The Wars of the Roses: military activity and English society, 1452-97 (review)

184 Short Notices the Grand Duke, Francesco de'Medici, contributed to the financial crisis of the 1580s which ushered in a long period of depression. While historians may disagree about when Florence's golden age came to an end, it cannot be postponed beyond the 1580s. While Cipolla does relate mints and coins to Grand Ducal and banking house politics, his book nevertheless remains very much one for speciaUsts. Roslyn Pesman Cooper Department of History University of Sydney Goodman, Anthony, The Wars of the Roses: military activity and English society, 1452-97, rpt, London, Roufledge, 1990; paper; pp. xii, 294; 2 maps, 1 genealogical table; R. R. P. AUS$26.95 [distributed in Australia by the Law Book Company]. Dr Goodman's thorough and responsible study of the civil wars in later fifteenthcentury Englandfirstappeared in 1981. The present book is a simple reissue. There is no new introduction, no survey of the last decade of quite intense study of Lancastrian and Yorkist England, and no Ust of the recent literature, much of it in celebratory volumes or conference papers. As a result an opportunity has been lost. Goodman's book was a good one in 1981, and remains good, but it was hardly a definitive study. Nor was it a historiographical watershed such as McFarlane's posthumously pubhshed Nobility of later medieval England, which appeared twenty years after he deUvered the Ford Lectures in 1953. The strong points of Goodman's approach remain. Students and the general pubhc need to be reminded that civil war is singularly harsh, that the pitched battles of this period were very different from continental siege warfare, and that casualties, damage and looting were all serious social problems, not only to combatants. Goodman's sophisticated approach to sophisticated technology remains relevant to warfare. H e argues that artillery was expensive and slowed down an army's march, that hasty campaigns made ordnance hard to muster and that the insistence, as in 1460, of the Lancastrians in 'tying themselves to their Midlands arsenal' (p. 173) could be self-defeating. Goodman's contrast of the artiUery piece as a virile symbol with the sporadic success of more mobile forces unencumbered by symbols is an antidote to simplistic thinking about medieval warfare. R. Ian Jack Department of History University of Sydney ...