Christopher Hadley – författare

‘Impossible to summarise and delightfully absorbing, Hadley’s book is comfortably the most unexpected history book of the year’ Sunday TimesA luminous journey through a thousand years of folklore and English history.Once upon a time in a Hertfordshire field, an ancient yew tree hid a dragon hunted by a giant named Piers Shonks. Today, the dragon and its slayer are the survivors of an 800-year battle between rural legend and national record, storytellers and sceptics.In this brilliant and lyrical history, Christopher Hadley journeys from churches to tombs to manuscript margins, to explore history, memory and legend, and the magical spaces where all three meet.

‘Impossible to summarise and delightfully absorbing, Hadley’s book is comfortably the most unexpected history book of the year’ Sunday Times A luminous journey through a thousand years of folklore and English history. Once upon a time in a Hertfordshire field, an ancient yew tree hid a dragon hunted by a giant named Piers Shonks. Today, the dragon and its slayer are the survivors of an 800-year battle between rural legend and national record, storytellers and sceptics.In this brilliant and lyrical history, Christopher Hadley journeys from churches to tombs to manuscript margins, to explore history, memory and legend, and the magical spaces where all three meet.

‘Impossible to summarise and delightfully absorbing, Hadley’s book is comfortably the most unexpected history book of the year’ Sunday TimesA luminous journey through a thousand years of folklore and English history.Hollow Places begins with a Hertfordshire dragon-slayer named Piers Shonks but soon draws us into the company of outlaws and stonemasons, antiquaries and champions. Full of wonder and always surprising, the story takes us to the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry where strange creatures gather, to ancient woodland where hollow trees hide secrets, and to the scribbled clues about folk heroes in eighteenth-century manuscripts. Hadley leads us back shivering to a church in Georgian England to sketch the dragon on a tomb, to stand atop its tower triangulating the Elizabethan countryside, and to confront the zealous Mr Dowsing and his thugs looting brasses and smashing masonry during the Civil War. Along the way, we discover how long bones will last in a crypt and where medieval stonemasons found inspiration.The story of Piers Shonks is the survivor of an 800-year battle between storytellers and those who would mock or silence them. It stands for all those thousands of seemingly forgotten tales that used to belong to every village. It is an adventure into the past by a talented and original new writer, and a meditation on memory and belief that underlines the importance and the power of the folk legends we used to tell and why they still matter.

A story of lying, miracles, wonder and ways of the imagination. From the bazaars of Jerusalem in the last years of the 19th century to the monasteries of Northumbria 800 years earlier, from the gates of paradise to the end of time, The One and Only Tree travels back and forth along the great east-west routes forged by crusaders, pilgrims and merchants, through seven millennia of real and imagined time, through history and make-believe. It tells the story of one of the most remarkable objects in the history of civilization – the cross on which Christ was crucified – and the story of that story: of the poets, khatibs, archaeologists, kings, painters and adventurers who have told it. Tracing the twists and turns of the complete tale, you walk in the footsteps of the Bogomil heretics in their exile, share a hookah with a Maronite Christian through a long afternoon’s storytelling, look over the shoulder of Agnolo Gaddi as he paints the first fresco to bring all three legends together. You will discover too, the beguiling gnostic and apocryphal books of the bible that scholars are still wrestling with today, overhear a khatib in Palestine in the 1890s pointing out the pillars that supported the wood of the cross when it was a bridge in the time of Solomon, the bridge that the Queen of Sheba refused to step upon when she foresaw what it would become.The One and Only Tree is as much about creativity as about belief. It is about our powers of invention and the well-springs of the narrative impulse, the urge to tell a story that encompasses all the world and all its hopes, a story that offers a key to a thousand years of humanity’s artistic endeavour. Absurd and magical, familiar and alien, here are tales that might have been written by Neil Gaiman or Ursula K. le Guin and they totally confound our sense of what to expect from bible stories and ancient literature. This is the story of the happy tree, the wondrous tree, the one and only noble tree.

A story of lying, miracles, wonder and ways of the imagination. From the bazaars of Jerusalem in the last years of the 19th century to the monasteries of Northumbria 800 years earlier, from the gates of paradise to the end of time, The One and Only Tree travels back and forth along the great east-west routes forged by crusaders, pilgrims and merchants, through seven millennia of real and imagined time, through history and make-believe. It tells the story of one of the most remarkable objects in the history of civilization – the cross on which Christ was crucified – and the story of that story: of the poets, khatibs, archaeologists, kings, painters and adventurers who have told it. Tracing the twists and turns of the complete tale, you walk in the footsteps of the Bogomil heretics in their exile, share a hookah with a Maronite Christian through a long afternoon’s storytelling, look over the shoulder of Agnolo Gaddi as he paints the first fresco to bring all three legends together. You will discover too, the beguiling gnostic and apocryphal books of the bible that scholars are still wrestling with today, overhear a khatib in Palestine in the 1890s pointing out the pillars that supported the wood of the cross when it was a bridge in the time of Solomon, the bridge that the Queen of Sheba refused to step upon when she foresaw what it would become.The One and Only Tree is as much about creativity as about belief. It is about our powers of invention and the well-springs of the narrative impulse, the urge to tell a story that encompasses all the world and all its hopes, a story that offers a key to a thousand years of humanity’s artistic endeavour. Absurd and magical, familiar and alien, here are tales that might have been written by Neil Gaiman or Ursula K. le Guin and they totally confound our sense of what to expect from bible stories and ancient literature. This is the story of the happy tree, the wondrous tree, the one and only noble tree.

