Hammer for Princes is set in England in the middle of the twelfth century, a country laid waste by a long and inconclusive civil war: on the one hand King Stephen, and against him the strongest of the nobility and the young Prince Henry Plantagenet, their candidate for the throne. Fulk, Earl of Stafford, is Prince Henry's man, and for him the public and political decision is easier to face than the complexities within his own family. Here he must come to terms with his own son, Rannulf, and combat the murderous jealousy of a cousin, ambitious for the earldom. In the body politic compromise is ultimately attainable. In private life, seldom. Through the quicksands of twelfth-century power politics, through forced march and siege, tournament and ambush, through hunt and parley, Cecelia Holland brings the heraldic postures of mediaeval England fiercely and vibrantly to life.