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).

Marc Bloch: Feudal Society (1940)

Translation: L.A. Manyon, 1962
Edition: Routledge Kegan Paul, 2014
Review number: 1507

The foreword to this Routledge Classics edition, by Geoffrey Kozol, starts by asking, "Why read a work of history written over seventy years ago?" Clearly, after such a long time, a scholarly work of this kind no longer represents current knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, any more than earlier historical classics like Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Carlyle's history of The French Revolution do.

Each of the books mentioned, including this one, has good reasons why you might want to read them. Three in particular are common to all of them: they have all been influential in one way or another; they are all quite general overviews of topics often treated on a smaller scale by specialists; and they are all of high literary quality.

In Feudal Society Bloch attempts a study of several centuries of Western European social history, analysing the genesis, flowering and eventual modification into something else of the culture known as "feudal" - that is, based around vassal/overlord relationships, tied to land grants (fees, the origin of the word feudal). Given the fragmentary state of the documentary record, especially in the early years going beyond the major chronicles to understand the society is hard work, but in this book Bloch uses a huge array of small scale records (mainly legal documents) to produce as full a picture as possible.

To research this way is now far more common, but the scale of the project in this case means that it is still an impressive synthesis - indeed, it would be fair to say that Bloch is phenomenally successful. Naive historical accounts, in any era, tend to paint a picture of society as though it remains the same over long periods of time, so that Roman customs and fashion appear to be constant from the late Republic to the end of the Empire, for instance, or (more relevantly) as though feudalism as an organising principle sprang into being in the tenth century and then was replaced during the fifteenth, and was the same in France, Germany, Italy and even England after the cataclysm of 1066. It is clear that these pictures are nonsensical, and Bloch of course gives a far more nuanced and subtle description of a culture which was never uniform, and which developed significantly over time. Bloch identifies the economic downturn of the late Carolingian era and the disruptions to social order and centralised power at the time of the Magyar and Viking raids as causes of the adoption of personal vassalage and serf labour in the manorial system, as a development of Germanic and Roman customs. The argument is convincing, but I would like to read a modern equivalent of this book to see how today's scholarship has modified this viewpoint. That is, of course, if there is a modern historian with such detailed and widespread knowledge and understanding.

At the end of Feudal Society, Bloch suggests that one area which could the focus of further study is how European feudalism is related to other historical cultures which have been described using the word. He discusses in particular the Japan of the samurai, and describes a number of significant differences from medieval western Europe. Although I don't think it's all that clear from the text, I'm sure that Bloch was perfectly well aware that the use of the "feudal" label for Japan is based on superficial likenesses: the real interest is to look at how and why the similarities and differences on opposite sides of the globe.

Overall, Feudal Society is an inspiring classic from "the father of scientific history", and, like Carlyle and Gibbon, deserves to be read and remembered. My rating: 10/10.

Michael Angold: Byzantium: The Bridge From Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2001)

Edition: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001
Review number: 1026

While Angold, as Professor of Byzantine History at Edinburgh University, clearly knows the subject, his popular style book about the Eastern Roman Empire neither matches its subtitle nor the description on the inside cover. While in the west the discontinuity provided by the barbarian conquests is at least an explanation of the change from a classical to a medieval culture (and even there the picture is really much more complex), the political continuity at Constantinople presents a fascinating study - how did things change, what resisted or promoted change, and how different was life in the Byzantine Empire from that in western Europe?

What we have here is a competent, fairly easy to follow history of the Byzantine Empire from the time of Constantine the Great to the resolution of the Iconoclast controversy, a period of about six centuries, with an epilogue describing Norman Sicily (as a cultural melange of Western, Byzantine and Islamic influences). It is almost entirely political and cultural, and is an old fashioned narrative history. As such, it throws virtually no light on the relationship between classical and medieval that its title suggests is the theme of the book; nor does it cover the end of the Empire as the inside front cover suggests. My feeling is that the history of the economic relationship between east and west, particularly changes in trade routes in the Mediterranean, would say more about the change between the two periods, while a sociological study of the eastern and western cultures would help illuminated just what medieval means in the Byzantine context. To do this for a general readership would be quite a feat, but I feel that Angold has missed his opportunity.

