Humanities: History

424 LETI'ERS IN CANADA: 1965 and channing vignettes, and of these last the one devoted to mediaeval minstrels is perhaps the best. Mrs. Labarge's work is informed by a sense of those dynamic realities to which her sources bear witness. Her remarks on the mobility of thirteenth-century society are, in this connection , well taken. Her writing is often guided by an acute appreciation of the terms under which mediaeval man struggled for survival, his unending battle against filth, his longing for air, warmth, and sunlight. Her pages on marriage are distinguished by a judicious critique of the writings of mediaeval moralists and romancers on this subject. From these there emerges a clear understanding of the hard work, mutual support, respect, and affection which characterized the successful partnership of a great bf!.ron and his lady. Nor is poignancy lacking from her account. W e read of the wine ordered for the bath of Edward Plantagenet 's ailing son, the Prince Henry, and of his toy cart, soon broken, a pathetic 'symbol of its owner who died in childhood. The truth is that Mrs. Labarge has deliberately chosen to present us with an unromanticized and unidealized picture of mediaeval domestic life, and this may breed dissatisfaction in some readers. However, if for these her book fails to satisfy, if some feel that she has in the end created a mosaic or woven a tapestry which we can only observe but never enter into, the fault lies, not with Mrs. Labarge, but with the intrinsic limitations of all purely social history. (J. G. RowE) The fifteenth century has always been one of the Dark Ages of English history. Original materials are voluminous enough; in fact the Public Record office houses them by the hundredweight, if not by the ton. Unfortunately they are mostly concerned with the details of administration . More vivid material, particularly for the middle years of the century, is, however, sadly lacking. The great monastic Latin chronicles end in i422 with Thomas Walsingham and the series of state papers which shows us the thoughts, motives, and the ultimate shifts and compromises of the men in power begins only in the next century. The writers of th~ intervening period are, with very few exceptions, myopic, naive, and comparatively ill-informed. Many of these chronicles must be consulted in nineteenth-century editions, which though textually accurate enough in many cases, fall sadly short of modem critical standards. Because of this paucity of information combined with inadequate editing, writers of political and constitutional histories have, until HUMANITIES 425 recently, seized upon any details-truth, rumour, or slander:-with the avidity of starving cormorants in the Andes and combined them into a political 11arrative completely deceptive in the certainty of its outline. So much is this true that the recent discovery of a short, and far from accomplished, Latin Chronicle in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, will add to our knowledge of even so obvious a matter as the dates of the sessions of parliament. On questions of motive we are in even worse case, particularly for the critical years of the middle of the century. W e possess a multitude of minor details about the estates and family connections of the earls of Salisbury and W arwick, the dukes of Buckingham and Norfolk and Richard, Duke of York, but only the most infrequent and occasional indications of what they were thinking. Their motives must generally be deduced from their acts-a process hit-and-miss in the extreme. From this material Dr. Wilkinson, in his Constitutional History of England in the Fifteenth Century, 1399-1485 (Longmans Canada, 1964, pp. x, 418, $8.40), has compiled a splendid collection of documents , for which all students of the period must be grateful, for it includes many extracts not easily available elsewhere. It will be of the greatest interest for undergraduates reading honours courses and, as detailed references are always given, it will lead more advanced scholars to much interesting material. Dr. Wilkinson precedes each section of documents by an introduction explaining in some detail his conclusions on fifteenth-century constitutional development and draws the reader's attention to particular documents which...