It will stand side by side with Winston Churchill's volumes on English history on bookshelves throughout the world.' 'If all history books were written in the manner of this masterpiece, children would adore the subject at school. 'Rutherfurd's.meticulous research makes the smallest detail interesting' 'A richly imagined vision of history, written with genuine delight.' 'Bursts with action, encyclopedic in historic detail.supremely well crafted and a delight to read.' 'A high-speed cavalcade of our island story.a heady and sometimes sexy brew' Read More About SARUM at GOODREADS: CLICK HERE

We learn how Common Law began, how the Jews of Sarum were expelled, what really happened in the Black Death how the independent people of Sarum threw both the Royalists and the Roundheads out of town, how the Industrial Revolution came to the countryside, and how Stonehenge was sold. In the days of British Empire, Adam Shockley fights in the American War of Independence Peter Wilson takes part in the great naval battle of Trafalgar Jane Shockley tries to join Florence Nightingale as a nurse, before succumbing to a scandalous romance.

Cloth merchants prosper, knights are ruined Protestants are burned, Catholics persecuted, witches tried. Roman roads, the Celtic hillfort of Old Sarum, a Saxon convent, a Norman castle, a medieval market town, a Tudor country house, Georgian townhouses, Victorian cottages - all appear and live on in perpetuity in Sarum's echoing landscape.

Nooma the stone mason builds Stonehenge for the astronomer priests and witnesses a human sacrifice thirty-two centuries later, his descendant Oswald Mason builds Salisbury cathedral with its soaring spire, and falls into each of the seven deadly sins. Hwll the hunter, fleeing the rising seas at the end of the last Ice Age, finds refuge on Sarum's high ground. The family saga sweeps across millennia of settlement. SARUM is the story of English ancestral roots. Set in the magical landscape of Stonehenge and the cathedral city of Salisbury, SARUM is an epic story of five families - the Wilsons, the Masons, the Roman family of Porteus, the Saxon Shockleys and the Norman Godfreys - through the turbulent course of English history from the Ice Age to the present day.

The source by james michener summary