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.

Nick Aitchison: Macbeth: Man and Myth (1999)

Edition: Sutton Publishing, 2000 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 898

Because of Shakespeare's play, Macbeth is easily the most famous Scottish king (Mary Queen of Scots may be the country's most famous monarch). However, the drama's version of his life bears little relation to the small amount of contemporary information about him. Aitchison's book attempts to put what we do know in the context of early medieval Scotland, and then to examine how and why the myth enshrined in the play developed.

Basically, the only fact common to the known facts and the myth is the murder of Duncan, and this is crucial to understanding it. Until about the tenth century, when Macbeth lived, murder was the most common cause of death for Scottish kings. Their system of succession was the reason for this; the kingship alternated between different branches of the royal family, and when a lengthy reign began to make it look as though a turn might be missed, murder was the common and acceptable solution. Macbeth had even more justification, for Duncan was the grandson of the previous king, Malcolm II, who had tried to change the rules to a patrilinear succession of the eldest son. Thus Duncan's kingship (also marked by military failures, not a propitious sign for his regime) threatened the existence of Macbeth's right to the throne.

So if his "crime" was justified by the rules of the period, and given that Macbeth went on to become a successful monarch (having a long reign, and a country stable enough for him to become the only Scottish king to make the pilgrimage to Rome), why did he become the centre of the story of treachery and witchcraft current by the end of the medieval period? The key to this is in the success of Duncan's son Malcolm III in completing the change in the rules of succession; from Duncan are descended all the Scottish kings after 1058. This line had every interest in promoting the legitimacy of their rule, especially as the English were beginning to interfere in Scottish affairs, and so they portrayed Macbeth as an usurping criminal - he was an early victim of political spin. The other elements gradually crept in until the story we know today appeared in the history of Boece (1527) and the chronicles of Holinshed (1577), the source for many of Shakespeare's historical plays.

The story is fascinating, for anyone interested in early medieval history or in the way in which stories develop. Aitchison tells it well, making quite academic points in a clear and easily understood manner. In some places, the book is marred by over-repetition, and the final section about the places associated with Macbeth is dull, but in general this is an excellent book.

Piers Paul Read: The Templars (1999)

Edition: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999
Review number: 862

In Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, every conspiracy theory, every mad story about secret societies, all of them involve the Templars. Their dramatic downfall and the bizarre accusations made against them tend to overshadow the rest of their two centuries of history and the purpose for which they worked.

Read aims to set out something of the true history of the Templars, avoiding the sort of speculation that Eco was talking about. His book is aimed squarely at the popular market, with a good deal being a retelling of very well known medieval history. He spends some time explaining some of the background of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, (to establish the importance of the Temple in Jerusalem), and to describe the development of monastic ideals (as the Templars were a monastic order), the authority of the papacy and the background to the Crusades. Most of the book is in fact a history of the Crusades, and my major criticism of it is that Read doesn't make enough effort to narrate the history with the role of the Templars at the centre.

In the end, despite Read's efforts to put the order in its context, it is the downfall of the Templars which forms the most interesting part of the book. In contrast to many narratives of the story, he makes it seem almost inevitable, as the Templars failed to adapt as the Hospitallers did after the fall of Acre and the end of the Western presence in Palestine in 1291. Unlike the other order, they put a low emphasis on learning (particularly in the law which increased massively in importance at around this time), and they were much more dependent on the West (conquering the island of Rhodes effectively made the Hospitallers independent of the control of Western monarchs). The massive psychological blow of the fall of Acre thus made them particularly vulnerable, so that when Philip IV of France moved against them, they were in a poor position to try and stand up to him, and the old fashioned, elderly grand master, James de Molay, found it impossible to make any coherent plan of resistance. Even so, it did take about ten years from the initial accusations to the final suppression of the order, and this is something brought out by Read which is a contrast to many other accounts.

