The Conquest

The Conquest follows Tancred a Dinant, a fictional Norman knight, through the final years of William the Conqueror’s struggle to secure England. Beginning with the northern rising of 1069, the trilogy moves through renewed English and Danish resistance, warfare on the Welsh Marches and the last major rebel stronghold in the Fens. Tancred gains land and rank under the new regime, but every advance binds him more tightly to lords whose rivalries can be as dangerous as open battle.

The novels combine military adventure with the politics of occupation. Real figures including Edgar Ætheling, Eadric the Wild, Hereward the Wake, Robert de Comines and William the Conqueror appear beside fictional soldiers, landholders and rebels. Across the sequence, conquest is shown not as a single victory at Hastings but as a prolonged process of ambush, castle-building, punitive campaigning and divided allegiance between 1069 and 1071.