Kings, Barons and Justices: The Making and Enforcement of Legislation in Thirteenth-Century England by Paul Brand (review)

REVIEWS 191 dreamer and the reader. The dreamer, shifting between his own mortal-bound view of things and the pearl maiden’s exposition of eternal time and space, is finally left comforted and yet still, Borroff argues, retains a “mortal partiality” (156) that grounds and shapes the poem as a whole. This chapter is followed by an appendix, “Rhyme-Sounds and Rhyme Words in Lines 1–120 of Pearl and Pety Job,” which shows how the meanings which the Gawain-poet carefully builds up through links of rhyme and alliteration are different from the more mechanical use of metrical form in Pety Job. Chapter 8, “Systemic Sound Symbolism in the Long Alliterative Line: Beowulf and Sir Gawain,” investigates the different effects of the same alliterating word, “good,” in the two forms of alliterative verse the poems represent. Borroff ’s chief argument is that in Beowulf, where the tight metrical form allows few extraneous words, “good” retains its full force of meaning when it is used and, furthermore, that the poem’s tone may often be traced through the words linked with “good” by the alliteration. A key example of this is at Beowulf’s death, where “good” is linked alliteratively with the “glēd” (fire) of Beowulf’s funeral pyre. In Sir Gawain, in contrast, the long alliterative line of Middle English verse allows extra-metrical fillers that pad out the lines with extraneous alliteration. So, while “good Gawain” is a common epithet in the poem, and is more frequently linked to Gawain’s name than it ever is to Beowulf’s, it is bleached in meaning. Borroff further argues that this bleaching shows a change from a certainty about “good” in Beowulf, where there is generally a correspondence of expectation and action, to a general uncertainty about both interior and exterior “good” in the later poem. The final two chapters make up the philological part of the book, though, as should be clear by now, the whole book has a largely philological bent. Chapter 9 is an excellent guide to and argument for reading the poem aloud. Chapter 10, “A Cipher in Hamlet,” dives into new territory but, in its discussion of Hamlet ’s sly, understated way of slipping in verbal insults against his enemies, may call to mind the earlier chapters on Chaucer’s elusive moral and social critiques. In sum, Traditions and Renewals is an excellent collection of essays by a top notch scholar, particularly fine in its use of philological detail to open up wider areas of interpretation within the poems. In addition to the three new essays, it is a great boon to have the seven previously published essays collected together in a single volume for easy access. MARGARET LAMONT, English, UCLA Paul Brand, Kings, Barons and Justices: The Making and Enforcement of Legislation in Thirteenth-Century England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2003) xix + 508 pp. Kings, Barons and Justices is a dense legal history of the creation of the Provisions of Westminster of 1259 and the subsequent revisions and reissues of the Provisions until their final iteration as the Statute of Marlborough of 1267. The Provisions come out of the Petition of the Barons in 1258, and reflect a power struggle between the king and the magnates. But the original legislation, surprisingly , is most concerned with tenant-lord relations and reforms to the justice system, many of which are of greater benefit to tenants lower down the social scale than to the lords themselves. The Provisions also safeguard some of REVIEWS 192 the king’s prerogatives. The subsequent revisions and reissues of the Provisions largely reflect a struggle over who would get credit for the reforms, the king or the barons. For the generalist, chapters 1, 2, and 3, plus the conclusion are the most useful . Chapter 1 outlines the process of drafting the original Provisions, including the forming of the Committee of Twenty-four in order to do so, while chapters 2 and 3 present the broader social and legal context out of which the individual clauses of the Provisions came. The succeeding chapters deal, in painstaking detail, with the enforcement of the Provisions of Westminster from 1259–1263, then...