After a lifetime of study and enduring fascination, working more recently with the historian Michael Long, I was finally able to conceive and edit a title that told the full story extraordinary royal history of my family home village of Kings Langley and its medieval royal court. This title eventually published in the autumn of 2023 by KLLHMS, the local history society.
Palace Lives is a substantial paperback book (also available as a Amazon Kindle e book) about a remarkable medieval royal palace which no longer exists. But this is no mythical Camelot, even though you will find precious few physical remains of the Royal Palace at Langley above the ground.
Such exceptional history therefore now exists only on a few written pages and the memory and imagination of those who know its story. However, defining elements of our common heritage were seeded within its stone and flint walls. Not least, because the creators of this once magnificent Royal Palace, were the mighty Plantagenet rulers of thirteenth and fourteenth-century England, who favoured it as a royal residence for one-hundred-and-twenty-five years. The real-life Game of Thrones!
Very deliberately, each of the historical personages featured in Palace Lives had their own affinity with Langley. For some, it was home; for others, the location of their birth or death; others were laid to rest in the Church beside it.
It is a tale of enduring significance, not least the likely identity of the body of a mysterious young woman, buried in the tomb of the first Duke of York in the Parish Church of All Saints in Kings Langley. All is revealed within…
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