A Presentment of Englishry

Are you English?' is never a neutral question. In the 11th century a `Presentment of Englishry' was the offering of proof that a dead man was English and therefore unimportant. In the 12th century Lazamon, a priest living in the small settlement of Areley Regis by the River Severn, set out to `tell the noble deeds of the English, who they were, and where they came from.' No one knows why he chose to write his 16,000-plus lines in English. Taking his life and poem as their starting point, the stories in this collection of poems move outward from the legendary arrival of the Trojans in Britain, finding echoes and similarities in stories from Angevin England and Ireland, the prehistoric tin trade and the arrival of the first English as raiders and migrants in a fading Roman Britain.