'A promising and inventive writer.' Jim Crace

The Supernatural History series is not meant for the erudite scholar but nor is it quite intended for the edification of total neophytes. Rather, these short works hope to find themselves in the hands of those with a good grounding in history - but who also feel they might benefit from further exploration. It is our hope that you come to this series with at least a general understanding of both the nature of Magic through the ages of human history and of those sources of Magic in this world that date from the time of The Ancients.
Though each book in the series has been helmed by expert historians each is commissioned to illuminate those periods of recorded history when Magic has been at its stages of, in modern parlance, 'peak' use - the epochal moments that have defined human civilization - and to concentrate on people and events (in this volume places) in brief and general context rather than with any in-depth, overly technical analysis.
Students of early 20th Century poetry may be familiar with the middling poet Charles Cording. His mediocre poem 'Houses of Magic' has long been a source of amusement to supernaturalist historians on account of its many inaccuracies, misunderstandings and exaggerations but, most particularly, for its division of periods of magical history into ages of 'Oldestness', 'Elderness', 'Olde', 'Old', 'Then' and 'Now'.
With a stroke of perversity the team of researchers who helped me compile this volume of our series have insisted that the work should be divided up into chapters named after Cording's odd fancy - evidence, if evidence were needed, of the obtusity of those who truck with supernature on a daily basis.

S.J.Hirons (Series Editor)