Free audiobook

The Silver Sea

A history of Britain from Doggerland and Stonehenge to the present day: Boudica and Roman Britain, Bede and Alfred, the Vikings and 1066, Magna Carta, Bannockburn and the Black Death, the Tudors and the Armada, the Civil Wars, the Union, slavery and abolition, steam and empire, Victoria, two world wars, the NHS and Britain today, with Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the story. Every quotation comes from a public-domain translation, and every era's sources are named.

40chapters
7.8hours
8,000years of history

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Chapter 1

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Chapters

    Sources by era

    Quotations come from public-domain translations: Caesar (McDevitte and Bohn, 1869), Gregory of Tours (Brehaut, 1916), Einhard (Turner, 1880), the Song of Roland (Scott Moncrieff, 1919), Joinville (Wedgwood, 1906), Froissart (Berners), the trial of Joan of Arc (Murray, 1902), Commynes (Scoble, 1855), Montaigne (Cotton), Saint-Simon (Bayle St. John, 1857), Rousseau (Cole, 1913) and Hugo (Hapgood, 1887). Every page the research opened is listed under its era.

    Chapters 1 to 5: Before England: prehistory and Roman Britain
    Chapters 6 to 10: Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and the first kings
    Chapters 11 to 16: Normans, Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses
    Chapters 17 to 20: The Tudors
    Chapters 21 to 25: The Stuarts, the Civil Wars and the Union
    Chapters 26 to 30: The Georgians: empire, industry and revolution
    Chapters 31 to 35: The Victorian age
    Chapters 36 to 40: The twentieth century to today

    Narrated by an AI voice. Written and fact-checked with the help of AI tools, from published scholarship, museum records and the ancient texts themselves; where scholars disagree, the book says so. Dates for prehistory are approximate. Events of 2025 and 2026 are told from official records and news reports available when the book was finished, in November 2026.

    Want to see it? The British history timeline has the people and events in this book, with sources.