A massive bestseller in England, one of Britain's most popular and esteemed historians tells the epic story of the birth of the country The first in an extraordinary six-volume history, Foundation takes the reader from the primeval forests of England's prehistory to the death, in 1509, of the first Tudor king, Henry VII. Peter Ackroyd guides readers from the building of Stonehenge to the founding of the two great glories of medieval England: common law and the cathedrals. He shows glimpses of England's most distant past� a Neolithic stirrup found in a grave, a Roman fort, a Saxon tomb, a medieval manor house�and describes in rich prose the successive waves of invaders who made England English, despite being themselves Roman, Viking, Saxon, or Norman French. With his accomplished skill for evoking time and place and his acute eye for the telling detail, Ackroyd recounts the story of warring kings, of civil strife and foreign wars. But he also gives a vivid sense of how the people lived in the country's early days: the homes they built, the clothes they wore, the food they ate, even the jokes they told. All are brought vividly to life through the narrative mastery of one of England's finest writers, calling to mind the absorbing royal portraits of Alison Weir and the revealing everyday details of Bill Bryson.