About Horse Guard

To Charlotte Shaw Mason. 1842 – 1923.
Without her inspiration, this publication would not exist.

Horse Guard is a free weekly publication on British heritage for home-educating families.

History, literature, folklore, art and craft, science and invention – not as textbook summaries but as something that families, and particularly boys, can enjoy.

Each week brings a single piece: a retold folk tale, a narrative history article, a portrait of a British inventor or artist, a passage for copywork, an annotated reading list. Each one is written to be read aloud at a kitchen table or handed to a ten-year-old on a Wednesday morning.

The history strand – Britain: The Story of an Island for Young Readers – retells the history of Britain from the Anglo-Saxons to the Glorious Revolution in approximately fifty weekly articles across two volumes. These are written as a companion to Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, the spine text used by families following the AmblesideOnline curriculum in Years 7 and 8, at a reading level that a ten, eleven or twelve-year-old can read with pleasure and without strain. Each article is approximately 2,800 to 3,800 words – a natural fit for a Charlotte Mason reading session.

Horse Guard is free.

Horse Guard – British heritage for home-educating familes

Horse Guard is free.

Subscribe to get full access to the essays and publication archives.

Every article is sent directly to your email inbox, and you are very welcome to subscribe at no cost.

If you would like to support this work, paid subscriptions are available and gratefully received – but the essays are FREE for subscribers.

About the Author.

My name is Vincent Shaw-Morton. I write under the pen name Vincent Shaw.

I live in West Sussex, England, in the landscape where much of this history happened. Arundel Castle is half an hour’s drive away. William Blake’s cottage is in the nearby village of Felpham. And Chichester, with its magnificent cathedral, is ten minutes from the village where I live – the same city where Charlotte Mason undertook her teacher training at Bishop Otter College in the 1860s. I did not know that when I started this project. I like to think she would have approved.

I am also the author of Care & Craft

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