Summer of Blood | Dan Jones | Review by The Spectator

The rebels’ cry was ‘King and commons’. Putting their faith in the boy king Richard II led to their downfall. Luring them into negotiations, he betrayed their naive trust. Defeated, they made their sorry way back to the counties. Tyler was slain. Ball was hanged and quartered. In the royal retribution that followed, between 1,500 and 7,000 rebels lost their lives. Little had been gained. Labour laws that flew in the face of supply and demand remained what they had been, impossible to enforce. Although Jones writes that the revolt ‘would change the course of English history forever’, all that he comes up with is that it ‘was the first sign that the ordinary people in England were politicised, and could be made angry enough to rise against bad leadership’.

Since the revolt has been relatively neglected by historians, Jones’s book is welcome. His purpose, he writes, is to fulfil ‘the historian’s most important duty’, which is ‘to tell, as accurately as possible, a cracking good story’. At his best he does. His prose rises to the occasion provided by the dramatic showdown between Richard and the rebels at Smithfield. But he is too willing to supply ‘colour’ in the absence of evidence, and to fall back on ‘must have’ or ‘would have’ in an attempt to get inside the minds of his characters. Juicing up prose dilutes it. Dry wood crackles. ‘Bold, surprising, unputdown- able’ David Starkey gushes on the cover. It is high time that publishers’ deplorable practice of scouting around for pre- publication puffs and presenting them as if critical reviews were abandoned.