Jonathan Sumption: Cursed Kings: The Hundred Years War IV (2015)

Edition: Faber & Faber, 2016
Review number: 1511

The fourth volume of Sumption's brilliant history of the Hundred Years' War is up to the standard he set in the earlier books, and very similar in many ways to them. Cursed Kings covers the early years of the fifteenth century (up to 1422). Until 1413, both countries were ruled by kings whose rule was compromised: Henry IV of England, who faced difficulties establishing the legitimacy of his rule after deposing Richard II; and Charles VI of France, who spent long periods mentally incapable of governing while the many other royal princes squabbled and diverted national resources to their personal gain. Neither reign was a period for a country to take pride in, and it often seems as though the governments of the two countries seem to be competing to make the poorest showing. Both crowns suffered from a chronic lack of financial resources, along with political disruption which was at times close to civil war. This means that the period was mostly one where the war was characterised by uneasy truces rather than open combat, at least until the accession of Henry V in 1413. The most interesting question about the early  years of the fifteenth century covered is what happened to make the immediate recovery of England so fast and so successful.

The second half of Cursed Kings is dominated by the effect of Henry V on the war. As Sumption says, "as with other successful warriors, his personality has been almost entirely masked by the uncritical adulation of contemporaries and the nostalgia of a later generation which lived to see his achievements undone". Being the subject of one of Shakespeare's best known and least ambiguous plays does not help, of course. I did occasionally feel that Sumption fell into the same trap that he warned about. Whatever he was like as a person, Henry's effect on the war was dramatic, and at one point, it looked as though France was about to be entirely extinguished as a nation. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that his personality, drive and ambition were the main reasons why the position changed so dramatically.

The book ends with the deaths of Henry V and Charles VI, paving the way for the final act of the long drawn out conflict to be covered in the final volume.

The book does include a fairly obvious copy editing error, not something I've seen in the earlier volumes. It is fairly minor (the town of Ham is described as "unwalled" on page 285, and then on page 286, its inhabitants "shout defiance" from these non-existent walls).

Julian Rathbone: Kings of Albion (2000)

Edition: Abacus, 2001
Review number: 1458


L.P. Hartley's line "The past is a foreign country" is often quoted, but it can be hard to realise just how different things were in former times. Kings of Albion is a novel which literalises the quotation to great effect. The plot is about an expedition sent out by the threatened Indian kingdom of Vijayanagara, to see if they can learn something from the far away English, who are rumoured even that far away to be the most warlike race on Earth. And the rumour turns out to be accurate, for they arrive at their destination in 1460, at the bloodiest period of the Wars of the Roses.

This device makes it possible for Rathbone to make us see how different England was 550 years ago, as the cultured Indian delegation react in horrified fascination to the things they see. Apart from being clever, Kings of Albion is also funny, with anachronism being used in a creative and humorous fashion: it is not out of place for the party to survive being caught between two gangs of youths from rival factions in Verona, but it seems so to the modern reader, because this is an episode from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. This sort of pre-echo is used to evoke films, plays, books, and twentieth century physics without technically breaking the historical mode of the novel.

Vijayanagara is a kingdom about which fairly little is known; according to Rathbone's preface, this is why he chose it, on the advice of an expert in Indian history. It enables Rathbone to construct a culture which produces a delegation with a philosophical outlook more like a person of today than a medieval Englishman, which heightens the shared reactions that we as readers have with the characters in the delegation.

Some modern devout Christians could still be offended by the religious themes of Kings of Albion, which concern on the one hand links between Hinduism and the origins of the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary, and some of the practices of the fifteenth century church on the other. But on the whole, most people should enjoy this evocation of medieval England which is reminiscent of the spirit of George MacDonald Fraser.

My rating: 9/10.

Michael Wood: Domesday (1986)

Edition: BBC, 1986 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 978

Produced as part of the nine hundredth anniversary of the production of the Domesday Book, this is the least accessible and least individual book which Wood has written. This is mainly because of the subject matter; to most amateur historians, Domesday is mainly of interest for local history of by the fact of its existence (being the earliest nationwide survey of land ownership and obligations of any European nation). Much of its true significance is seen by detailed and technical analysis, looking at the entries either statistically or in relation to whatever other information is available about a locality (Anglo-Saxon charters, for example).

