From Transylvania to Tunbridge Wells: The Original Manuscript restores Nicholas de Vere's working voice-sharp, sardonic, and meticulously sourced-exactly as readers remember it. Moving fluidly from Central-European folklore to English parish memory, de Vere follows the long threads of lineage, heraldry, and mythic kingship to ask a hard question that official histories often avoid: how do families and kingdoms manufacture memory-and what power does that memory hold?
This is not a tidy textbook assembled after the fact. It is the author's laboratory notebook: citations in the margins, cross-references to charters and brasses, side-glances at ballads and legend, and sudden flashes of humour that break the tension without blunting the argument. De Vere's method is simple and bracing-lay out the fragments (names, seals, devices, landholding patterns, funerary art, stray local traditions), test their fit, and keep only what survives the pressure. The result is a lively, field-ready history that treats readers as collaborators rather than spectators.
This Original Manuscript edition presents de Vere's material as he left it-lightly edited for clarity, carefully annotated, and framed with contextual notes-so the pace, bite, and mischief remain intact. A long central sequence pursues connections between continental nobiliary traditions and British lines, while later sections sink into the particulars of towns, churches, and families around Kent and Sussex-Tunbridge Wells, parish by parish, inscription by inscription. Everywhere, the emphasis is on how history is made: how stories travel, why symbols repeat, where archives resist, and where living memory refuses to die.
Readers who come for dragons will find them-dragons as signs, dynastic metaphors, and boundary-markers in the medieval imagination. Readers who come for documents will find those as well: printed transcriptions, references to peerage volumes, county histories, and museum holdings, and a working bibliography that maps where the author stood in the stacks. De Vere is learned and playful in equal measure-wickedly witty, sometimes sarcastic as hell, always with a wink, a nudge, and a grin when he's pulling your leg-yet his demand is serious: test everything; keep what the record can carry.
For genealogists, local historians, medievalists, and general readers who like their history argumentative and alive, From Transylvania to Tunbridge Wells offers both a destination and a method. It is a record of inquiry in motion and an invitation to keep going: read bravely, document thoroughly, and steward materials so they can stand in the record.
This edition includes:
Restored source trails, marginal notes, and cross-references Fresh editorial footnotes and context boxes to orient new readers A concise apparatus explaining de Vere's methodology and key symbols Clean page design for citation-heavy reading
Genealogy enthusiasts; local historians; medieval/early-modern history readers; folklore and myth readers; researchers interested in lineage, heraldry, and cultural memory.
