Set in a Silver Sea

Book excerpt: Arthur Bryant regarded A History of Britain and the British People as the summary of his life's work. It is based on sixty years of writing scholarly history and embodies material written at the height of his creative powers. The theme of Set in a Silver Sea, which covers all but the last five hundred years of our ten thousand years of history, is the creation and evolution of the laws, institutions, moral beliefs and ways of thought which, deriving from our past, form the basis of our nationhood. It begins with the Atlantic flood which made Britain an island and ends with the building of the last great medieval churches at the close of the fifteenth-century when the ocean trade routes to America and the golden East were being opened up. It is a great and complex tale: Set in a Silver Sea has been designed to tell it in a way that will 'keep children from play and old men from the chimney corner'.