Wood's book is actually not principally about Domesday itself. It is an account of the manorial system recorded there, about how it developed from Roman and early Anglo-Saxon farming practices until its decline in the later Middle Ages (the crisis being the plague of the 1340s). Since comparatively little is recorded about the lives of ordinary people in this period, much of the account is inferred from what evidence there is, which makes the book Wood's most academic. Considerable interest in history is required, but for the right reader there is much to enjoy.

Colin Platt: Medieval England: A Social History and Archaeology from the Conquest to 1600 AD (1978)

Edition: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 941

It is still usual for different types of historical study to be kept separate. This book, however, combines social history with archaeology most successfully. In most social histories, it is pretty much only documentary sources of various types which are used for those periods in which they exist in sufficient completeness. For most of the period covered in Medieval England, these sources are incomplete, fragmentary and usually have a clerical bias, though that doesn't stop historians using them. Platt, however, backs up much of what he has to say by reference to archaeology, particularly to the study of buildings.

This means that the examples illustrating the social history are not the usual ones; instead of passages from the Paston letters, say, Platt uses the ways in which churches were rebuilt in the fifteenth century, or the changes in village settlement patterns. This may be in many cases a rather superficial change, but it gives Medieval England an entirely different feel and gives a good excuse for the profuse illustrations, both photographs and diagrams.

The other effect that the concentration on the archaeological record allows Platt to do is to correct some of the erroneous impressions which tend to be left by history which is more popular in style. The best example of this is a discussion of the fourteenth century crisis, which is usually connected to the effects of the Black Death. Platt traces the fall to processes well under way half a century before the plague, which came as a final blow to an already over-stretched system. The evidence for this is partly documentary - accounts of trailbastons as a response to armed gangs roaming the countryside at the beginning of the century - and partly from the archaeology - such things as dates of abandonment of deserted villages.

This is also the reason that the book continues for so long after the conventional date for the end of the medieval period in England - the accession of the Tudors in 1485 - and even after the Reformation and dissolution of the monasteries which perhaps more than any other events could be said to mark the end of an era. There was still continuity in many areas, which can be more clearly seen from archaeology - buildings marrying fifteenth century styles with fashionable continental architectural ideas, for example. By the end of the book, though, it is very clear that the English society being described is in many ways very different from that a hundred and fifty years earlier.

Michael Wood: In Search of the Dark Ages (1981)

Edition: BBC Books, 1981 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 917

The TV series which this book accompanied was my first introduction to Michael Wood's style of history; then, it was not as personal as it has become (In Search of Alexander and Conquistadors being as much about his own journeying as about the history). Perhaps Wood's background as a Dark Ages scholar has something to do with this, making the book more academic in tone.

In form, the book is a series of examinations of pivotal characters from Britain between the Roman and Norman conquests - Boadicea, King Arthur, the Sutton Hoo body, Offa, Alfred, Athelstan, Eric Bloodaxe, Ethelred the Unready, and William the Conqueror. The emphasis is clearly political; even though the conversion of the English and the disputes between the Roman and Celtic churches are important to the development of medieval Britain, very little is said about them. There is nothing outside England, either, though this may because its history is better documented than other areas of the British Isles.

Of course, the book is not intended to be a narrative history of the period. It is a set of snapshots of prominent secular figures, and if there is any unifying theme, it must be the nature and development of Dark Ages kingship in England. The format certainly has the advantage that even the most uninformed about history are likely to have heard of most of the figures covered. In this way, the book does introduce a reader to the scene of England in the thousand years described here; at the same time, there is plenty of material to interest the reader who starts knowing more.

Michael Wood: In Search of England (1999)

Edition: Viking, 1999
Review number: 807

Like every nation, England has its collection of historical mythology, which is of varying truthfulness. This collection of essays is mostly about this subject, the famous and the less famous - Arthur and Robin Hood, on the one hand, to the survival of ancient crafts ("the last bowl-turner of England"), to turning points in English history. Though England is the unifying theme, the collection of essays is not sufficiently focused to make them read as though they were specially written for this book, and there plenty of things which could have provided interesting material but which are not covered - Magna Carta, Simon de Montfort and the English Parliament, and so on.

