Norah Lofts

“It was in the first week of October in the year 1391 that I first came face to face with the man who owned me"....

“At the age of seven I was a skilful pickpocket. I could sew neatly, write a tolerable hand, make a curtsey and a correct introduction, dance a little and play simple tunes on the harpsichord.”....

The House at Old Vine is the second in a trilogy of novels by Norah Lofts about the inhabitants of a Suffolk house from the late 14th century to the middle of the 20th....

Over two generations, and throughout the turbulent years of the Civil War, Pargeters comes to stand as a symbol of unity for a household divided by conflicting political loyalties and abandoned by its menfolk....

She was the daughter of a preacher and a gypsy. A strange and elusive child with powers of prophecy, she grew into an even stranger woman....

The house was built in the Old Queen's time: built for an Elizabethan pirate who was knighted for the plunder he brought home....

“All eyes and hair” a courtier had said disparagingly of her...

Sir Godfrey Tallboys was a knight-errant, famous for his success at tourneys....

Eleanor…young, high-spirited, supremely intelligent, heiress to the vast Duchy of Aquitaine – at a time when a woman’s value was measured in terms of wealth....

Out of the courts of 12th-century England strode the legendary figure of Richard of England leading his knights onto the Saracen battlefields, inspired by a vision of the Holy Land....

For the Spender family, the ancient, beautifully kept house had seemed a godsend....

When young John Vincent died, the outward respectability of the Cornwall household was undermined....

Thus the future of Caroline Matilda, youngest sister of George III....

This is the story of Sir Walter Raleigh's relationship with the two women who dominated his life: Elizabeth, his queen, and Bess, her lady-in-waiting and his secret wife....

Ataxerxes, king of Persia, needed a wife. This powerful warrior lord picked the one girl who would have given anything to have been passed over....

When Daisy Holt was dismissed from her post as a nursemaid she set off cheerfully into the jungle of mid-Victorian London....

Wherever destiny or chance took the young Scottish rebel, he carried with him the dream of Braidlowrie - Braidlowrie, the home of the Lowries - the home from which he was forever exiled....