Philip Augustus went down in the middle of his own battlefield, hooked from his saddle by the men of Renaud of Boulogne, a lord who had once been his friend and was now doing everything in his power to end him personally, in the mud, before the day could be decided any other way.
She was four years old when they sent her to France to live with the thirty-one year old man she was going to marry. Six years later her mother married him instead. Then they sent her to Scotland.
Caernarfon Castle was not built to be beautiful. Edward I of England began it in 1283 as a statement pressed in limestone against the throat of a conquered nation, its banded stonework and eagle towers rising from Welsh earth to say, in the language of stone that kings have always preferred, that Wales was finished. The castle was the full stop at the end of a sentence Wales had not agreed to speak.