The eclectic approach is the major problem that In Search of England faces; in other respects (and certainly as far as individual chapters are concerned), it is as interesting and well written as Wood's earlier In Search of ... volumes. Wood's popular history offers a very personal approach particularly appropriate in the TV versions which have been made of some of the books; his obvious engagement with the past makes it exciting and alive for the view and reader.

G.M. Trevelyan: English Social History (1942)

Edition: Longmans, 1946
Review number: 697
Buy from Amazon

Trevelyan's best known work is a pioneering classic, and in many respects remains a great achievement. It covers the period from the early fourteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, and is one of the very first attempts to describe everyday life in England between these dates. It is not entirely consistent in approach, but in the main it centres around certain individuals whose writing is important in understanding their times: Chaucer, Defoe and Cobbett, for example.

While much of the writing is coloured by an upper class patrician attitude, and the history concentrates a bit too much on the experiences of the middle and upper classes - I can't really see that the change in fashion from deer to fox hunting, or the development of the examination system at Oxbridge really had much effect on the average English person - it remains a useful outline guide. More space could be given to the later periods, which had the most formative influence on our own society; at least, I feel that, because to me much of the interest in social history is concerned with how the culture in which we live today came about. Some sections are less interesting and there are occasional patches of arch humour that have dated badly. These are matched with some fascinating pieves of historical writing, notably the essay about the transition from medieval to modern Britain, which is a tour de force.

A lot of the popular history which you still see in bookshops was written about fifty or sixty years ago, like this book. It is still there because it is well written, but perhaps it is about time to move on.

Frank Stenton: Anglo-Saxon England (1943)

Edition: Oxford University Press, 1971
Review number: 644

For a long time now, the Oxford History of England has been the standard series of reference works on the subject. I suspect that time is running out for the volumes covering the earliest period, which rely so much on archaeology, and the one covering the twentieth century, which has been superseded by events. Even though, as its introduction states, there was felt to be little need to make changes for this edition (as subsequent discoveries had mainly confirmed Stenton's ideas), that itself was written almost thirty years ago.

Taking into account the limitations inherent in its age, Anglo-Saxon England is a truly classic history. It is intended for the interested general reader (its length would put off the casual browser), and is academic enough to be able to stand as a general reference work for a specialist. Eminently readable, learned and thorough, its main problem is a lack of source material, and that is hardly Stenton's fault. It also has a somewhat old-fashioned outlook, being mainly political and economic; if you want an account of the farming practices of the Anglo-Saxon peasant or of everyday life in a tenth century town you should look elsewhere.

Nigel Saul: The Batsford Companion to Medieval England (1983)

Edition: Batsford, 1983
Review number: 584

The introduction seems to imply that this book is aimed somewhere between those with an amateur and those with a professional interest in medieval history. This turns out to be a bit of a problem, and it becomes clear that Saul is not really sure at what level to pitch his writing to hit his target.

The articles are a little haphazard, though the criterion for what is to be covered seems to be related to what might be useful to, say, a local historian trying to make sense of what a church or a charter can tell them of the past of their own area. Thus, the kinds of things that are covered include government and law (terms which might be mentioned in documents such as "advowson"), and artefacts (coins, architecture and so on).

The book could have done with more cross references - the reader is unlikely to look under "government" if they are interested in Chancery, and Chancery has no article of its own. The coverage of some of the articles is rather idiosyncratic; the article on "government" already mentioned concentrates almost exclusively on finance, for example, which is not the only concern even of a medieval national government. (It has nothing to say about local government whatsoever.) There is a pro-clerical bias - quite minor English clerical figures are given articles, while the only non-royal nobleman to get one is Richard Neville Earl of Warwick (the "Kingmaker"). More about England's foreign affairs might have been interesting; information on this subject is mostly to be found in the articles on individual kings, other than the three specific articles on Scotland, Wales and the Hundred Years' War.

The book is rather slovenly produced, even having pages of different coloured paper. Proof reading seems to have been almost non-existent; one man has his name given differently in the title and the body of the article about him.

