Slender Threads - Shaw, R. O.

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Résumé :
From an ancient charter in the reign of King John, a slender thread leads through many generations, until it reaches modern men who worked for the Manchester Ship Canal Company and the Lancashire Cotton Corporation. As the book traces this unlikely journey, it captures history through the lives of an ordinary family. For almost eight centuries, they lived in a corner of the north-west of England, on the borders of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire, in Saddleworth, Ashton and Stalybridge. Shaw had not always been their surname (they changed it in the 14th century) and, as communities recovered from the Black Death, so Shaws ramified here. A great many families would share the surname and, wittingly or not, a common medieval ancestor. Slender Threads follows one branch of these Shaws. On the wrong side of primogeniture, their fortunes declined in medieval times from a manorial lord to a tenant farmer, and they would aspire less to shape history than to survive it. But history would mould their lives, through civil wars and world wars, political protest and pandemics, revolution in industry and in religion...

Biographie:
R.O.SHAW was born in Ashton-under-Lyne and is descended from the Shaws of Saddleworth and Ashton. He has a first class honours degree from the University of Sussex and a PhD from University College London for his thesis on Marcel Proust. He has written English Language textbooks, published in India by Orient Longman, and held senior public service roles in the UK. Slender Threads is the product of a decade of research....

Sommaire:
R.O.SHAW was born in Ashton-under-Lyne and is descended from the Shaws of Saddleworth and Ashton. He has a first class honours degree from the University of Sussex and a PhD from University College London for his thesis on Marcel Proust. He has written English Language textbooks, published in India by Orient Longman, and held senior public service roles in the UK. Slender Threads is the product of a decade of research....