The Making of the Neville Family in England, 1166-1400 A.D. (review)

272 Reviews editions are also brief, and speculate on possible ways of editing numerous glosses and treatises which contain considerable material in common. This would be an ideal area in which to construct a corpus of electronic texts which could be structured to ensure that c o m m o n material was stored only once, whtie variants and unique glosses were linked hypertextually. The electronic text offers an environment which can replicate and document the multiple inter-relationships of scholia, catena commentaries and the works which they gloss. As Ward makes clear, the substantive text of this book was completed in 1987, and this is reflected in the main bibliography (pp. 27-50) and the footnotes. There are, however, extensive supplementary notes and references covering the period up to 1992. Whtie these chronological layers do not detract from the main text, they make the book somewhat difficult to use. It would have been better, if possible, to incorporate the later notes and references into an updated text, instead of adding them to the end of the 1987 text. The apparatus of this book also includes a useful subject index and a list of manuscripts cited. A tabular presentation of the main commentaries and glosses would also have been helpful. Toby Burrows Scholars' Centre The University of Western Australia Library Young, Charles R., The Making of the Neville Family in England, 11661400 A.D., Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 1996; cloth; pp. xiii, 172; R.R.P. £32.50, US$56.00. Scholars have long recognised that the history of post-Conquest England can be approached very profitably through the study of the family. By the creation of coUective biographies it has been possible to gain insights into such areas as the rise of the 'new men', the development of royal administration, and the increasing lay interest in both literacy and genealogy. All of this, of course, is in addition to the prosopographical and biographical information which remains invaluable in its o w n right. Charles R. Young's current work is dedicated primarily to the last Reviews 273 of the preceding concerns. Young is interested in h o w a family of knightly status but with no special prominence in the mid-twetith century was able to rise to become one of the two major families in the north of England and see one of its number created earl of Westmorland at the end of the fourteenth century'. In tracing this rise Young discusses, among other things: the extent to which, in the absence of an organised civil service, government in England depended on the aid of prominent families for its day to day functioning; the opportunities for seti-promotion provided by the Hundred Years W a r and war against the Scots; and the ability of powerful famines to exploit these openings in order to re-establish their positions after internal crises. A U of these themes coexist with the dtificult task of clarifying the complex relationships between a range of m e n (and sometimes w o m e n ) in the English historical record w h o aU bore the name 'Neville' or were descended from such Nevilles. The book is prefaced by a detailed family tree of all the branches of the Nevilles; this is certainly helpful if the reader wishes to distinguish between the many members of the family who/inevitably in this period, all seem to have shared in the same limited stock of forenames. Alternatively, the work can be read profitably without such attention to the minutiae of genealogy, since each of the nine chapters is generally dedicated to only a handful of the more prominent Nevtiles. Like many other families, the Nevilles gained their foothold under Henry H, as part of the parvenu generation often referred to as 'men raised from the dust'. ThefirstNeville to gain attention was Alan w h o became infamous as a justice of the forest in the 1160s. Forest administration would remain the Nevilles' chosen profession throughout the period in question and was a highly successful forum for their aggrandisement. The second chapter raises the point of the Nevilles' geographic expansion (into n e w counties) and...