Death by buggery. Death by castration. Even death by being scared to death. Or so we are led to believe for the Plantagenets’ world. They had a lighter side, too: Henry II employed a professional flatulist with the trade-name of Roland the Farter. The longest reigning royal dynasty in English history (1154-1399), the Plantagenets offer the glaring contrast between their even balance of outstanding kings and outstandingly bad ones; this adds to the already exciting dynamics of a dramatic period, captured to great effect in Dan Jones’s big book on a big subject.
The Plantagenets were established on the English throne by the ‘incessantly busy’ Henry II. He brought with him his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine; with her extensive lands added to those of his new acquisition of England, Henry’s Angevin empire now extended from the border of Scotland to the Pyrenees, slicing France in half all the way down.
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