Justin Pollard's Blog: Secret Britain

I'm delighted to say that, courtesy of Michael Wood's excellent new BBC4 series on The Anglo-Saxons, my biography of Alfred the Great is now the no.1 bestseller on Amazon in Books > Biography > Historical > 501-1000.

Now I appreciate that's not exactly a Dan Brown category but it's lovely to see people interested in the King who did more any other to make us a literate nation.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alfred-Great-...

Gentles All,
The good news is that for once it’s not because I have another book out, so there should at least be a little comfort in that. Having said that I have started a publishing business which perhaps amounts to much the same thing.

Unbound.co.uk gets authors to pitch ideas for as yet unwritten books and then asks readers to pledge support for ones they’d like to read. Only the books that readers support then get written – so for once readers rather than publishers decided what books should be published. It removes the waste of unearned advances, pulped returns from the shops and the huge discounts that have to be offered supermarkets and online retailers. To give you an example, on a £12.99 book the author often receives just 25p - 50p from online retailers.

We currently have six authors on the site who’ve been brave enough to stand up to the old publishing system, including Terry Jones (ex-Python), Amy Jenkins (This Life) and Tibor Fischer (Booker nominated).

If you have a moment please come to http://www.unbound.co.uk and have a look round. This is very much a fledgling business with no hefty backers so support from friends, colleagues and family will make or break the idea over the next few weeks. Equally please do pass this email on to anyone that you think might be interested. And do let me know what you think.

[image error] There have been many explanations given of some of the peculiarities of the reign of Elizabeth I. Her failure to marry, her early baldness and her strict instructions that no post mortem should be carried out on her body have all attracted their fair share of conspiracy theories. Few, however, are as colourful as the tale of the Bisley Boy.

Bisley in Gloucestershire is the site of Over Court, which in 1542 was a royal hunting lodge and, briefly, the home of Henry VIII's youngest daughter, Prin...

[image error] Any marriage might be considered something of a risk but there have been few as risky as Janet Dalrymple's in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Janet was the daughter of James Dalrymple, 1st Lord Stair, a whiggish lawyer and politician with an eye to securing the further rise of his ambitious family. His daughter, meanwhile, had her eye on the penniless Archibald, 3rd Lord Rutherford, a man of exactly opposite political opinions (being a firm Jacobite) and declining fortunes.

Janet a...

[image error] Very little is known of the early life of John and Charles Allen, both of whom were probably born sometime in the 1790s. Although this is partly because of the lack of contemporary records, it is more a product of the elaborate and fantastical web of deceit they spent the majority of their lives weaving around themselves.

We do know that they were the sons of Thomas Gatehouse Allen, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, but beyond that things start to get a little murky. According to them, their fat...

[image error] The fate of Lady Alice Lisle at the Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffreys shows how dangerous it can be to hide fugitives in your house, even if you're doing it for all the right reasons.

Lady Alice had, indirectly, been closely linked to the main events of the English Civil War. Her husband, John Lisle, had been one of the signatories to Charles I's death warrant and a grateful Cromwell had elevated him to the upper house in his Commonwealth government. At the Restoration in 1660, naturally enough...

[image error] The names of fields often have meanings that are obscure to us today but in the Dorset villages of Halstock and Corscombe they hold a clue to the secret burial of one of the greatest academic patrons of the eighteenth century.

Thomas Hollis was a very unusual character for his age. As a libertarian and a firm believer in democracy, he was of the opinion that the people had every right to depose a tyrant. As a republican, he was all in favour of the increasingly independent noises coming out of...

[image error] On each New Year's Eve a celebrity 'mystery runner' lays a wreath on the grave of Guto Nyth Bran in the churchyard of St Gwynno's, Llanwonno, before lighting a flaming torch and running with it to the village of Mountain Ash where races are then held to see in the coming year. They trace their origins to an extraordinary man whose story goes back almost 300 years.

Guto Nyth Bran was born Griffith Morgan in the Rhondda valley in 1700. As the son of a sheep farmer he spent much of his childhood ...

[image error] The secrets of the grave are often best left exactly where they are but in the eighteenth century, as a new age of antiquarianism dawned, there was a sudden craze for investigating the contents of ancient tombs in churches and cathedrals. It led in one case to the remarkably unsavoury discovery of the secret behind a strange preservation.

Following the successful 'opening' of the tomb of Edward I in Westminster Abbey in 1774, in which the king was found to be richly dressed and crowned, with h...

[image error] On Monday 21 February 1814, Colonel du Bourg, aide-de-camp to Lord Cathcart, arrived at the Ship Inn in Dover and made the announcement that everyone in the country had been hoping to hear. Napoleon, the scourge of Europe, was dead, killed by a detachment of Cossacks, and the triumphant Allied armies were fast approaching Paris.

Pausing only to ask that the message be transmitted as quickly as possible by semaphore to the Admiralty in London, du Bourg then took the coach for London himself, s...