Henry I: King of England and Duke of Normandy (review)

Green (University of Edinburgh) has spent her career studying aspects of Henry I's important reign, and this book synthesizes her conclusions about the reign and the ruler. Green's assessment of her subject is a complete and well-rounded one, complementing in many ways the larger but more diffuse (and arguably unfinished) biography of Henry by the late Warren Hollister. Green is also less enamored of the king than Hollister was; whether her more critical take is more accurate may be largely a matter of taste since Henry's personality is hard to get at in convincing detail, given the limits of the sources.

Green does try hard to get at the personal Henry, assessing what the chroniclers say about him and inferring what she can from his acta. But inevitably the public Henry receives more attention, in ten chronological chapters followed by three thematic ones on rulership, relations with the church, and court culture. Green's central contention is that Henry's reign had a transformational effect on a number of areas of the Anglo-Norman world, especially on governance and law in England, despite the fact that the king's attitude towards his role and his kingdom was very traditional. She shows how Henry's able defense of tradition, closely connected to his long maintenance of stability, in the midst of changing times, laid unplanned foundations of institutional structures and legal practices that would be built upon more intentionally by his grandson. And in the area of court culture and its connection to the intellectual currents of the twelfth century, she credits Henry's court with a leading creative role in the period, though the role of the king himself in this development, beyond being a patron and provider of stability, seems not to have been central.

This is, then, a valuable, well argued, and convincing study. For readers of this journal, however, its offerings will probably seem a bit thin. Green pays less attention to questions of military organization, campaigning, and battles than Hollister did in his biography of Henry and has fewer original things to say about such topics. Readers interested in the military history of the reign are better served by more specialist works, including J. O. Prestwich's The Place of War in English History, 1066–1214, reviewed recently in this journal. It is debatable whether the relative lack of analysis of Henry's military activity is a flaw in the work as conceived. The judgments Green presents about Henry as a commander are sound and supported by her general picture of the king's personality and achievements, and though warfare itself is perhaps shorted, its many and varied ties to diplomacy, aristocratic politics, and the fiscal and institutional development of the English state are clearly adumbrated. As long as readers do not expect a military focus, what they find in Green's study will not disappoint.