The Templars includes too much background to really be a history of the order; there is scope for a more focused narrative, even one aimed at the same popular audience. I would have wanted to see more on how the Templars became a prototype of the banking houses of the late Middle Ages, more about how as a multinational organisation they related to the states around them (to phrase the question in an anachronistic way) - they very nearly became a state in their own right, when a childless Spanish ruler bequeathed his kingdom to them; his relatives managed to have the will overturned. This is perhaps of some relevance today, as the nation state is declining and the power of international corporations is growing. Read is a good writer, though, and his book is an interesting history of the Crusades even if it does not really throw new light upon its subject.

Jonathan Sumption: The Albigensian Crusade (1978)

Edition: Faber & Faber, 1978
Review number: 672

Of all the facets of medieval culture which differ from their modern equivalents, the one which is the most difficult to understand is the most important. The Catholic church and western European culture were literally synonymous - with the name Christendom - and the church was totally dominant in every area of life. One of the most important rights that many people today take completely for granted - and I am aware that it is not one which everybody possesses - is freedom of religion, not just the freedom to practice whatever religion chosen, but to practise no religion at all. This right is so familiar to most of us that we hardly realise that we practise it. And yet, it would have been completely incomprehensible to a medieval peasant.

This means that the Albigensian Crusade, which seems to us to be a great crime, was at the time considered not only desirable but absolutely necessary. To be a heretic, defying the church, was to be denying the fundamental core of society, was to be attempting to destroy society completely. Heresy was an illness which had to be eradicated, whatever the cost.

Sumption's book is a fairly direct description, as much as one is possible, of the campaigns which make up the crusade. The qualification is due not just to the usual obscurity of medieval chronicle, but because the contemporary and near contemporary histories sometimes contradict each other irreconcilably; history as propaganda is not a new idea. It is difficult to go beyond this kind of straightforward account; descriptions of the beliefs of the Cathars are even more partisan. Orthodox writers tended to ascribe similar beliefs and practices to just about every group of heretics. About all that can be said with any certainty is that they were dualists (with God and the devil as fundamentally equal opponents) who tended to reject the real world as evil, which meant in practice extreme asceticism and the embracing of martyrdom and suicide by the famous Cathar adepts known as Perfects.

This is a different kind of history from that which makes up Montaillou, also about the Cathars; that is a reconstruction of medieval village life from the records of the Inquisition, which first began its terrible work in the wake of the Crusade. As far as the religious and political statements in these records are concerned, they cannot be trusted because they are shaped by what the orthodox expected to hear and because they were extracted by physical or psychological pressure. Clearly, though, when they talk of everyday things as familiar to the inquisitors as to their victims, they will be far more trustworthy.

The religious element to their lives did not mean that the motives of those who fought on either side of the war were pure. There was much that could be gained or lost materially, for the crusaders had been promised the lands of dispossessed heretics. The motivation of greed adds to the reasons why the modern viewpoint tends to sympathise with the Cathars rather than the crusaders. However, it is also a reason why the events of the Crusade are surprisingly obscure, because it motivated a lot of behind the scenes political manoeuvrings, particularly as the main driving force behind the military campaigns was the will of Pope Innocent III, who kept on trying to control what was happening around Toulouse from weeks' journey away.

Sumption's concentration on the overt military activity of the Crusade is understandable, but does make the book both rather dry and superficial. The medieval mind remains obscure, the personalities involved hardly come alive, by comparison with many of those who took part in the Crusades in the Holy Land. It is difficult to see how a different book could have been produced based on the available resources. Sumption is not to blame; he has at least shed light on what would be interesting to know.

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.

