The Royal Forests of Medieval England by Charles R. Young (review)

REVIEWS certain beliefs or dramatic situations in ways that could impress unlet­ tered folk and allow them to take these ideas home for further thought. Later, Wenzel rightfully backs away from claiming that the Fasciculus reaches the intense meditative profundity of a Donne, yet at the same time these simple poems are capable of possessing a trenchant power that can approach the epigram. Let us remember Ball at Blackheath in 1381. Wenzel notes, after an historical rundown, that the tradition slackens during the later fifteenth century, but does not offer any hypotheses for the decline. Perhaps no one can. Chapter III offers the poems themselves, preceded by a defense of their originality and diveristy, with the general disclaimer that they are "at best third- or fourth-class citizens in the kingdom of lyrics" (p. 121). It is true that when these poems are excised from their original context, with the prose introductions, they do appear rather truncated and naked. Yet that can be said of many short lyrics. To make the poems stand forth in whatever glory they originally possessed, one needs the entire treatise. Wenzel himself compares the works to "punch-lines," and punch-lines can only be effective with the proper lead-ins. The reader who wants the whole story will be pleased to learn that Wenzel himself is contemplat­ ing a fuller edition that includes the Latin text, along with a translation even of the Middle English, which, despite the editor's excellent glosses, is often hard. Students who demand from literature more than superficial delight will look forward to its arrival. JAMES]. WILHELM Rutgers University CHARLES R. YOUNG, The Royal Forests ofMedieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979. Pp. ix, 220; 3 maps. $14.00. Hitherto, non-specialists inquiring about this subject have usually first consulted]. C. Cox, The Royal Forests ofEngland(1905), and despite its anecdotal and antiquarian character Cox's book is in many respects not fully outdated; but as a political and administrative history it is quite 185 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER superseded by C. R. Young's excellent new monograph. In narrative histories of the Middle Ages the forests are usually given minor treat­ ment or considered an antiquarian curiosity. But, as Young reminds us, at their height of importance they may have comprised as much as a quarter ofthe arable land in England; they were in themselves subject not to the common law but to the king and his officials; in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they were an immensely important source of royal income-in cash, kind, fees, etc. (see esp. pp. 130-34}--and from the late twelfth to the early fourteenth century their limits and the king's privileges in them were the subject of intense controversy between the king and his barons. This study, amply documented from original sources and modem studies, is chiefly concerned with the period ofcontroversy, from Henry II to the first years ofEdward III, but some attention is given to the later fourteenth century. It is to a great extent a work ofsynthesis, with few major novelties, but it is nevertheless welcome and even necessary. The maps are enlightening, and although the technical terminology (eyre, swanimote, purpesture, agist, etc.) is unfamiliar and unexplained, Cox and the OED explain it. After reading Cox and Young, the interested reader can pursue the subject further by means ofYoung's exemplary and wide-ranging bibliography, the only major omission from which, from a literary standpoint, is E. F. Shannon, Jr., "A Medieval Law in Gamelyn" (Speculum, 26 [1951], 458-64). Marcelle Thiebaux, The Stag ofLove: The Chase in Medieval Literature (1974) probably appeared too late for inclu­ s10n. Young devotes most of his attention to the causes and the effects of two periods ofcrisis involvingroyal-baronialconflict about the forests: in 1217 and following and in 1297 and following. According to him, a statute of l Edward III (1327) "may be taken as a turning point leading to the decline of the royal forest in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries" (p. 147). Thereafter, significant disafforestation occurred, and the administration ofthe forests decayed and was neglected. Young suggests that the diminished importance was due to...