The Royal Bastards of Medieval England

The dust jacket blazons Millais' The Princes in the Tower, a view of the Middle Ages encrusted with mid-Victorian sugariness and appropriately spurious for a study in bastardy. Chris Given-Wilson and Alice Curteis, his wife, furnish a competent account of the natural children of England's kings from 1066 to Tudor times. The coverage is uneven, but that is inevitable when so little is known about most regal by-blows. Only a handful, such as Robert of Gloucester, Geoffrey 'Plantagenet' and William Longsword in the early Middle Ages, Arthur Viscount Lisle around 1500 and, among women, Henry I's daughter Sybil, who married Alexander I of Scotland, were other than obscure.