Jonathan Sumption: Pilgrimage (1975)

Edition: Faber & Faber, 1975
Review number: 636

A fascinating study of the defining feature of the Middle Ages, its devout Catholicism, Pilgrimage views its subject through the aspect of it which provides the book's title. There are deliberate limitations to keep the book within manageable bounds - concentration on the period between 1100 and 1500, an emphasis on France and England rather than Germany, and interest in popular religious belief rather than the abstract theological arguments of scholars. Some important parts of medieval religion are sketchily covered as a result, though these are subjects easily accessible in more general histories of the period: the development of monasticism; the relationship between the papacy and Holy Roman Emperor (and, more generally, between religious and secular authority); the crusades (except in relation to religious enthusiasm and the invention of indulgences, both topics of great relevance to the history of pilgrimage in the later Middle Ages).

The importance of pilgrimage is really that it is probably the principal distinguishing feature of (popular) Western Christianity in this period. Its development and debasement - from a penance for serious sin to tourism and an indulgence to be gained by visiting particular shrines to obtain early release from Purgatory to an indulgence gained by cash payment - show much of the character of medieval belief as it developed and fed into the reaction against its excesses of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. (The Reformation is not an important a theme in the book as it perhaps could be, and relating what Sumption says to the ideas of Luther, Calvin and other reformers is an interesting exercise for a reader with some knowledge of developments in the sixteenth century.)

Pilgrimage is also one of the areas in which it is possible to gain an insight into normally unrecorded, popular ideas about Christianity as opposed to those of the theological schools. It is of course a relative extreme of enthusiasm - a lot of the evidence for the beliefs of the common people is gained through official condemnation of its excesses - and the picture it points to is not particularly surprising - a greatly simplified and superstitious version of the intellectual subtleties of the church's official views - but it is of great interest none the less.

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.

George Holmes: The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe (1988)

Edition: Oxford University Press, 1988
Review number: 396

This history, in tone somewhere between a popular and an academic exposition, divides Europe into two zones (north and Mediterranean) and the medieval period into three sections (500-900,900-1200,1200-1500). Each division is covered by a lengthy essay by a different author, making six in all, topped and tailed by short editorial commentaries.

The strength of the editing is indicated by the fact that there is no obvious stylistic change from one chapter to another; the writing is sufficiently uniform to be the work of a single writer. Rather than following political events, the emphasis is on developments on the social and economic fronts, to show the reader a broad outline of the way in which the ancient world transformed itself into the medieval and thence to the modern. English language medieval histories tend to concentrate on England and France; this one has more about Italy and Germany, making a refreshing change.

The illustrations are interesting and well selected - not just the standard pictures which are reproduced endlessly. It would be nice if a few more of them were in colour. There is a small problem with proof reading - in the genealogical table of the kings of Castile, for example, the date of death of Alfonso XI is given as 1350, while in the text a point is made of its being 1349 (he was the only major ruler to die in the massive plague epidemic of that year).

Frank Delaney: A Walk in the Dark Ages (1988)

Edition: Collins, 1988
Review number: 212

A Walk in the Dark Ages is based on an interesting idea: to follow in the footsteps of an imaginary seventh century pilgrim from the monastery of Skellig Michael off the coast of Ireland, the very edge of Christendom, to Rome and then Constantinople, the centres of his faith. Frank Delaney set out to follow his putative footsteps as closely as would be possible by car - a journey on foot would still of course take months.

Now, it is reasonable to expect a Western monk to travel to Rome, though at that particular time (when the Irish church was losing its independence following the Synod of Whitby) there would be political reasons why an Irish monk would be less likely to do so. The continuation to Constantinople is perhaps more unusual, though the reason advanced by Delaney (curiosity to see Rome's political overlord) makes it possible. The specifics of the route chosen (following river valleys in the main) are plausible enough, but in between the two extremes of route choice Delaney's scheme is less so. Why travel via Iona, Lindisfarne and Canterbury? The obvious reason is not one which motivates a seventh century Irish monk, but is due to Delaney's desire to visit the best known British ecclesiastical sites of the period. It was an age when travel was extremely infrequent, so it is possible that you could explain the choice of route by assuming that the monk was carrying messages for the other monasteries, but such an assumption would assume that enough happened on Skellig Michael to be of interest elsewhere, and that there was a high enough degree of organisation to the monasteries. This was, after all, at a time when many Irish monasteries were just groups of hermits who happened to set up cells in the same place, without reference to each other or any higher authority. Delaney does however, not mention this possibility.