Though there is much in the book to criticise, most of the problems stem from the task Saul has set himself. Each of the long articles has to summarise material that could easily fill a book of its own, and in many cases the interested reader would want to consult such a book. (The coverage of archaeological subjects is of necessity too sketchy to allow a reader to perform a task like identifying a coin, for example.) This is provided for by the bibliography which accompanies each article, one of the best features of the book for a reader with access to a good library. As an encyclopaedia of the period, The Batsford Companion to Medieval England could be greatly improved, but it does contain much of interest.

Anne Brontë: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Edition: Granada
Review number: 464

Anne Brontë's best known novel is much less famous than those of her sisters. It is easy to see why; though it contains much which is praiseworthy, its faults are far more obvious.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall starts with the arrival of a mysterious stranger, apparently a widow, at the nearly derelict, remote, Wildfell Hall. After inital antipathy, local farmer Gilbert Markham senses a growing attraction between Helen Graham and himself. She eventually feels that she needs to reveal her past to him, and gives him a diary covering her disastrous marriage to the alcoholic Arthur Huntingdon. Then she receives word that Huntingdon, from whom she had fled to safeguard her son, is dangerously ill, and returns to their marital home to nurse him.

The novel falls into three sections: the initial friendship between Helen Graham and Markham; the diary of the Huntingdon marriage; and the events following the reading of the diary by Markham. The major strength of the novel, also an important feature in the works of Anne's sisters, is the depiction of gradually changing emotion, particularly in this case Markham's changing attitude to Helen Graham. The diary section is also very powerful in evoking Helen's growing despair at her husband's descent into alcoholism. This, and Huntingdon's initial charm, are modelled on Anne's brother Branwell, and it is a sufficiently honest and unredeemed portrayal to have caused trouble between Anne and her sisters.

The weaknesses of the novel are more structural. It supposedly takes epistolary form, being a collection of letters sent by Markham to a friend. The problem is that it reads more like a (fairly) continuous narration than a series of letters, for a large number of reasons. Markham also reveals things to his friend which he has been asked to keep secret, and which he has not even passed on to his mother and sister. (He definitely desires to do so, because he wants to refute malicious gossip about Helen Graham which is passing round the neighbourhood.) We learn nothing about the friend to whom the letters are addressed, not even where he met Markham, and no one in Markham's circle seems to know him at all. (No information about other people is ever passed on except incidentally as part of the main story.) Markham never responds to anything written by his friend (whose letters are not included), and he never writes about anything which is not germane to the novel's plot, so we don't even know what interests Markham (other than good looking widows). The inclusion of the diary is a little strange, as there is no real way that it can be included among the letters. So Anne Brontë has to include it as though it were written out from memory, which is absurd (it forms over a hundred pages of the novel). She more or less abandons the idea of the letters at the point when the diary is introduced, by remarking that it should begin a new chapter. The diary itself suffers from similar weaknesses where its content does not fit its supposed form. It is confused, for example, about whether it is a diary written at the time of the events it records, or a commentary written much later. Remarks such as "I have found it much easier to remember her advice than to profit from it" imply the latter, while the external descriptions of the diary and its dated entries imply the former.

Though the reader is conscious of these defects while reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, it remains an engrossing read. Its picture of the virtuous woman trapped by society in a marriage with a rapidly degenerating alcoholic is very powerful, particularly as the cruelty with which she is treated is principally mental stress rather than physical abuse.

Anthony Powell: The Soldier's Art (1966)

Edition: Mandarin, 1991
Review number: 430

More engrossing to read than the earlier volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time (because events start to move a little faster), the eighth novel in the series sees Nick Jenkins working as assistant to Kenneth Widmerpool. This means that instead of seeing, as before, just the results of Widmerpool's activities in his successful career, we experience the under-hand manipulation and self centredness which produce these results. Still in a battalion in Northern Ireland (this is not explicitly stated, but a deserter escapes across a land border), Nick is almost too far from the action of the war to be practising the soldier's art in any traditional form, but Widmerpool's scheming provides the reason for the title. This is the first book in the series in which the origin of the title is made explicit; it comes from a line in Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, which says that the soldier's art is to "think first, fight afterwards". It seems to me, particularly as I read this book just after rereading John Keegan's The Face of Battle, that thinking is what front line soldiers really need to avoid doing. However, it describes Widmerpool's unscrupulous scheming quite well, and Powell obviously seems to think that it brought success for a wartime officer.

