Spain is the favoured destination of millions of British holiday-makers and retirees, but few who visit today are aware of the many links, stretching back hundreds of years, that have bound together these two ancient kingdoms on the western seaboard of Europe. As with most relationships, it has had its ups and downs.

Visiting the Basque country to teach English, the author realised how little he knew of those links and set about finding out more. The result of eight years research, España Britannia is the first book to bring together so many fascinating episodes and reveal how much more there is to Anglo-Spanish history than the Armada and Gibraltar.

One of the first surprises is to be reminded that once the lands of the Kings of England in Gascony bordered on those of Castile in the Pyrenees. Dynastic alliances, such as that between Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, were arranged to secure this boundary. The Queen’s death is commemorated by the Eleanor crosses, one of which, Charing Cross, is in Central London not far from Trafalgar Square – another Spanish link. Catherine of Aragon was the first of Henry VIII’s six wives.

Later religion, imperial rivalry and piracy made Britain and Spain bitter enemies both in the Old and the New Worlds, culminating in the Armada and Spain’s attempted conquest of England. In the early eighteenth century, during the War of the Spanish Succession, Britain sided with one of the claimants to the Spanish throne and captured Gibraltar, which has since remained British. During the Peninsular War British troops under Wellington once more fought beside the Spanish to drive out the French and restore a Spanish king. The present Spanish king’s English grandmother was a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria.

In the twentieth century many Britons fought in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. In the Second World War a Spaniard was one of Britain’s most important double agents, who tricked the Germans into believing that the D-Day landings in Normandy were a decoy for a much larger landing near Calais.

All places in Spain associated with the events described in the book are shown on a specially compiled map and there is an index of place names at the end.