Through the Windows of an Ordinary House:
A History of England

How would the history of England appear if it was presented from a single viewpoint? We often express our national history as a series of stories dotted around the country - the South East for the Battle of Britain; London in the time of Samuel Pepys; the north in the Industrial Revolution. But this results in a patchwork quilt of a narrative - a history of nowhere in particular. Instead, what would it be like if we looked at it just from one point of view? In fact, how would it have appeared to the people living in my house in rural Devon - or a house on this site - since Saxon times? What would be different? What would be more important and what less important? Moreover, how would those people living here strike us if we could see them?

This experimental book is both a national history and a local one. At the same time it is a social history of the English with a southwestern emphasis. It won't be like your normal history book, least of all like a traditional house history. What was the importance of the murder of Thomas Becket here? Did Magna Carta matter to the people here in 1215? How many other house histories can claim the property was owned in by a thirteenth-century priest who was pardoned for murder, and by the brother of a judge at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots? Here, a seventeenth-century resident, a woolcomber, carved his initials in the woodwork. And you can still see the damage from the winter of 1740, where a medieval truss snapped and the whole roof slipped sideways. As for the garden walls being laid out in the Bronze Age, suffice to say, this house is on a long, magnificent journey through time - and so is England - and so are we.

The book (my fifteenth history title) will be published by The Bodley Head on 17 September 2026. Click here for the publisher's webpage and more information about the book.