England in the Late Middle Ages

The first three volumes of this series were very much social histories, giving details about kings and such almost incidentally, and preferring to emphasize social arrangements. Myers somewhat rails against this concept in his foreword: "To limit history to 'dates and kings and battles' was a mistake; but equally mistaken is the recent tendency to exclude politics and war as much as possible from the now fashionable social history" (7). I will say that I have struggled a bit with the social history emphasis of this series, which often leaves me feeling adrift; in volume 1, in particular, I felt like I got told a lot about what Roman houses in Britain looked like but not, say, why the Romans turned up to build houses to begin with. (To show more be fair, I do think volumes 2 and 3 handled this somewhat better.)

While previous volumes had about five or six chapters covering broad topics across the entire time period in question, Myers uses a very different arrangement here for volume 4. The book is divided into three parts covering 1307-99, 1399-1471, and 1471-1536 respectively; each part is then divided into five chapters. In each case, the first chapter of each section covers the politics of the era in question, especially who had the kingship, and the other four chapters always have the same titles: "The Government of the Realm," "Economic and Social Developments," "Religious and Educational Movements" (or "Change" for part III), and "The Arts."

I guess I can see why Myers did this, but I didn't find it very effective in practice. The end result is that there's not a lot of continuity, and it's not easy to follow the story of each topic across the course of the book. You get a bit about, say, growing antipapalism on p. 74, then more on p. 165, and then it comes to a climax on p. 236, but there are big gaps in between where you don't hear about it at all. And despite his claim to not be downplaying the political history as much as some other volumes in the series, I felt like major events like the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) and the War of the Roses (1455-87) were just kind of mentioned in asides rather than explained. So, other than the Roman volume, I found this one the most frustrating so far.

Myers very much emphasizes the changing fortunes of the kingship throughout: basically the king goes from a position of being politically and financially constrained by the lords to being much more secure in his power even as limits were applied to it. This wasn't quite absolute, though; Myers claims that when Edward IV died, "[i]f he had been succeeded by an able, grown-up son, England might have taken a road towards an absolute monarchy, wealthy enough to dispense with parliamentary rights, strong enough to keep order, and basing its claims on the indefeasible divine right of hereditary kingship" (201). Things didn't go this way, as Edward V (one of the "Princes in the Tower") was only twelve, but by the time of Henry VII, the king was financially independent.

Myers argues that the increasing importance of a council of lords in the latter part of this period actually shows how much power the king had; he could afford to delegate it without threatening his own position. This ends up culminating in Henry VIII's break from Rome, which was kind of about who Henry wanted to marry, but not just about that: "It is an absurdity to assert that the breach was due to Henry's lust for Anne Boleyn" (209). You wouldn't upend an entire country's organized religion over that! The Reformation also pays off a running thread about Lollardy throughout the book, which I found quite interesting.

As Myers points out, if it was just about Henry's own whims, it "would have imperilled his throne if there had been widespread and organized resistance. Henry's almost unopposed success must have been due to something deeper than his own will" (237-8). Myers argues that popular anti-papal sentiment had their roots in growing Church corruption, but also growing English nationalism, the rise of the merchant classes (less dependent on the old order), and increasing education. But the consequences of this were quite drastic: a king not beholden to a pope "br[ings] out the unmedieval idea that the king was supreme in every sphere of life, and that England was a self-sufficient empire, with Henry as its emperor, subject to no other authority on earth" (211). But as that's not a medieval idea, it is an idea that means this book has come to an end! show less

The Pelican History of England: 4

2/7/23