The rule that Delaney has set himself is not to mention events more than a century either side of the date at which his monk is supposed to have travelled. This is a rule which he finds it impossible to keep. The main reason for this is that little enough is known about the conditions of ordinary life, even monastic life, at the precise time in question that it is far easier to generalise. (The difficulties in describing this journey show that, though the term "Dark Ages" is deplored by historians for many reasons, the original motivation for the term, the lack of knowledge and sources, still holds true today.) Apart from that, few remains survive from the seventh century, making it difficult to get a picture of what places were like (particularly in those towns like York and Lincoln where ecclesiastical building continued throughout the Middle Ages). Of the places visited by Delaney, the best seventh century remains are at Ravenna and Skellig Michael itself, and even at these sites we have the most important architecture remaining rather than the houses of ordinary people that would have been a major part of the landscape, particularly at Ravenna. Even so, he finds himself unable to resist referring to interesting events falling outside his self-imposed limits. To explain the complexities of seventh century politics without referring back to the end of the Western Empire is difficult, particularly when you can expect most of your readership to know very little about it.

Even when he sticks to the period, Delaney finds it hard to resist dwelling on the more lurid parts of the history, such as Gregory of Tours' descriptions of the vendettas between the various branches of the Merovingian dynasty. These may be fun to read, but they don't give a very good picture of the normal life of the monks of the period.

A Walk in the Dark Ages, then, is based around an interesting idea, but one which is flawed in the execution. Given the difficulty of carrying it out, this is hardly surprising; and Delaney has certainly managed to write an entertaining book with it.

Philippe Contamine: War in the Middle Ages (1980)

Translation: Michael Jones, 1984
Edition: Blackwell, 1984
Review number: 207

Philippe Contamine's survey is designed to cover a subject that for many other historians might almost as well not exist. There is a stereotyped view of medieval warfare which makes it seem hardly worthy of study: it is seen as lacking in strategic and tactical thinking, consisting of poorly armed peasants hacking at each other with agricultural implements while a ludicrous knightly caste engaged in empty charades of chivalric encounters covered in so much armour they could hardly move.

Like all stereotyped ideas, there are elements of truth and fiction in this view; at the very least, it should be remembered that the thousand year span of the Middle Ages is sufficiently long and Western Europe sufficiently vast and fragmented that few generalisations hold over the area or period as a whole. Contamine's aim is to produce a concise account of the main features of warfare in the Middle Ages, avoiding unwarranted generalisation.

The book is arranged in three parts, including a comprehensive (and lengthy) bibliography. The first part is a chronological survey from the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire to the advent of the first professional armies at the end of the fifteenth century. The second consists of various thematic essays, covering topics such as arms and armour, fortification, tactics and a history of the ideal of courage.

It is in the first part that the limitations imposed by the desire to write a short treatment of such a massive subject become apparent. At almost every turn, there is more that could be said. Even to list the major campaigns of the Middle Ages would take more space than Contamine has allowed himself - though of course his purpose is not to attempt anything so pointless but to show how warfare affected the political and economic situation and how warfare itself changed. Even with the concision attempted by Contamine, War in the Middle Ages is a long book.

The second part is the most interesting, particularly the sections dealing with the theoretical aspects of war, which are less well covered elsewhere. The chapter on courage, looking at how ideas of what should be praised as courage and its relationship to the other chivalric virtues attributed to knights, attempts something very different and unusual.

Jacques le Goff: Medieval Civilisation (1972)

Translation: Julia Barrow, 1988
Edition: Blackwell, 1988
Review number: 194

Medieval Civilization is an examination of the Middle Ages as a culture, an attempt to get into the minds of men and women quite alien to modern thought patters yet from whom modern culture derives.

Available for many years in France before being translated into English (at which point some revision was made), le Goff's work fits very much into the style of French historical writing whose best known exponent was Fernand Braudel. The earlier period of le Goff's interest has a much narrower range of available material, though the nine hundred years he covers is more stable than the rapid changes of early modern Europe which interested Braudel.