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR ‘An absolute joy to read and an early contender for every list of History Books of the Year’ Sunday Telegraph ‘On nearly every page a random passage takes one’s breath away’ The Times Have you ever heard the march of legions on a lonely country road? For two thousand years, the roads the Romans built have determined the flow of ideas and folktales, where battles were fought and where pilgrims trod. Almost everyone in Britain lives close to a Roman road, if only we knew where to look.In the beginning was Watling Street, the first road scored on the land when the invading Romans arrived on a cold and alien Kentish shore in 43 CE. Campaign roads rolled out to all points of the compass, forcing their way inland and as the Britons fell back, the roads pursued them relentlessly, carrying troops, supplies and military despatches. In the years of fighting that followed, as the legions pushed onwards across what is now England, into Wales and north into Scotland in search of booty, mineral wealth, land and tribute, they left behind a vast road network, linking marching camps and forts, changing the landscape, etching the story of the Roman advance into the face of the land, channelling our lives today.Christopher Hadley, the acclaimed author of Hollow Places, takes us on a lyrical journey into this past, retracing and searching for an elusive Roman road that sprang from one of the busiest road hubs in Roman Britain. His passage is not always easy. Time and nature have erased many clues; bridges rotted and whole woods grew across the route. Carters found an easier ford downstream, and people broke up its milestones to mend new paths. Year after year the heavy clay swallowed whole lengths of it; the once mighty road became a bridleway, an overgrown hollow-way, a parched mark in the soil.Hadley leads us on a hunt to discover, in Hilaire Belloc’s phrase, ‘all that has arisen along the way’. Gathering traces of archaeology, history and landscape from poems, church walls, hag stones and cropmarks, oxlips, killing places, hauntings and immortals, and things buried too deep for archaeology, The Road is a mesmerising journey into two thousand years of history only now giving up its secrets.

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR ‘An absolute joy to read and an early contender for every list of History Books of the Year’ Sunday Telegraph ‘On nearly every page a random passage takes one’s breath away’ The Times Have you ever heard the march of legions on a lonely country road? For two thousand years, the roads the Romans built have determined the flow of ideas and folktales, where battles were fought and where pilgrims trod. Almost everyone in Britain lives close to a Roman road, if only we knew where to look.In the beginning was Watling Street, the first road scored on the land when the invading Romans arrived on a cold and alien Kentish shore in 43 CE. Campaign roads rolled out to all points of the compass, forcing their way inland and as the Britons fell back, the roads pursued them relentlessly, carrying troops, supplies and military despatches. In the years of fighting that followed, as the legions pushed onwards across what is now England, into Wales and north into Scotland in search of booty, mineral wealth, land and tribute, they left behind a vast road network, linking marching camps and forts, changing the landscape, etching the story of the Roman advance into the face of the land, channelling our lives today.Christopher Hadley, acclaimed author of Hollow Places, takes us on a lyrical journey into this past, retracing and searching for an elusive Roman road that sprang from one of the busiest road hubs in Roman Britain. His passage is not always easy. Time and nature have erased many clues; bridges rotted and whole woods grew across the route. Carters found an easier ford downstream, and people broke up its milestones to mend new paths. Year after year the heavy clay swallowed whole lengths of it; the once mighty road became a bridleway, an overgrown hollow-way, a parched mark in the soil.Hadley leads us on a hunt to discover, in Hilaire Belloc’s phrase, ‘all that has arisen along the way’. Gathering traces of archaeology, history and landscape from poems, church walls, hag stones and cropmarks, oxlips, killing places, hauntings and immortals, and things buried too deep for archaeology, The Road is a mesmerising journey into two thousand years of history only now giving up its secrets.

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR‘An absolute joy to read and an early contender for every list of History Books of the Year’ Sunday Telegraph‘On nearly every page a random passage takes one’s breath away’ The TimesHave you ever heard the march of legions on a lonely country road? For two thousand years, the roads the Romans built have determined the flow of ideas and folktales, where battles were fought and where pilgrims trod. Almost everyone in Britain lives close to a Roman road, if only we knew where to look.In the beginning was Watling Street, the first road scored on the land when the invading Romans arrived on a cold and alien Kentish shore in 43 CE. Campaign roads rolled out to all points of the compass, forcing their way inland and as the Britons fell back, the roads pursued them relentlessly, carrying troops, supplies and military despatches. In the years of fighting that followed, as the legions pushed onwards across what is now England, into Wales and north into Scotland in search of booty, mineral wealth, land and tribute, they left behind a vast road network, linking marching camps and forts, changing the landscape, etching the story of the Roman advance into the face of the land, channelling our lives today.Christopher Hadley, acclaimed author of Hollow Places, takes us on a lyrical journey into this past, retracing and searching for an elusive Roman road that sprang from one of the busiest road hubs in Roman Britain. His passage is not always easy. Time and nature have erased many clues; bridges rotted and whole woods grew across the route. Carters found an easier ford downstream, and people broke up its milestones to mend new paths. Year after year the heavy clay swallowed whole lengths of it; the once mighty road became a bridleway, an overgrown hollow-way, a parched mark in the soil.Hadley leads us on a hunt to discover, in Hilaire Belloc’s phrase, ‘all that has arisen along the way’. Gathering traces of archaeology, history and landscape from poems, church walls, hag stones and cropmarks, oxlips, killing places, hauntings and immortals, and things buried too deep for archaeology, The Road is a mesmerising journey into two thousand years of history only now giving up its secrets.