The House of Percy resounds throughout Shakespeare's history plays, the War of the Roses and centuries-long Anglo-Scottish Wars. In the Middle Ages, the earls of Northumberland were famed, or notorious, as the Kings in the North, a region they ran almost as a hereditary domain. Alexander Rose traces the history of this ancient and sometimes haughty dynasty from the moment William de Percy stepped into England alongside William the Conqueror to the waning of the medieval era after the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.