Stewart Binns

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Agent

James Gill

Assistant: Lara Hughes-Young

lhughesyoung@unitedagents.co.uk

jgill@unitedagents.co.uk

+44 (0) 20 3214 0887

About

Stewart Binns began his professional life as an academic before deciding he was neither bright enough nor sufficiently disciplined to be productive. He then pursued several adventures, including a stint at the BBC and soldiering, before settling into a career as a schoolteacher, specialising in history. Later in life, a lucky break took him back to the BBC, which was the beginning of a successful career in television. He has won a BAFTA, a Grierson, an RTS and a Peabody for his documentaries.

Passionate about English history, especially its origins and folklore, Stewart is the author of Conquest, an epic historical novel of 11th-century Europe.

Forthcoming publication:

ANARCHY - PENGUIIN - APRIL 2013

The year is 1186, the thirty-second year of the reign of Henry Plantagenet, the ruler of a vast Angevin Empire that stretches from the Orkneys to the Mediterranean.

Gilbert Folio, the Bishop of London, has lived through Henry’s long reign and that of his grandfather, Henry I. He has also witnessed, first-hand, the terrifying days of the civil war between Henry Plantagenet’s mother, the Empress Matilda, and her cousin, Stephen, grandson of William the Conqueror; a time so traumatic the chroniclers call it the Anarchy.

Folio, the greatest letter writer of the 12^th Century, begins a correspondence with his great friend, Thibaud of Vermandois, Cardinal of Ostia. In it he gives an intimate account of one of England’s most troubled eras: a period of ruthless brutality, greed and ambition. Central to his account is the life of a knight he first met over fifty years earlier, Harold of Hereford.

Harold’s life is an intriguing microcosm of the times. He is one of the nine founders of the Knights Templar, a survivor of the fearsome battles of the Crusader States in the Holy Land and a loyal warrior in the cause of the Empress Matilda. He also carries the noble blood of his parents, Sweyn and Estrith of Bourne, and his now legendary grandparents, the enigmatic Torfida of the Wildwood and the leader of England’s brave resistance to Norman rule, the fabled Hereward of Bourne.

On his broad shoulders, Harold carries the legacy of England’s past and its dormant hopes for the future.

Praise for CONQUEST:

“Hereward the wake is an elusive character in English history, and a gift, therefore, for fiction writers. Stewart Binns has taken full advantage of the vacuum in our knowledge to produce a fascinating mix of fact, legend and fiction. Prior to the fateful year of 1066, Hereward is a man on the run, having been exiled from England for his turbulent ways. He roams the British Isles and Europe before returning to England to fight with King Harold against the Norman invader, William the Bastard. After the defeat at Senlac Ridge -Hastings to us now- he is once more on the run, fighting now for the resistance.
This is storytelling at its best, and a good background to the politics behind England's greatest defeat.”
Daily Mail

Gallery

Conquest
Crusade

Fiction

Publication Details	Notes
CRUSADE 2012 PENGUIN	Crusade will be the Second Chronicle in the “Making of England Trilogy”, which Stewart has so successfully begun with Conquest. The story takes up where Conquest left off, at the end of the Norman Conquest with the Harrying of the North, and takes us from the first years of the Conqueror’s rule in England through to the chaos and bloodshed brought by the endless feuding between his sons after his death – when all hell breaks loose, in England and on the near Continent. The violent power-struggles between William Rufus, Henry Beauclerc and Robert Curthose, threaten the great recent prosperity of the realm, and cause untold hardship on the country – until a settlement is made in hard cash: William II will keep the English throne; Curthose Normandy, while the youngest brother, Henry Beauclerc is given a huge payment to buy lands on both sides of the Channel. With another period of relative calm in England, the country now turns its attention to a greater cause: the plight of the Holy Land. Christian Europe has become obsessed by Jerusalem and the Islamic control of the Holy Land. After seven hundred years of slumber, a new Europe is asserting itself, and a new kind of Englishman – Norman and Anglo-Saxon alike – will be in the vanguard...
CONQUEST 2011 PENGUIN	Conquest is a sweeping historical epic of the early Middle Ages. Set all over 11th-century Europe in the build-up to and the aftermath of the Norman invasion of England in 1066, it ranges across a canvas of astonishing breadth and ambition. With an amazing combination of both hugeness and detail, the novel re-imagines the life of its hero, the much mythologized but little documented English outlaw Hereward of Bourne (better known, thanks to 19th-century romanticisation, as Hereward the Wake). Following his banishment at the age of 18 from the Kingdom of England by Edward the Confessor, Hereward turns mercenary and the novel follows the outlawed hero in the company of his wife Torfida, on an odyssey that takes him through the great theatres of European conflict during one of the most significant phases of the continent’s history. Throughout their journey, they carry an ancient and enigmatic Talisman, an inheritance from Torfida’s mysterious father, the Old Man of the Wildwood, which seems to be leading them to their destiny. It is a quest that leads them from the wildwood of England, to Wales, to (the, at the time, Norse settlement of) Dublin, onto Scotland in the time of Macbeth in whose service Hereward fights, to Scandinavia, the Baltic, to the Ukraine, then Constantinople, war-torn Italy, Norman Sicily in the service of Robert Guiscard, the Spain of Alfonso and El Cid, and finally (with a recommendation from Guiscard) to service in Normandy in the household of William the Bastard. William is preparing to take the crown of England – if not by inheritance from Edward, then by invasion and force. It is here in Rouen that Hereward meets Harold Godwinson, a rival heir to William who is at his court on his embassy from England. Hereward finds in Harold a kindred spirit, and the attributes of a man fit to rule England, as well as the possibility of return to his homeland. Seeing over time, and at first hand, the hardness and uncompromising efficiency of William’s rule in Normandy and the limitless brutality of his kingly ambition in England and France, Hereward comes to know that he must return to his own country to help her prepare. With the Confessor now dead, and the country riven by the squabbles of the self-interested earls, the new king Harold Godwinson is struggling to unite the kingdom and faces invasions looming on two fronts – from Harald Hardrada in the north and William of Normandy from across the Channel. Hereward leads Harold’s Housecarls, the elite of the Anglo-Saxon army, to a decisive and crushing defeat of Hardrada’s Norwegians at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, before rushing south to meet William in an equally decisive battle barely two weeks later, at Senlac Ridge, near Hastings. Escaping from the carnage of the battle’s aftermath, Hereward finds himself again an outlaw, again in the wildwood, leading the last pockets of English resistance to Norman rule – culminating in a final stand against William, a man not known to history for his compromises. It is what happens next to Hereward and his family, to William – now the Conqueror – and to England, that the novel’s final parts relate. It’s a resolution of tremendous narrative imagination and intelligence.

