In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Plantagenet England 1225–1360
  • Michael Brown
Plantagenet England 1225–1360. By Michael Prestwich. Pp xxiii, 638. ISBN: 0 19 8228448 9. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. £35.00.

As might be expected from Michael Prestwich, this is a masterly survey of English politics and society during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It opens with a discussion of kingship and government before providing a chronological analysis of English politics. This section is also interspersed with chapters on English interests, mostly military and political, in Wales, Scotland and France which absorbed a fair proportion of the English crown’s resources during this period. Though the book opens with politics and war, nearly half the book is given over to an analysis of English society with chapters dealing with nobility, gentry, urban society, trade, crime and the peasantry amongst other topics. The period covered by the book witnessed the great shift in population and economy which centred on the Black Death and it is with an assessment of this event that Prestwich ends his discussion. The discussion throughout shows the combination of detailed expertise developed by Prestwich for the period from the 1270s to the 1320s with the ability to sum up political relationships and norms demonstrated in earlier studies of thirteenth-century English politics. If warfare takes centre stage throughout, this is not unreasonable given its importance in both the minds of kings and in the demands and concessions they made in pursuit of military goals which shaped their dealings with the English community.

Anglo-Scottish relations are given an emphasis which is rarely found in English textbooks. Prestwich goes well beyond simply discussing Scotland during the period of intense conflict from the 1290s to the 1330s. Instead he looks at the relationship between the two realms throughout the period and provides illuminating sections on English military organisation in Scotland and on the way landed connections between nobles in the two realms were a major factor in dealings across the border. Interestingly his treatment of Edward I’s record in Scotland is much less favourable than some recent assessments of the king from a Scottish perspective and, in general, Prestwich gives a better press to that king’s grandson, Edward III.

Ironically the attention paid to Scotland raises issues about the coverage of the volume. While discussing the wars of English kings in Wales and Scotland at length, Prestwich does not really consider the place of Wales in English politics after 1300. More strikingly, there is very little mention of the English lordship of Ireland. In the preface an explanation of this coverage is provided, which argues that the book is a history of England as one country and that Ireland, and Gascony, are omitted as lands of the English crown only. While this [End Page 335] argument is valid for Gascony, in Ireland and Wales there were communities who regarded themselves as English and whose leaders were full members of the governing class of England itself. As with the Anglo-Scottish landed elite, who are discussed, the interests of these lords, like those of the crown, were not confined to England. This issue clearly involves the nature of English identity. In the period 1225 to 1360 this was going through rapid and highly significant developments, as recent work has shown. Complaints about foreign personnel and payment for continental enterprises were central to attacks on Henry III and Edward I, while the wars of the latter and of Edward III used English antipathy to their neighbours as a recruiting mechanism. Similarly the Englishness of colonial populations in Wales and Ireland, relative to their non-English neighbours and their homeland, also emerged as a major concern in these decades. Prestwich does use the English of Ireland and Wales to define English identity, but only in the conclusion when he finally tackles the subject head on in a brief but valuable discussion. Considerations of Scottish politics and political society for the same period have long regarded issues of identity and regnal solidarity as central themes to be addressed and, while the reasons for this focus (or obsession) are obvious and the results not uniformly successful, this may be one area in...

pdf

Share