Some non-fiction is good now and then, and when I dip into it, it tends to be art, history or landscape based. Here is some history that I just stumbled on half price in Waterstones. Alice Loxton is a young historian and writer and indeed this book could only have been written by someone who was Gen Z; the first generation to grow up in an entirely digital age. The first couple of chapters grated with me very slightly as Alice Loxton seemed to be trying to be accessible and popular in an almost aggressive fashion. However, she calmed down and I settled into the book with an old person’s benign sufferance of the young and in the end I found a lot of the writing quite amusing.
‘Eleanor’ attracted me on the book table as I had recently been talking with a friend about the Eleanor crosses. The one I am very familiar with stands in the car park of Charing Cross station in London and I see it often.
For anyone who has not met Eleanor, this is Eleanor of Castile, Spanish princess, that we are speaking of. She was married to Edward I and unlike very many medieval royal marriages, this was a love match. When Eleanor died in 1290, her husband was distraught. She died in Harby in Nottinghamshire and was to be buried in Westminster Abbey. Edward ordered commemorative crosses to be built at each of the stopping places on the long journey that the coffin took on its way to London. Some of these crosses have disappeared completely, some were destroyed in the time of Henry 8th in the 16th century and others in Cromwell’s time in the later 1600s and of course natural weather erosion has also played its part.
Alice Loxton decided to walk this route, from Harby to Westminster, as closely as possible and so the reader goes on a 200 mile walk with her … vicariously, thus without blisters, aching legs or soggy clothing. It is fun. I think she would be a good walking companion.
Pleasingly I definitely learnt some history. Previously I had studied the times of the Tudors, onwards and upwards through the Victorian era and into the 20th century but very little of the medieval period. So, that always works for me: to be entertained and to learn as well. Boxes ticked.
I enjoyed this book. A pity though that the publishers did not feel they could run to colour photos. The black and white copies are sometimes rather muddy and grainy. My only complaint I think. The book has given me some Eleanor places in London that I will seek out and enjoy being a tiny part of that pilgrimage.