Richard II by Nigel Saul (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER schools existed without instruction in reading.And some of the song schools that did teach reading also taught grammar, despite Russell's claim that Latin was "never construed" by this population. While such neglect of current scholarship presents grave problems, the interpretations of the individual tales in Chaucer and the Trivium should be well received.While the relevance of medieval preuniversity education to the book's discrete readings of Chaucerian texts is not al­ ways apparent, Russell's study is sure to provoke further work on the topic. BRUCE HOLSINGER University of Colorado, Boulder NIGEL SAUL.Richard II. Yale English Monarchs Series. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997.Pp.xii, 514.$4 0 .00cloth, $18.00paper. That, at the end of the twentieth century, the Yale English Monarchs should have become (or so its dust jacket proclaims) "a classic series, arguably the classic series in historical biography"-indeed, that such a series should have been thought of at all-might have surprised an ear­ lier generation of historians.Writing before there was even such a thing as an "Annales school," Eileen Power suggested that though "we still praise famous men ...we praise them with due recognition of the fact that not only great individuals, but people as a whole, unnamed and undistinguished masses of people, now sleeping in unknown graves, have been part of the story"; there is no need, then, to espouse one of the wilder brands of French historiography ("history without people," "immobile history") in order to feel that there is something rather paro­ chial about this whole enterprise.That said, Nigel Saul's biography of Richard II fills a distinct gap.With the notable exception of Armitage­ Smith, older writers of late medieval political biography (such as Wylie, Vickers, and Schofield) evidently found the fourteenth century less at­ tractive than the fifteenth, and the previous standard life of Richard (Anthony Steel's) is a slight thing by comparison.Steel's was, in fact, a political history in the narrowest sense (as Galbraith noted with ap­ proval), and those seeking a more extended view of Richard's reign had 534 REVIEWS either to turn to the last 150 pages ofMay McKisack's Fourteenth Century or to supplement their reading with more specialized studies such as Ruth Bird's or Gervase Mathew's. If I have some reservations about Saul's success, then, they should be read in this context; he has at­ tempted the first comprehensive modern biography of Richard II and his achievement is considerable: the historical scholarship is generally painstaking, the writing on the whole lucid, and the scope, given the limitations imposed by the genre, impressive. It will doubtless serve as the standard account ofthe reign for many years to come, and readers of this journal, searching out historical background for the literary texts they are working on, will find much of value in it. My main reservation is with the way Saul handles the central problem his subject presents him with, the enigmatic and protean character of the king himself. The Westminster Chronicle (one of the most important sources for the period 1381-94, and one that Saul himself relies upon heavily) offers us, according to its most recent editor, Barbara Harvey, two distinct Richards: the early one, temperamental and vainglorious, and the later one, temperate and conciliatory. Had the chronicler con­ tinued on to the end ofthe reign he might well have had to portray yet a third Richard, the arrogant and vindictive tyrant of the final years, 1397-99. How are we to account for this royal chameleon? We might put it down to the incompetence, ignorance, or bias ofthe chronicler (or chroniclers), but this is an explanation Harvey herself rejects, attribut­ ing the change in the king to the harsh schooling of the Merciless Par­ liament and its aftermath; he had to learn "the necessity of often dis­ sembling, proceeding adroitly and biding his time." Harvey's Richard, however (in essence, a Richard whom Steel would have recognized), is certainly not Saul's. When Saul's Richard sheds "the brittle and inflexible behaviour ofhis adolescent years" and assumes "the character ofa mature and...