The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

The New York Times bestseller, from the author of Crusaders, that tells the story of Britain’s greatest and worst dynasty—“a real-life Game of Thrones” (The Wall Street Journal)


The first Plantagenet kings inherited a blood-soaked realm from the Normans and transformed it into an empire that stretched at its peak from Scotland to Jerusalem. In this epic narrative history of courage, treachery, ambition, and deception, Dan Jones resurrects the unruly royal dynasty that preceded the Tudors. They produced England’s best and worst kings: Henry II and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, twice a queen and the most famous woman in Christendom; their son Richard the Lionheart, who fought Saladin in the Third Crusade; and his conniving brother King John, who was forced to grant his people new rights under the Magna Carta, the basis for our own bill of rights. Combining the latest academic research with a gift for storytelling, Jones vividly recreates the great battles of Bannockburn, Crécy, and Sluys and reveals how the maligned kings Edward II and Richard II met their downfalls. This is the era of chivalry and the Black Death, the Knights Templar, the founding of parliament, and the Hundred Years’ War, when England’s national identity was forged by the sword.

• The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors
• The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors
• Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty
• The Hollow Crown
• A Great and Terrible King
• Summer of Blood: England's First Revolution
• The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English Thrones
• Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands
• Britain's Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy
• The Norman Conquest