To this day The White Hart and The Red Lion are two of the most popular names for a public house in England – both talismans that served as the insignia for Richard II and the banished Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, who usurped the throne in 1399.

Nick Asbury acted in the Royal Shakespeare Company's famed Histories cycle which staged Shakespeare's vision of the deposition of Richard II through to the notorious Battle of Bosworth in 1485. With fellow RSC actors for company, Nick travels the country visiting the buildings, landscapes and former sites of war and intrigue that feature in the plays, and asks the question: what is it about the England of Shakespeare's Histories that continues to fascinate? From Alnwick to Eastcheap, Windsor Castle to a Leicester car park, this is his snapshot of England and its people, then and now.

'John Shakespeare, William's father, was an Ale Taster before he was a glover and luminary of Stratford-upon- Avon, so in his footsteps I and my travelling players will be exploring the hostelries and byways of an England forged on the battlefields, triumphs and betrayals of The Histories: on the one hand, Red – be it a pub or bloody Rose. On the other hand, White – be it the alabaster tombs of broken Princes or the quill of a playwright from Stratford-upon- Avon.'