Complete and unabridged, with 55 full-page plates by Edvard Munch, Paul Sandby and Frederic Leighton. England during the Anarchy, when Stephen and Matilda tore the country apart for nineteen years and, the chronicle says, Christ and his saints slept: Wallingford Castle under siege, Dorchester Abbey, and a lord who keeps faith when keeping it costs everything. Crake was a clergyman and schoolmaster who wrote history for the young and got the charters right; the siege is real and so is Brian Fitz-Count. Fifty-five plates, from Munch's figures on the bridge to Girtin's and Sandby's castle views at Pevensey and Windsor, give the medieval strongholds and river crossings of the story their later faces.