William Harrison's Elizabethan England offers a vivid, unsparing portrait of sixteenth-century English life, from royal palaces and university halls to cottages, markets, and parish houses. Drawing on chronicles, letters, maps, and his own observation, Harrison ranges across social ranks, law, poverty, clothing, food, religion, education, housing, crime, punishment, shipping, and the navy, creating not a narrative but a living cross-section of a whole society. A learned clergyman with a pr...

The classic Victorian novel of romance and an unholy feud reaching across generations, based on the Lancashire witch trials of 1612.Widely considered to be a masterpiece of nineteenth–century gothic literature, William Ainsworth's The Lancashire Witches begins in 1536 with a fateful confrontation atop the notorious Pendle Hill. Falsely accused of witchcraft and condemned to death, Nicholas Demdike sold his soul to Satan in exchange for his escape and reven...

England under Mary Tudor, the Spanish marriage, the Smithfield fires, and the papal legate sent to bring the country back. Ainsworth wrote it from the state papers and did not spare either side.

Pendle Forest in 1612, where a real trial hanged ten people on the evidence of a nine-year-old girl. Ainsworth was a Lancashire man, worked from the surviving court record, and set his romance among people who had actually been named in it.

The Constable de Bourbon turns against Francis the First, leads the imperial army into Italy and dies at the sack of Rome in 1527. Ainsworth wrote it from the chronicles and the sack is not prettified.

Manchester in 1745, the townsmen who came out for the Young Pretender, and the heads that stayed on the Exchange afterwards. Ainsworth was a Manchester man and wrote his own city's part in the rising from the trial records.

This meticulously edited horror collection is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: H. P. Lovecraft: The Tomb The Dunwich Horror The Shunned House Bram Stoker: Dracula The Dualists Edgar Allan Poe: The Cask of Amontillado The Mystery of Marie Rogêt The Premature Burial Mary Shelley: Frankenstein The Evil Eye Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan The Terror William Hope Hodgson: The Ghost Pirates The Night Land Algernon Blackwood: The Willows The Wendigo A ...

The tyrannical measures adopted against the Roman Catholics in the early part of the reign of James the First, when the severe penal enactments against recusants were revived, and with additional rigour, and which led to the remarkable conspiracy about to be related, have been so forcibly and faithfully described by Doctor Lingard,[1] that the following extract from his history will form a fitting introduction to the present work. “The oppressive and sanguinary code framed in the reign of ...

The Last Abbot of Whalley. CHAPTER I.—THE BEACON ON PENDLE HILL. There were eight watchers by the beacon on Pendle Hill in Lancashire. Two were stationed on either side of the north-eastern extremity of the mountain. One looked over the castled heights of Clithero; the woody eminences of Bowland; the bleak ridges of Thornley; the broad moors of Bleasdale; the Trough of Bolland, and Wolf Crag; and even brought within his ken the black fells overhanging Lancaster. The Other tracked the strea...

In the twentieth year of the reign of the right high and puissant King Henry the Eighth, namely, in 1529, on the 21st of April, and on one of the loveliest evenings that ever fell on the loveliest district in England, a fair youth, having somewhat the appearance of a page, was leaning over the terrace wall on the north side of Windsor Castle, and gazing at the magnificent scene before him. On his right stretched the broad green expanse forming the Home Park, studded with noble trees, chief...

No sooner was Mary, eldest daughter of Henry VIII., securely seated on the throne left vacant by the premature death of her brother, Edward VI., than the Emperor Charles V., already related to her through his aunt, Katherine of Aragon, determined to bring about a marriage between the Queen of England and his son Philip. By the accomplishment of this project, which had been conceived by the Emperor during Edward's last illness, the preponderance obtained in Europe by the House of Austria wo...

The castle bells rung out a merry peal at the approach of a winter twilight, and the warder was stationed with his retinue on the battlements, to announce the arrival of the company who were invited to share the amusements that reigned within the walls. The Lady Clotilda, the baron’s only daughter, had but just attained her seventeenth year, and a brilliant assembly was invited to celebrate the birthday. The large vaulted apartments were thrown open for the reception of the numerous guests...