Customer Reviews

England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075-1225 (New Oxford History of England)

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Anyone familiar with the Cambridge History collection will be familiar with the format of this book. Essentially Bartlett's work is an expansion of an epoch of English history from, roughly, 1066 to 1200 and covers the reigns of William the Conqueror and the generations of Norman and Angevin kings succeeding him on the throne. Like the Cambridge History series, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings dissects the period, examining life from nearly every aspect: military events of each reign, relations between king and nobility, king and commoner and king and heirs, social strata, cost of armaments, land holding and land use, cost of living and inflationary trends, law courts, rise of a merchant middle class, growth of cities, etc. The volume is incredibly thorough in its coverage of the period, and its bibliography is impressive. Original documents are described and cited throughout the book, providing the dedicated reader with primary sources with which to follow up his/her interests. It would be an excellent secondary source book for someone doing research on the period. It is however very deep and detailed and takes considerable time to read. Light reading it isn't, even for the history buff, but it is worth doing for anyone interested in this very active, very complex period.

Bartlett acts as a wonderful guide through the many layers of Medieval life. As he says in the Preface this is an "entry-point of the understanding of processes only slowly unfolding, sometimes across centuries". The book has a very narrow focus in both place and time, yet goes very deep in detail covering all aspects of medieval life. It is a long book that could easily be read in chapters in no particular order, but I read it straight through cover to cover hopeing it would not end for want of Bartletts engaging prose and wealth of fascinating source material. Perhaps the best compliment of all is my desire to want to learn more.

It is an academic book and not always easy with some sections that are fairly boring (economic production figures, calculations of the number of sheep in the country), but overall the balance of interesting material outweighs these sections and makes the effort well worth the veins of gold. Most of all, it is highly trustworthy and authoritative; Bartlett is one in a long line of English historians who endeavored to be readable, arming themselves, as Roger of Wendover (13th C) says, against both "the listless hearer and the fastidious reader" by "presenting something which each may relish," and so providing for the joint "profit and entertainment of all."

Bartlett tries to cover practically every aspect of life during his period, from court politics to village religious life to sexual mores. He does a nice jobe of balancing the general and the specific, reinforcing his general conclusions with interesting anecdotes. Some parts are more tedious than others, depending on your tastes - since he deals with so many issues, some are bound to interest the reader more than others.

I am jointly reviewing Frank Barlow's The Feudal Kingdom of England and Robert Bartlett's England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings. They deal with the same period, they are remarkably complementary, and I highly recommend doing as I did and reading them together.

Barlow's book, first published in 1955, takes a traditional approach and reviews the events of the Norman and early Angevin period chronologically. Bartlett's, benefiting from recent research, offers a more static but broader picture of the period's trends and features. To the newcomer (as I was) or, I think, to someone with basic knowledge of 12th century England, the combination will be as instructive as it is exciting to read.

The Feudal Kingdom of England recounts the main political events from the Norman invasion to the forced grant of the Magna Carta by king John. Barlow tells the drama of the conquest, the tales of dynastic intrigue, the blow-by-blow of three-sided feuding between king, church and baronage in sometimes gory, sometimes inspiring detail. Some stories simply need to be given chronologically, which Bartlett doesn't do: the manoeuvrings of William's sons, the dispute between Becket and Henry II, Richard's crusade and capture, the crafty king John's miserable reign. Though the narrative remains central to it, the book also contains chapters on aristocratic society, the church, and the English towns and countryside. In fact, it begins with an overview of England under Edward the Confessor which is invaluable for understanding change in post-invasion England.