Publication Details

Notes

CRUSADE
2012
PENGUIN

Crusade will be the Second Chronicle in the “Making of England Trilogy”, which Stewart has so successfully begun with Conquest.

The story takes up where Conquest left off, at the end of the Norman Conquest with the Harrying of the North, and takes us from the first years of the Conqueror’s rule in England through to the chaos and bloodshed brought by the endless feuding between his sons after his death – when all hell breaks loose, in England and on the near Continent. The violent power-struggles between William Rufus, Henry Beauclerc and Robert Curthose, threaten the great recent prosperity of the realm, and cause untold hardship on the country – until a settlement is made in hard cash: William II will keep the English throne; Curthose Normandy, while the youngest brother, Henry Beauclerc is given a huge payment to buy lands on both sides of the Channel.

With another period of relative calm in England, the country now turns its attention to a greater cause: the plight of the Holy Land. Christian Europe has become obsessed by Jerusalem and the Islamic control of the Holy Land. After seven hundred years of slumber, a new Europe is asserting itself, and a new kind of Englishman – Norman and Anglo-Saxon alike – will be in the vanguard...

CONQUEST
2011
PENGUIN

Conquest is a sweeping historical epic of the early Middle Ages. Set all over 11th-century Europe in the build-up to and the aftermath of the Norman invasion of England in 1066, it ranges across a canvas of astonishing breadth and ambition. With an amazing combination of both hugeness and detail, the novel re-imagines the life of its hero, the much mythologized but little documented English outlaw Hereward of Bourne (better known, thanks to 19th-century romanticisation, as Hereward the Wake).

Following his banishment at the age of 18 from the Kingdom of England by Edward the Confessor, Hereward turns mercenary and the novel follows the outlawed hero in the company of his wife Torfida, on an odyssey that takes him through the great theatres of European conflict during one of the most significant phases of the continent’s history. Throughout their journey, they carry an ancient and enigmatic Talisman, an inheritance from Torfida’s mysterious father, the Old Man of the Wildwood, which seems to be leading them to their destiny. It is a quest that leads them from the wildwood of England, to Wales, to (the, at the time, Norse settlement of) Dublin, onto Scotland in the time of Macbeth in whose service Hereward fights, to Scandinavia, the Baltic, to the Ukraine, then Constantinople, war-torn Italy, Norman Sicily in the service of Robert Guiscard, the Spain of Alfonso and El Cid, and finally (with a recommendation from Guiscard) to service in Normandy in the household of William the Bastard.

William is preparing to take the crown of England – if not by inheritance from Edward, then by invasion and force. It is here in Rouen that Hereward meets Harold Godwinson, a rival heir to William who is at his court on his embassy from England. Hereward finds in Harold a kindred spirit, and the attributes of a man fit to rule England, as well as the possibility of return to his homeland. Seeing over time, and at first hand, the hardness and uncompromising efficiency of William’s rule in Normandy and the limitless brutality of his kingly ambition in England and France, Hereward comes to know that he must return to his own country to help her prepare.

With the Confessor now dead, and the country riven by the squabbles of the self-interested earls, the new king Harold Godwinson is struggling to unite the kingdom and faces invasions looming on two fronts – from Harald Hardrada in the north and William of Normandy from across the Channel. Hereward leads Harold’s Housecarls, the elite of the Anglo-Saxon army, to a decisive and crushing defeat of Hardrada’s Norwegians at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, before rushing south to meet William in an equally decisive battle barely two weeks later, at Senlac Ridge, near Hastings.

Escaping from the carnage of the battle’s aftermath, Hereward finds himself again an outlaw, again in the wildwood, leading the last pockets of English resistance to Norman rule – culminating in a final stand against William, a man not known to history for his compromises. It is what happens next to Hereward and his family, to William – now the Conqueror – and to England, that the novel’s final parts relate. It’s a resolution of tremendous narrative imagination and intelligence.

Client details

Stewart Binns