest him. He resisted. They hacked the top of his head off and mashed his brains with their boots.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“He was munificent and liberal to outsiders, but a plunderer of his people, trusting strangers rather than his subjects. . . . [H]e was eventually deserted by his own men and in the end, little mourned.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“Henry I was, as one contemporary chronicler put it, “the man against whom no one could prevail except God himself.” The fourth son of William the Conqueror, he enjoyed an exceptionally long, peaceful, and prosperous reign of thirty-five years, in which royal authority in England reached new heights. After his father’s death in 1087, England and Normandy had been split apart. Henry ruthlessly reunited them.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“Had Henry III been richer, less beset by other problems and a more competent military strategist, securing Sicily for his second son might have resembled the masterful pan-European geopoliticking in which his grandfather Henry II might have specialised. Unfortunately, he was none of those things. He was a naive fantasist with a penchant for schemes.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“But far from achieving a feat of chivalrous derring-do, Gloucester was surrounded and killed in a seething crush of horses and men.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“The effect would ultimately be to destroy Balliol’s kingship and drive the whole of Scotland into fierce opposition to the English.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“The most difficult problem Richard faced in leaving his kingdom was what to do with his twenty-two-year-old brother John.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“thousands upon thousands of arrows.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“A typical plague victim developed large, tumorlike buboes on the skin; they started the size of almonds and grew to the size of eggs. They were painful to the touch and brought on hideous deformities when they grew large. A bubo under the arm would force the arm to lurch uncontrollably out to the side; sited on the neck, it would force the head into a permanently cocked position. The buboes were frequently accompanied by dark blotches, known as God’s tokens, an unmistakable sign that the sufferer had been touched by the angel of death. Accompanying these violent deformities, the victim often developed a hacking cough that brought up blood and developed into incessant vomiting. He gave off a disgusting stench, which seemed to leak from every part of his body—his saliva, breath, sweat, and excrement stank overpoweringly—and eventually he began to lose his mind, wandering around screaming and collapsing in pain.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“For the next two years England trembled under the tyranny of Richard”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“Then he had him arrested and taken away under armed guard to a ship that would transport him to a prison in Calais.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“de Vere became the first duke not of the royal blood.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“Reacting promptly to the threat, Edward instituted in 1349 the Ordinance of Laborers,”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“Mounted archers were to become the most tactically effective and dangerous element of English medieval armies,”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“as Edward took the whole machine of government north to let him focus on the war.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“Between 1333 and 1337 the capital of England became York,”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“Concerns with Isabella and Mortimer’s control over the young king went beyond their influence in foreign policy.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“it seems most likely that Edward was indeed murdered and that it happened on the orders of Roger Mortimer.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“It is better to eat dog than to be eaten by the dog,” he had told the king,”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“is better to eat dog than to be eaten by the dog,” he had told the king,”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“Age of Glory (1330–1360)”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“Bruce was stronger than ever in Scotland and was free to open a military front in Ireland.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“so many fine noblemen, so much military equipment, costly garments, and gold plate—all lost in one harsh day, one fleeting hour.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“Edward’s privy seal was captured in battle.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

“butchered on the battlefield, or drowned attempting to cross the Bannock Burn or the river Forth.”
― Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England