Deborah, I read Sarum many years ago and think it is probably the best of his books.
Re your thoughts about the 'mingling' of cultures etc. I think it has obviously happened in the US far more than in the UK. For eg. Using the census returns for the nineteenth century the people living in Great Britain were mostly WASPS (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants). Add a sprinkling of Irish, Jewish immigrants who came for work or to escape religious persecution, but only since WWII has there been a much greater cultural/ethnic mix.
Just as a matter of interest I wonder how many RP'ers are able to trace their great grandparents back to countries other than the US?
To me it is amazing how quickly everyone is assimilated into the American 'Melting Pot'. You do it far better than we do over here. ;-)

My mother and I both liked Sarum. I would also vote for it being his best.

A few years ago a good friend of mine from Norway came to visit me - her first U.S. visit. Although certainly well educated and speaking perfect English (better than mine, sad to say), she mostly knew about the U.S. from movies and television. The image one gets is of people fighting in the streets all the time, which is of course not the case. She was fascinated by the fact that I lived on a quiet ordinary street with an African-American family on one side and a Korean family on the other. She asked how I felt when they moved in. I replied that she would better ask them how they felt when I moved in, as they had already been there for years. And I am the daughter of Scottish immigrants. I worry greatly that our present immigration policies are going to thwart our great Melting Pot, which I think is our biggest strength. However, I don't want to get political.

I bought a signed first edition of Rutherfurd's Forest but didn't finish it. Beautiful book, though. I also enjoyed his London.

I've not read any of Rutherford's work. Perhaps I was daunted by their length?

My own cul-de-sac is very multicultural: on my end of the street we have families of the following origins: African-Americans, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Irish Catholic, French Catholic, and WASP (mainly southern Baptist). Everyone gets along very well. We all feel safe, walk each other's dogs, have block parties with kiddie parades, and know each other well, even having keys to others' houses. I wonder how typical this is of any large American city....

In my own family we are quite a collection. I can trace my mother's side to 1634, southern France. My father's parents came from the Ukraine. My children's grandparents are from Latvia.

Woodnymph- I think you are a rarer and rarer breed. Right now I live in a small town and I don't lock my car at night and sometimes not even my front door but my mother lives in San Jose among many different races (in a typical middle class neighborhood) and I can assure they all lock uo tight every night.

I agree that Rutherford can be long but when you consider how much ground he covers it's no wonder. Forest was my first book by him and I liked it so much that I bought Sarum.

Veer- I learned a lot about England in this book and also Forest- I did not realize how much the French and Germans had been involved in 'taking over' England in the early years. I had known about the Romans but not how much the Germans and French (well, Normanandy) had been there.

woodnymph/Mary if you have visited the cathedral city of Salisbury, I think you would enjoy Sarum as the book, through fictional families but 'real' events/artifacts uses the old hilltop town of Sarum (later rebuilt down in the valley, as Salisbury) to tell the story of the area through the ages. Rutherford is a historian so his facts are accurate and although a weighty book the chapters divides neatly into the different time periods.

deborah the Normans certainly 'took over' England after the Conquest and were powerful Top Dogs, feared and mistrusted for several hundred years. Norman kings, lords, knights and clergy changed the old Anglo-Saxon way of life for ever.
Not sure about the German influence, unless you mean the Saxons, Jutes, Angles, Norsemen who had settled in the country before the Normans arrived.

I read it when it came out and loved it. I've always been fascinated by the flow of culture, but I confess to being uncomfortable with the idea of family character traits. I tried London next, liked it well enough but about halfway through put it down and didn't go back. I remember being weirded out by the family of fisher folk with webbed toes. Then my sister pointed out that I'd inherited my Dad's webbed toes. Who knew?

I remember being vaguely disappointed that The Forest was about England. I'd read Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic and was enchanted by Crispin's trek from Rome to Constantinople, going through the great European forest that had it's own mythology and pagan culture. I'd love to see Rutherford's treatment of the lands of the barbarians. We got a little bit of that in Eco's Baudolino but I want more.

If there is a family characteristic I've noticed it is that my family has been kicked out of some fine religious communities. Pilgrim ancestors arrived in Plymouth in 1620. In 1639 an ancestor came over to Plymouth as soon as he got out of prison - put there by Archbishop Laud for being a minister of an independent church. My particular ancestors left Barnstable early because of religious differences and started moving south. In 1650 a family of Howards (poor distant relations of the powerful family) came to Virginia but weren't allowed to stay because they wouldn't sign the pledge to the Church of England. Maryland said welcome to our Catholic colony, so my family settled with the Quakers in Annapolis. Then 40 years later repaid the welcome by fighting in the War of the Chesapeake to wrest control of the state from the Catholics and to move the capital from St. Mary's City to Annapolis. Also in the 18th century an ancestor got kicked out of a Quaker community in Pennsylvania and went south to Kentucky with Squire Boone (Daniel's father.) As near as I can figure my family was all here by 1750 and in Tennessee by 1792. One line goes back 13 generations in America. Sussex before that. From the Palatine in the early 1700s; Scotland by way of Ireland settling in the Southern Highlands of Tennessee and North Carolina. Don't know how those Scots-Irish landed in the Appalachians. The relocated Scots were lowlanders. None of this was of any interest to me until I moved to Baltimore where everyone I met was 2nd or 3rd generation Russian, Polish, German, Lithuanian, Greek, Italian ... and still celebrated aspects of their culture of origin. I had but vague ideas about my own ancestry which turned out to be mostly wrong.

I've been curious about Sarum and did have London in my TBR pile at one point - I'll have to see if I can find it. Generally, I'm not much on historical fiction, but I may give Sarum a try.

My great-grandparents came from Germany, Ireland, Sweden and Lithuania, with one line in America since the Revolutionary war, though I've been unable to sort out whether they were French or Irish. My DH's family is Irish-English-possibly Welsh with one Native American in the mix. One of his cousins managed to document them back to 1589 England. Another branch of his family has been in the US since the 1600's. We're a melting-pot, though mostly a European one.

Chris ITV, funny you mentioned the webbed feet. When I read London, it struck me that what my dad called our "twin toes" was probably the same thing. Three of the four of us siblings have them. I did get a little lost in trying to keep up with the different families in the book.

I have liked all Rutherfurd's books except Russka. It seemed choppy to me, and the names are so difficult. I think Sarum and The Forest were my favorites.