Root and Branch is a voluminous and incredibly detailed fictional story about the roots and branches of a family originating from and spreading to the Middle East, Spain, France, and England. Containing wonderfully evocative descriptions of life from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries and based on a combination of many years of research and planning and a flair for depicting life in those times, it details how people travelled, sometimes reluctantly, chance upon their life partners and succeed or fail in life. The powerfully conveyed and wholly accurate images of life in those often turbulent times transports the reader into a world which is, in turns, dramatic and insecure, providing a clear picture of how they lived in generally difficult times. How they used herbs for medicine, span and wove their clothes, relied on their beasts and bees for light. Often life was cruel and certainly very hard at times, yet in the end the family, through generations, bond together, then ultimately go their ways, some back to their roots or some to become, despite their mixed blood, as are so many of us, ‘puddin English’.