Dan Jones’s *The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England* is a sweeping popular narrative history of one of England’s most formidable royal dynasties, stretching from Henry II to Richard II. Published in the United States in 2013 (following its 2012 UK release), it became a *New York Times* bestseller and established Jones as one of Britain’s most commercially successful popular historians. It is an entertaining and accessible entry point into medieval English history, though readers seeking deep analytical rigour may find its priorities lie elsewhere.
About the book
The book covers the Plantagenet dynasty across roughly two and a half centuries of English history, tracing the line from Henry II — who consolidated royal power after the anarchic reign of Stephen — through to Richard II, whose deposition brought the dynasty’s direct line to a close. It is a story dense with warfare, political intrigue, dynastic ambition, and occasional catastrophe, and Jones moves through these centuries with the energy of a storyteller as much as a scholar.
Jones was born in 1981 in Reading, England, and educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he earned a first-class degree in history in 2002. *The Plantagenets* was his second book, preceded by *Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381* (2009), a popular narrative history of the 1381 uprising. The book received positive critical reception and proved commercially significant enough to spawn a sequel, *The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors* (2014), which picks up where *The Plantagenets* leaves off. A four-part Channel 5 television series, *Britain’s Bloodiest Dynasty: The Plantagenets*, was adapted from the book in 2014, and Jones revisited its themes in a 2022 podcast, *This Is History: A Dynasty to Die For*, produced through Somethin’ Else and Sony Music Entertainment.
Jones has since built an extensive body of work covering the Crusades, the Knights Templar, Magna Carta, the Wars of the Roses, and medieval history more broadly, along with a successful career as a television presenter and journalist. He is a recognisable figure in British popular history, a genre he has helped define for a contemporary audience.
What it does well
The book’s greatest strength is its narrative momentum. Jones has a genuine talent for making medieval history feel urgent and visceral rather than remote and dusty. The Plantagenet era is, objectively, extraordinary material — containing the murder of Thomas Becket, the Crusading campaigns of Richard I, the tyranny of King John and the sealing of Magna Carta, the spectacular fall of Edward II, and the Black Death — and Jones marshals this material with pace and confidence. Readers who might find academic histories of the period intimidating will find *The Plantagenets* an accessible and genuinely engaging entry point.
The book also benefits from Jones’s evident command of the period. His Cambridge training shows in the structural coherence of the narrative: despite covering an enormous span of time and a large cast of monarchs, the book maintains a clear sense of the dynasty’s evolving character and the tensions — between crown and church, king and barons, England and France — that run across the centuries. The title’s promise of “warrior kings and queens” is largely delivered: military conflict and the personal drama of kingship are kept front and centre throughout, giving the book a driving energy that sustains readers across its considerable length.
For those interested in the period who want a single-volume overview rather than a reign-by-reign academic study, *The Plantagenets* delivers excellent value. It is genuinely well-suited to curious general readers — the precise audience for whom it was written.
Where it falls short
The book’s commercial instincts are also, at times, its limitations. *The Plantagenets* prioritises storytelling over structural analysis, which means that readers hoping for sustained engagement with historiographical debates, questions of social history, or the lives of people beyond the royal court will find the book relatively thin. The emphasis on dramatic personal narrative — the “warrior kings and queens” framing of the subtitle — inevitably privileges the top of the social hierarchy and the battlefield over the more complex machinery of medieval governance, economy, and culture. Readers who have already encountered the major figures of the dynasty through other histories may feel the book covers well-trodden ground without significantly reinterpreting it.
There is also the perennial challenge of scope. Covering roughly 245 years and more than a dozen monarchs in a single popular history requires compression, and some reigns inevitably receive lighter treatment than others. The book cannot do justice to every king in its cast, and certain episodes that specialists would consider significant risk being reduced to narrative colour rather than properly examined. Readers who come away wanting more depth on, say, the reign of Henry III or the constitutional significance of Edward I’s legal reforms will need to supplement Jones with more focused scholarly works.
Who should read it
*The Plantagenets* is ideal for general readers who are curious about medieval English history but have not yet committed to the longer, more specialised studies the period demands. It works well as a gateway book — something to be read before tackling more analytical accounts, or alongside a television documentary series. Readers who enjoy popular historians like Alison Weir, Ian Mortimer, or Thomas Penn will find Jones operating in broadly similar territory, and those who enjoy *The Plantagenets* would do well to follow it immediately with Jones’s own sequel, *The Hollow Crown*, which continues the story through the Wars of the Roses.
Those looking for revisionist history, substantial social history, or deep engagement with primary sources should look elsewhere — to academic historians such as Michael Prestwich on Edward I or Nigel Saul on Richard II — but as an introduction to a dynasty that shaped the English nation, Jones’s book serves its purpose handsomely.
Where to buy
*The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England* is widely available at major booksellers in both print and digital formats. Canadian readers can find it conveniently via the Recommended Reading callout above through Amazon.ca.
Sources
- This review draws factual claims about the book and author from the Wikipedia article on Dan Jones (writer).
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