"'Ian Mortimer has earned a well-deserved reputation as a writer capable of communicating the fascination of medieval history... His speciality is the peculiar and the personal: the hidden springs by which the actions of the past were moved... he still has much to communicate about his explorations of the forgotten corners of Medieval England.' BBC History Magazine"

Ian Mortimer is the author of the bestselling The Time-Traveller's Guide to Medieval England, a series of four medieval historical biographies and a revolutionary study of medicine in early modern England. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (by whom he was awarded the Alexander Prize in 2004) and a qualified archivist.

Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Objectivity and information: a methodological introduction; 2. Sermons of Sodomy: a reconsideration of Edward II's sodomitical reputation; 3. The Death of Edward II in Berkeley Castle; 4. Twelve angry scholars: reactions to 'The death of Edward II'; 5. The Plot of the earl of Kent, 1328-30; 6. Edward III, his father and the Fieschi; 7. Edward III and the moneylenders; 8. Richard II and the succession to the Crown; 9. The rules governing succession to the Crown, 1199-1399; 10. Regnal legitimacy and the concept of the royal pretender; 11. Concluding remarks; Full titles of works cited in the notes; Index.