Nigel Bryant

The History of William Marshal is the earliest surviving biography of a medieval knight - indeed it is the first biography of a layman in the vernacular in European history. Composed in verse in the 1220s just a few years after his death, it is a major primary source not simply for its subject's life but for the exceptionally stormy period he had had to navigate. Few other medieval biographies have the immediacy of this celebration of Marshal's career, based not least on stories told by Marshal himself and those close to him, and it is made available here for the first time in a modern prose translation.