Yate

Yate is a bustling modern town in south Gloucestershire. Wallis Peel's account is of a thriving place, where she delves into a rich and varied history. We are conducted on a tour of its ancient seashell relics, its Cro-Magnon ancestry, and we are quickly acquainted with its beginnings economically. That important flowering is first identified with its dark-haired Dobunni tribe - a contrast to the fairer Celts - who as a trading people reached an accommodation rather than entered into warfare with the Romans. In a concise and highly conversational survey we are given an English social history rooted in the millennia-old structures of trade and settled society, important innovations underpinning much of life as we live it now. After the Romans and the Dobunni and other tribes of Briton we witness the invasions of the Saxons and the Danes. Airbrushed from history, but restored in Wallis Peel's book, is Aethelflaeda, the daughter of King Alfred, a natural military general and tactician, whose claims to our attention the author argues are greater than those of Queen Boudicca. But this is only the beginning, in a history that sees paganism overtaken by Christianity, the Norman conquest, and the feudal system that has gradually evolved into the democracy, and into a niche for the individual, that we, and Yate, know now, and all handled with great verve and intimacy by an author closely connected with her time and place.