The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, The Power Behind Five English Thrones

Renowned historian Thomas Asbridge draws upon the thirteenth-century biography of William Marshal along with an array of other contemporary evidence to present a compelling account of his dramatic life and times. The knight's tale lays bare the brutish realities of medieval warfare and the machinations of the legendary courts of Eleanor of Aquitane, Richard the Lionheart, and the bad King John, drawing us into the heart of a formative period of our history, when the West emerged from the Dark Ages and stood on the brink of modernity. It is the story of one remarkable man, the birth of the knightly class to which he belonged, and the forging of the English nation.