The reign of Edward III: crown and political society in England, 1327-1377 (review)

Reviews 147 term in Neuse's readings is 'ambiguity' and it is aesthetic ambiguity which allows each poettofindspace for the physical and psychological individuality of human beings in God's created universe. For Neuse, Chaucer's own two tales, Sir Thopas and Melibee, become key points of contact in the inter-textual exercise that exists between the Comedy and The Canterbury Tales. Each articulates key thematic and theatrical revisions of the Italian epic. Similarly, new readings of other tales work to lift Chaucer's achievement to the level of Dante and both poets are seen as engaged in major epistemological recreations of the classical tradition. Norman Simms English Department University of Waikato Ormrod, W. M., The reign of Edward 111: crown and political society in England 1327-1377, N e w Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xiii, 280; 13 plates, 2 genealogical tables; R.R.P. US$30.00. Edward Ill's long reign has attracted much less attention from English historians than the catastrophic short reigns of Edward II and Richard II. N o scholarly biography of Edward III has been published since the eighteenth century, although his son the Black Prince, earned three studies in a single anniversary year and even his squalid mistress, Alice Peners, cut afigureas The Lady ofthe Sun. Yet constitutional historians have long recognised that the medieval parliament took its shape and substance in Edward Ill's reign and aU writers on war and chivalry have shared something of Froissart's enthusiasm for the victor of Crecy. It has been left to Dr Ormrod to develop his D. Phil, thesis of 1984 into ten articles in the most prestigious journals and now to consolidate a decade of preoccupation with the England of Edward III into a book which wiU remain essential reading for many years. After a forty-page nanative of Edward's reign, conventionally taking the period 1341 to 1377 as distinct from the 'early* and 'later' years, the book examines six major topics: the king, the ministers, the magnates, the clergy, provincial society and the gentry, and urban society and the merchants. Each of these thematic chapters takes in the entire half century of Edward's reign, so there is inevitably some overlapping. There is also a tendency to pluck examples from widely differing decades but, on the whole, the presentation is cogent responsible, and appropriately illustrated, often from unfamiliar sources. Throughout the book, Ormrod's depth of reading in the Public Record Office gives an immediacy and authority to his explanations of political behaviour at all levels in fourteenth-century England. In contrast, Ormrod uses chronicles rather sparingly, probably too sparingly. 148 Reviews The conclusions reached by Ormrod all concern the polity. H e is content to leave the panoply of war, chivalry, culture and architecture to such as Allmand, Fowler and Juliet Vale. Ormrod emphasises that the emergence of the House of Commons, combining the interests both of the country gentry and the urban merchants, was of prime importance but within the King's control. However, the new will to demand redress of grievances before war taxation was approved by the C o m m o n s created a new element in constitutional development. Edward III was both uncommonly well financed and politically powerful. The isolation of the clergy into their own convocation, moreover, enhanced the king's political potential. Ormrod does well to emphasise the administrative changes, the professionalisation of the council, and the consolidation of financial reforms, which were fully as important as the better known parliamentary changes. He argues well for Edward's ability at getting his o w n way, through consensus and various forms of co-operation. In particular, his treatment of the nobility, their local influence, their inventiveness in creating trusts and entails to safeguard their landed inheritance, and their social aspirations, deals a series of telling thrusts against orthodoxy: 'Edward Ill's aim — and one of his greatest achievements — was to revive the tradition of aristocratic service destroyed in the civil wars and political conflicts of the 1320s ... His rapprochement with the magnates made him one of the foremost exponents of the art of political management in the...