The Conquering Family: The Pageant of England, Vol. 1, Volume 1

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Mar 7, 2012 - Fiction - 480 pages
Thomas B. Costain's four-volume history of the Plantagenets begins with THE CONQUERING FAMILY and the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, closing with the reign of John in 1216. The troubled period after the Norman Conquest, when the foundations of government were hammered out between monarch and people, comes to life through Costain's storytelling skill and historical imagination.

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Contents

Where the Planta Genesta Grows
The Long Years of Civil
The Epic Reign of a Great King
The King and the Archbishop
The Invasion of Ireland
The Sin of Absalom
The Milch Cow of the Third Crusade
The Lord of the Manor and the Villein
While the Devil Was Loose
The Unsolved Mystery
John Softsword
With Bell Book and Candle
Magna Charta
Twilight of a Tyrant
A Nation Again
Copyright

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About the author (2012)

Thomas B. Costain was born in Brantford, Ontario, in 1885. His first success as a reporter came in 1902, when the Brantford Courier hired him as a reporter. In 1914 Costain started working for the Toronto-based magazine Maclean's, which eventually led to his fourteen-year fiction editor job at the Saturday Evening Post in New York City. From 1934 to 1942, he was the head of 20th Century Fox's bureau of literary development. In 1942 Costain realized a longtime dream when he published the historical novel For My Great Folly and it became a huge bestseller. He published dozens of fiction and nonfiction books in his lifetime, and four of them were adapted for the screen.He received a doctor of letters degree from the University of Western Ontario in May 1952, and he received a gold medallion from the Canadian Club of New York in June 1965. The Thomas B. Costain public elementary school (1953) and the Thomas B. Costain–S.C. Johnson Community Centre (2002) in Brantford are named in his honor. Costain died in 1965.

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