The most bizarre event in the novel is the reappearance of Charles Stringham, who volunteered following his cure from alcoholism. However, rather than becoming an officer like others of his social status, he is the waiter in the officers' mess. Embarrassed, Widmerpool pulls strings to get him reassigned to the battalion's Mobile Laundry, which he happens to know is about to be moved to the Far East - a long way to move someone just to save a little embarrassment. Stringham turning up is exactly the sort of coincidence which mars the plotting of A Dance to the Music of Time - why should he be assigned to the officers' mess in Nick's unit out of all the possible billets in the wartime army?

Charles Dickens: Bleak House (1853)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 414

This famous attack on the excesses of the Court of Chancery is one of my favourite Dickens novels. By the nineteenth century, Chancery was a medieval anachronism which still made decisions on property disputes arising out of wills. Based on obscure law and strange principles of equity, its judgements were expensive and time consuming, incomprehensible even to most lawyers. Cases dragged on for many years - generations, even - frequently incurring costs beyond the sums disputed, occasionally eating up the entire estate in question in costs before a decision was reached.

Such a case forms the background to Bleak House. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce has gone on for years, casting uncertainty over the lives of those embroiled in it, including the young orphans Richard Carstone and Ada Clare, who are wards of the court because of their inherited interests in the case. They are adopted by their genial and charitable cousin John Jarndyce, who takes them to live in his home, Bleak House, in attempted reparation for the shadow of the suit. As in Much Ado About Nothing, the conventional main plot of Bleak House (the romance between Richard and Ada) takes second place to events involving more interesting characters. Their cousin brings them together with the focus of another of his charitable projects, the gentle Esther Summerson. Much of the novel is told from her point of view - it is written in an unusual combination of first and third person narrative, depending on whether Esther witnesses events or not. Other than an over sentimental side, she is quite charming and easily becomes the most important personality in the book. The mystery of her parentage is one of the important strands of the plot.

But it is the minor characters who are the main treasures of Bleak House, both likeable and unlikeable. In the latter category there are several characters satirising the Victorian obsession with charity. Mrs Jellyby is the most prominent of these, obsessed with projects for the natives of Borriboola-Gha to the exclusion of bringing up - or even noticing - her large family. On the likeable side, there are several who are connected in some way with the Chancery, and these include one of my favourite of all Dickensian characters, Miss Flite, at one time a party to a Chancery suit driven mad by the proceedings of the court.

Bleak House is a remarkably genial novel for a satire with the intention to provoke reform. This is partly due to the nature of the target (best exemplified through the metaphorical fog which appears throughout the novel), but it also produces a sense of helplessness in the face of legal obfuscation which in the end makes its point even more strongly.

Anthony Powell: A Question of Upbringing (1951)

Edition: Penguin, 1962
Review number: 249

The first volume of Dance to the Music of Time sets a fairly comfortable tone. After all, narrator Nicholas Jenkins and his set have many advantages in the England of the thirties, going from minor public school to Cambridge (with a summer in France in between to improve their French). The book is correspondingly uneventful, as they grow up in an environment where little effort is demanded from them and where, indeed, great effort would be considered rather strange. A Question of Upbringing is about their growing up, from the sixth form to university, and the lack of incident in their lives is perhaps indicated by Powell starting his story at that comparatively late age; no hint is given of their lives in the lower school.

The serene background is a contrast to the sequence of novels to which it is perhaps most tempting to compare Dance to the Music of Time, C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers. There, conflict is introduced through a character who does not fit in, who attends the public school and university despite his class background rather than because of it. The principal impression left by the first novel in Music in Time is one of serenity, despite the crises of adolescence portrayed in it. There is, of course, the depression and then the war awaiting these young men, but they don't know that yet.

