One gusty morning in March 1016, Earl Uhtred of Northumbria came with 40 followers to a wooden hall at a place called Wiheal outside York, to parley with the recently crowned King Canute who was attempting to bring his mighty northern subjects properly under his control. They were given guarantee of safe conduct, and came unarmed. But they were ambushed in the hall by an old enemy of Uhtred's, with Canute's connivance, and murdered, every one. From here, Richard Fletcher moves on to explore the whole culture of vengeance and reparation in early Medieval England. As well as the culture of aristocratic and inter-familial violence in Christendom, Fletcher looks closely at the Church's attempts to limit or discredit an institution closely tied with residual paganism. Another element of the book considers the tensions between monarchical authority and wilful local indulgence in vendetta on the one hand, and the influence of feud on high diplomacy on the other.

Bloodfeud : Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England

History

Richard Fletcher

Europe

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the legendary warrior-knight of Castile known as El Cid, is still is honored in Spain as a national hero for liberating the fatherland from the occupying Moors. Yet, as Fletcher reveals, there are many contradictions between eleventh-century reality and the mythology that developed over the ensuing centuries. Rather than the zealous Christian leader many believe him to have been, Rodrigo emerges as a mercenary equally at home in the feudal kingdoms of northern Spain and the exotic Moorish lands of the south, selling his martial skills to both Christian and Muslim. This ground-breaking inquiry disentangles fact from myth to create a portrait of an extraordinary man. Richard Alexander Fletcher (1944 - 2005) was educated at Harrow and Oxford, where he was a star pupil of the medievalist James Campbell, taking a first in history. His first book, published in 1978 and based on his thesis "The Episcopate in the Kingdom of León in the Twelfth Century", pointed to an academic career much of which would focus on medieval Spain. Fletcher was a very learned man but he abhorred the way historians were expected to know more and more about less and less and to communicate their esoteric findings in arcane language. He wanted to be a writer as well as a researcher and teacher and he succeeded brilliantly. His next book, it is true, was not intended for the general reader. Saint James's Catapult was a life of Diego Gelmírez, one of the more remarkable ecclesiastical operators of his age, who, having become Bishop of Santiago de Compostela in 1101, was appointed papal legate and turned his remote Galician town into the destination of pilgrims from across Europe. But the book which took Fletcher into the larger world was The Quest for El Cid. Very much not a "high vulgarization", it was a work of scrupulous source-criticism, but reads almost like a thriller, as it sleuths after its elusive subject to establish how much of his story was historical truth.

The Quest for El Cid

Biographies & Memoirs

Oxford Paperbacks

The Crescent and Cross (Universal History)

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Weidenfeld &Nicholson

Fletcher:Intl Marketing Asia-Pac_p3

Pearson Education Australia

International Marketing: An Asia-Pacific Perspective

Pearson/Education

Who's Who in Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England (WHO'S WHO IN BRITISH HISTORY)

Part of an eight-volume series providing short biographies of men and women from Roman to Victorian times, Who's Who in Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England is more than a work of reference: it is a book to read and enjoy. Drawing on the discoveries of archaeologists and other researchers, the author of this volume has prepared over 140 short biographies which convey more than the bare facts of his subjects' lives: he places them in the contact of their time and evokes what was distinctive and interesting in their personality and achievement. The biographies are arranged in a broadly chronological rather than alphabetical sequence so that the reader may easily browse from one contemporary to the next. The index, with its many cross-references, reveals further linkages between contemporaries. Each volume is a portrait of an age, presenting history in a biographical form which complements the conventional approach.

Who's Who in Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England (Who's Who in British History)

Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd

<p>Written from a wholly Australasian perspective and covers issues unique to local marketers looking towards the Asia-Pacific region, the European Union, and beyond. Fletcher, University of Western Sydney; Crawford, University of NSW.</p>

International Marketing: an Asia-Pacific Perspective

Business & Money

Heather Crawford

Marketing & Sales

Pearson Australia

Linden Brown

PRENTICE/HALL

International Marketing

<p>Written in the same tradition as John Julius Norwich's engrossing accounts of Venice and Byzantium, Richard Fletcher's Moorish Spain entertains even as it enlightens. He tells the story of a vital period in Spanish history which transformed the culture and society, not only of Spain, but of the rest of Europe as well. Moorish influence transformed the architecture, art, literature and learning and Fletcher combines this analysis with a crisp account of the wars, politics and sociological changes of the time. 'Richard Fletcher makes a winding and wonderfully evocative journey through Spanish history...His mastery of his sources is hardly less remarkable than his vivid, almost physical grasp of the Spain he describes' The Economist</p>

Moorish Spain

Arts & Photography

Orion Publishing

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Books by Richard Fletcher