Following the establishment of Danish rule, Uhtred, a Saxon raised by the Danes, comes to the aid of the kingdom of Wessex and its ruler King Alfred with the hope of eventually retaking his home of Bebbanburg as ongoing Viking incursions attempt to conquer the whole of England. The series covers the years 866–878 where the arrival of the Great Heathen Army in England led by Guthrum and Ubba Ragnarsson redefines the relationship between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. “I was forever phoning him and saying things like, ‘John, go up the Rue de Montreuil and look left and tell me what you can see’,” he laughs.Produced by the BBC, the first series adapts the first two novels of Bernard Cornwell's series of novels The Saxon Stories, The Last Kingdom and The Pale Horseman.
While unable to travel there this time (thanks, Covid) for his usual on-the-ground research, the author has explored previously and leaned on a Paris-based friend for last-minute extras. “It is an extraordinary landscape,” says Cornwell. It also features a number of well-known locations around the Somme, an area sacred to Australians familiar with the WW1 Anzac experience but with a history of warfare stretching much further back.
Sharpe’s Assassin features smugglers’ tunnels under the city walls and a Guy Fawkes-style Parisian gunpowder plot that really happened and sees our not-especially-woke hero helping to repatriate artworks plundered by Napoleon from across Europe.
Bernard Cornwell shines an interesting light on Napoleon Bonaparte’s plundered art collection and on moves, after the emperor’s defeat, to repatriate it – an issue that modern museums grapple with to this day.
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