Arthur Bryant: Set in a Silver Sea (1984)

Edition: Collins, 1984
Review number: 161

In his introduction to Set in a Silver Sea, Arthur Bryant says that he believes that each generation needs its own popular history, a book based on recent scholarship to help people understand the past and its particular relationship to the times. In particular, the general histories available before the eighties were still very concerned with political history, ignoring the social and economic history that has proved so important in academic history over the last fifty years or so. In some ways, Arthur Bryant was ideally placed to write such a history of England, having recently completed a large multi-volume academic history of the country, which he drew on for Set in a Silver Sea.

The fact the Bryant was retired when he began to write Set in a Silver Sea has both positive and negative consequences for the book, at least as it affected me while I read it. After a long and illustrious career as a historian, he could certainly speak from a position of knowledge. But as an old age pensioner, could he really be said to be writing for the generation of the eighties? I would consider myself to have passed my formative years in the eighties, and I must be over forty years younger than Bryant. My perspective on history is certainly somewhat different, at least a few steps further removed from the chivalric adventures that filled histories of the middle ages written in the nineteenth century.

And that brings me to another problem; this history, ostensibly covering the period from the earliest prehistoric settlements to the end of the fourteenth century, is really a history of the middle ages. The whole period up to the reign of Alfred, thousands of years, is covered in forty pages; the five hundred years of the middle ages from that date takes the remaining four hundred or so. If Bryant was uninterested in the earlier period, it would perhaps be helpful to say so; if this is meant to be a general history, a more general coverage is necessary. That is not to say that the history of the five hundred year period which takes up the major part of the book is not excellent; Bryant succeeds in giving an insight into the medieval mind which does not usually come through in this sort of work.

J.F. Plumb: England in the Eighteenth Century (1950)

Edition: Penguin, 1968
Review number: 111

This book, covering the reigns of the first three Georges (1714-1820), is perhaps the least successful in the Pelican History of England. The brevity of its coverage (imposed as a series restriction) is the main cause of this. There were many important developments during the eighteenth century involving - and frequently commencing in - Britain, not just in the social and economic spheres (the events collectively referred to as the Industrial Revolution) but in the political arena as well (the French and American revolutions and the development of British rule in India spring to mind).

The century saw so many developments important to the way we live now that they can only be sketched in brief in a book of this length. To try and get round this, Plumb assumes that his readers will have at least some sort of basic familiarity with the political history of the period, if not the social and economic. Thus, one section of the book is entitled "The Age of Chatham", yet he omits to mention that Pitt and Chatham are one and the same; so one who did not know this, it would not become obvious until the paragraph in a later section detailing the rise of his grandson, Pitt the Younger.

As the background to English affairs becomes more complex and more international, short paragraphs explaining the European situation are not enough to put its influence on them into context. This book cannot, like the earlier members of the series, be read as an introduction to a period; it is more a useful summary and a reminder to those who have already read more on the eighteenth century.

Doris Mary Stenton: Engish Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) (1951)

Edition: Penguin
Review number: 56

This book forms part of the excellent, though now rather outdated, Pelican History of England, and it shows both the merits of the series as a whole and the limitations of its approach. Each period possesses its own difficulties for historiographers; in the Middle Ages these are the paucity and one-sided nature of sources, and the alienness of the medieval mindset to modern Western Europeans. The statistical sources so important to the work of historians like Braudel are completely missing; it is thus difficult to check on economic and even on political statements in the sources which do exist. The clerical monopoly on literary endeavour also leads to bias, though I doubt that this is so much a problem as is somethimes thought - the number of clerics was sufficiently large to prevent them all being of one mind on issues such as the character of the king.

Stenton's book is intended for a popular readership, to such an extent that she was not allowed to include footnotes in early editions. This and the limitations of length, and her understanding of the period prevent the above from becoming too great a problem. Her concentration on social history - this is the only book in the series to have the word "Society" in its title - means that she can avoid the snap judgements on prominent figures common in such works and parodied by Sellars and Yeatman in 1066 and All That ("King John was a bad king.") It does mean that the paucity of resources becomes a problem; what can be said, for example, about changes in land ownership when one register was used as an authority on ownership throughout the period (the Domesday Book). The many excellencies in her treatment of the issues, particularly the growth of the state, are complemented by an attempt to understand the people from every walk of life from nobles to peasants. I look forward to re-reading the other books in the series.