I found le Goff easier to take in than Braudel, who has a rather more dense style (at least, this is the case for their English translations). The differences between their chosen fields may have something to do with it; Braudel is more easily able to carry out closely argued analysis (since he has something to analyse), while le Goff has to use a broader brush. It works well, both in the short summary of the political history of Europe from the decline of the Roman Empire to the fifteenth century, and in the longer discussion of the culture that follows.

It is a most interesting book on the medieval period, one which I found particularly valuable to read because of its concentration on France rather than England (as you so often get in histories of Europe written in English); France was, after all, in the centre of medieval culture while England was on the periphery.

Nicholas Cheetham: Medieval Greece (1981)

Edition: Yale University Press, 1981
Review number: 188

Greece had an incredibly complex history in the medieval period, from the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 until the fall of Crete to the Turks in the seventeenth century. Before and after this, it had hundreds of years as part of a large and stable empire, the Byzantine and the Ottoman; a fairly stable and slow-changing condition (though not without historical questions, such as the puzzle of when and how exactly the nature of the population changed from Greek to Slav). In between these periods of stability, though, come four and a half centuries of turmoil, incredibly complex political maneuvring among fragmenting states, all of which is little known in Western European histories.

The diversion of the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople was one of the more cynical crimes of history. Internal conflicts made the empire an easy target, and the commercial ambition of the Venetians made it a tempting prize to them (and they were organising the transport for the crusade). The capture of Constantinople caused the disintegration of the empire, particularly its European provinces, which had already been carved up among the participants in the Fourth Crusade before it took place. Greece was divided into four or five small states, some still ruled by Greek aristocrats, others taken over by the conquerors and reorganised along Western feudal lines, with the Venetians gaining many important ports and commercial privileges.

It is perhaps amazing that the Latin states (as they are known) lasted as long as they did, until in fact they were destroyed by the Turks. They were often at loggerheads with each other and with the Greek states; faced continual interference from the West in their internal affairs - mainly because the Angevin royal family of Naples got involved, which also involved their rivals for control of Sicily, the Aragonese; and experienced the dangers common to all foreign ruling classes which never even attempt to integrate themselves with the mass of the people. The first state to go was the Latin Empire, based in Constantinople itself, and the last the Venetian colony of Crete.

The complicated and often obscure affairs of these petty states are well described by Cheetham, a long-serving British diplomat in Greece, fascinated by the many medieval remains completely ignored in favour of the more well-known classical structures and artefacts. He even tries to unravel something of the economic and social history, in which material for the historian is almost completely lacking. The political manoeuvrings are incredibly dificult to keep track of, particularly given the way that pepople change name as they change the fief they hold, or marry, or their relatives die. Cheetham does his best, but even at 300+ pages can only manage to give a fairly sketchy picture of the history.

A.R. Myers: England in the Late Middle Ages (1307-1536)

Edition: Penguin, 1981
Review number: 78

Like D.M. Stenton's English Society in the Early Middle Ages, this book forms part of the Pelican History of England. It's aim is similar - to provide a popular level, short history which maintains high standards of scholarly accuracy.

Myers divides the period into four, and examines various facets of the historical picture with the same chapter headings in each section (basically looking at political, economic, social, religious and art history). He doesn't stop at the usual endpoint given for the English middle ages, 1485 and the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, and he gives convincing reasons why 1536 (the dissolution of the monasteries and the establishment of the Anglican church)marks a better division. (These reasons include the common policy of the late Yorkist kings and early Tudors, the lack of continental humanist influence, the continuing faithfulness to Rome and the monastic idea, and so on.)

A very good basic history, though the concise nature means that certain aspects need to be skimmed over rather too rapidly. One area where this is particularly noticeable is the unquestioning acceptance of the standard picture of Richard III's murder of the princes in the tower; even if Myers felt that the traditional view is correct, his omission of any argument is not really helpful.

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.