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The Journal of Military History 71.1 (2006) 211-212

Reviewed by
Stephen Morillo
Wabash College
Crawfordsville, Indiana
The Place of War in English History: 1066–1214. By J. O. Prestwich. Edited by Michael Prestwich. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer, 2004. ISBN 1-84383-098-1. Appendixes. Notes. Index. Pp. xix, 138. $75.00.

This is, inevitably, an odd book. The late J. O. Prestwich delivered the Ford Lectures that form the bulk of the text in 1983; he had been given the Lectureship, as his son and editor of this volume, Michael Prestwich, explains in the Acknowledgments, in the hope that he would publish the lectures in timely fashion and so provide a more extended explication of his views of Anglo-Norman history than his few (brilliant) scholarly articles had hitherto done. The electors were disappointed, and that the lectures appear at all, even more than twenty years late, is due to the efforts of the younger Prestwich. For this reviewer, whose graduate career Prestwich helped shape, this volume took on the added dimension of a meeting with an old friend. And yet, the volume is not simply a dated tribute piece. John Prestwich's analyses are so incisive, his way with sources so careful and critical, his knowledge of the relevant sources so broad and deep, that there is much here that may be read with profit by medievalists and military historians alike. Michael Prestwich has also thoroughly updated the bibliography for each chapter and added suggested readings at the end. [End Page 211]

Prestwich considers general problems of sources and interpretation in Chapter 1, stressing that military history must be seen in its political, administrative, and social contexts. He notes the problems with the problematic concept of "feudalism," treated at length in the first of two appendixes, in an assessment which is dated not because recent scholarship has passed him by but only because it has finally caught up with his skepticism. Chapter 2 looks at the conduct of war, and Chapter 3 examines "Sea Power" in the era, and is perhaps the most original and currently valuable section of the book. Chapters 5 and 6, on War and Government and War and the Economy, add to the best known of Prestwich's articles. In addition to the appendix on "feudalism," a second extended appendix examines selected questions about the composition of royal military forces in this period, with emphasis on the employment of mercenaries. Prestwich summarizes the place of war in English history during this era as both destructive and constructive, noting that it occupied the thoughts and efforts of rulers far more than common subjects.

A complete assessment of how Prestwich's work looks today must note the ways in which it will appear dated outside the field of military history, however. This is not so much a matter of scholarship having answered the questions Prestwich was still considering when he first wrote. Instead, the very qualities of Prestwich's analysis and the assumptions that underlie it—that war was largely shaped by material factors, that medieval commanders were rational calculators of those factors, and that we can understand their rationality because we share it—will be subject to question by historians who stress the importance of culture (including religion) and identity formation in assessing medieval actors, and whose approach to the sources leans more to deconstructionism. And there is a certain Anglo-centrism apparent even in the book's title that historians of British Isles history may note. The latter may be excused as a product of the limits of space (the lectures as a whole are selective rather than synthetic). As to the former, it is doubtful that Prestwich, who never wrote about religion and who was a critic of Sir Richard Southern's view of the Middle Ages, would have taken to The Cultural Turn even had he had the chance. For better or worse, most contemporary military historians will probably find Prestwich's method agreeable, and in any case will profit from...

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