The Herd Boy and His Hermit

A boy herding sheep on the northern fells is taught by a hermit who is not what he seems, and the Wars of the Roses come to the hills to collect them both. Yonge lived her whole life in one Hampshire village and taught Sunday school there for seventy-one years; she wrote history for the young without lying to them, and the fifteenth-century North here is bleak, cold and exactly documented. Fifty-five plates from David Cox to Edvard Munch follow the shepherd through wind, flock and flood, matching the weather of Yonge's northern fells.