And the Peasants' Revolt did not represent peasants. Elsewhere, too, Anglicanism is not allowed to hold the field uncontested. To be deprived of public ceremonies was to destroy the entire sense of shared community on which the old Church had thrived. Faith and nation parted company in these years. By and large, however, it cannot be said that the forgotten, the mute, and the inglorious elements in British history get much of a look from Schama, the occasional bravura passages notwithstanding.
Material is excavated out of spheres far removed from war and the conduct of public affairs.
The images of charnel houses and ossuaries deliberately suggest Auschwitz or the reign of Pol Pot, while the manorial rolls vividly indicate the seismic economic shifts that accompanied the crisis. In general, though, material culture gets short shrift here. Archaeology is underused. Chaucer looks in once, and Spenser appears only in his views on Irish colonization. More importantly, Schama is very good, visually and verbally, on grand architecture, a subject to which he brings both authority and passion.