Kings in the North: the house of percy in british history

“There is no doubt that Alexander Rose’s sweep across the centuries from the arrival of William, first Baron Percy, with the conquering Normans, to the murder of Henry Percy, fourth Earl of Northumberland in 1489, is an extraordinary magnum opus, knitting together the skeletal facts about the Percys into an ambitious retelling of Anglo-Scottish history.”—BBC History

The House of Percy resounds throughout Shakespeare's history plays, the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years' War, and the ceaseless Anglo-Scottish Wars. In the Middle Ages, the earls of Northumberland were famed, or notorious, as the Kings in the North, a harsh land they ran almost as an hereditary domain. Kings in the North traces the history of this ancient and sometimes haughty dynasty, from the moment William de Percy stepped into England alongside William the Conqueror to the waning of the medieval era after the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.