Beginning with the Roman invasion of Britain in 55 B.C., as seen through the eyes of Julius Caesar, and ending at the dawn of the third millennium, this new Mammoth volume heightens major events in three thousand years of British history with the immediacy of vivid firsthand accounts that have been culled from memoirs, diaries, letters, and newspaper reports of people who were there. So it is that William of Poitiers recounts the Battle of Hastings, where in 1066 King Harold got it in the eye, while Edward Grim recalls the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas a Becket. So, too, Samuel Pepys describes the Great Fire of London; Friedrich Engels the slums of Manchester; Charlotte Bronte the Great Exhibition of 1851; Virginia Woolf the Blitz; and Edmund Hillary the conquest of Everest. This collection of eyewitness accounts not only chronicles such critical historical moments as the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the execution of Charles I, Wellington's triumph at Waterloo, and the resignation of Margaret Thatcher. It also provides vignettes of British social life like cockfighting in Tudor inns and a Victorian Sunday in the country as well as cultural milestones like the first concert of the Sex Pistols. From the discovery of Virginia to the invasion of the Beatles, from the execution of Mary Queen of Scots to the tragic death of Princess Diana, here is brutal, dynamic, glorious, decadent, insular, powerful, splendid Britannia through the ages.