For 16 years Philippa Gregory has been enthralling readers with her Tudor and Plantagenet novels'¦ stories that give a fascinating fictional voice to some of this tumultuous period's leading players.
The House of Plantagenet[a] was a royal house which originated in the French county of Anjou. The name Plantagenet is used by modern historians to identify four distinct royal houses: the Angevins, who were also counts of Anjou; the main line of the Plantagenets following the loss of Anjou; and the Houses of Lancaster and York, two of the Plantagenets' cadet branches. The family held the ...
House of Plantagenet, royal house of England, which reigned from 1154 to 1485 and provided 14 kings, 6 of whom belonged to the cadet houses of Lancaster and York. The royal line descended from the union between Geoffrey, count of Anjou (died 1151), and the empress Matilda, daughter of the English king Henry I.
The first Plantagenet was King Henry 2nd whose father owned vast lands in Anjou an area as big as Nor around the modern town of Tours. Henry’s wife Eleanor ruled the even larger territory to the south called Aquitaine. Plantagenet Kings were thus the richest family in Europe and ruled England and half of France.
Who were the Plantagenets, and why were they so unstable? This in-depth history traces the Plantagenet kings of England from Henry II through Richard II, covering the Hundred Years’ War, Magna Carta fallout, baronial rebellions, the Black Death, and the dynastic chaos that set up the Wars of the Roses. A practical, narrative guide to England’s most dramatic medieval dynasty.