Bartlett's England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings paints a multi-faceted panorama of 12th and early 13th century England. It is equally awesome in breadth and depth. And it is free of the typical fault of medieval history, in which 90% of space is devoted to the doings of 10% of the population. Bartlett devotes more than half his book to ordinary people's lives, urban and rural: their work, their habitat, their relationship to the lords, their money problems, their beliefs. He offers fascinating information on perceptions of the world, how the day was spent and divided, on marriage, manners and pastimes, even on sex. His section on culture and language isn't the boring recital one often finds, but is lively and relevant to the rest of the book. He describes the church at all levels, not just that of the bishopric, and from both the institutional and the spiritual perspective. He makes the best use of available data to discuss economic developments, themselves key to some of the period's political events (e.g. late 12th century inflation and the disasters of John's reign). And of course, Bartlett describes government and political patterns, only not in sequence.

These two books are complementary in other ways. Where Barlow tends to use original words, Bartlett prefers their more explicit equivalents (for example danegeld in one book is called a land tax in the other). If you only have time to read one, I would probably recommend The Feudal Kingdom of England, as it will leave you with the period's basic milestones. Still, it would be a shame to miss the fun of Bartlett's big canvas.

Every now and then you come across a technical or academic book that is clear, concise and just beautifully written. This is such a book. One hundred and fifty years are covered at a cracking pace and I savoured each and every page. It's a large book at 750+ pages, but it left me wishing it had been twice as long.

Most books relating to this period cover who did what, to whom and when. Bartlett doesn't: he assumes if you're reading this book you already know, at least in outline, the events of the period. It does cover how people lived, worked, worshipped, swore, laughed and cried. It makes you feel that you understand what it would have been liked to have lived during the period.

The book is well structured and you can happily dip in here and there as your interest takes you.

One minor criticism is that there are many words and phrases which, it is plain from context, have a particular technical meaning that Bartlett doesn't explain. But with Google to hand that's just a minor irritation.

I just hope the rest of the series is as good.

This book is one that I reach for constantly when I need to check something; in addition Bartlett writes in an effortless style that makes him a pleasure to read. He's a master of the primary sources; the only think missing from this book is a good bibliography of secondary, specialized material.

Robert Bartlett's contribution to the New Oxford History of England series is about a kingdom in transition. In 1075, England was a newly conquered realm of William of Normandy, who was transforming the sleepy monarchy of the Anglo-Saxons into a powerful feudal state. A century and a half later, his great-great-great grandson, Henry III, issued a modified Magna Charta that served as the foundation of English common law, establishing the right of the English aristocracy against the king. How this evolution took place forms just one aspect of this exceptional book, which addresses nearly every aspect of England's politics, culture, and society during this period.

In doing this, Bartlett adopts an analytical rather than narrative approach. Events are studied within the context of the broader patterns and developments of the era. This makes for a more challenging read but also a much more rewarding one, with insights contained on every page. Readers unfamiliar with the period should start with a survey such as David Carpenter's The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain 1066-1284, but even knowledgeable students of the period will learn much from Bartlett's clear writing and perceptive analysis.

This is a very ambitious book, trying to cover essentially every aspect of English life-including the social, economic, political, spiritual and military realms, among others-in the 150 years following the end of Norman Conquest. Unfortunately, by attempting to cover so much material, much is left out and the book suffers from these omissions. The timeline encompassed within this volume begins in 1075 with the Rise of the Earls (although this event isn't actually mentioned) and the final serious resistance to William the Conqueror and ends with the passing of the Magna Carta into law in 1225 under Henry III. This era represents to evolution of an distinct Anglo-Norman culture derived from the native Anglo-Saxons and the occupational Norman aristocracy. The development of this English culture and nationalism has profoundly impacted the history of Europe and reverberates through the present.

However, these broad strokes are lost within the minutiae of this volume. For instance, the disaster of the White Ship and the loss of William of Adein, Henry I's only legitimate male heir, is mentioned only in passing and the resulting period known as the Anarchy only merits a couple of paragraphs. There are many other similar examples, such as the very light coverage of the Crusades. Furthermore, the social and political aspects of the evolving English feudal state are rarely contrasted with similar developments on the continent, so the reader cannot see the genesis of the unique Anglo-Norman culture and state.

This book is much more valuable to a serious student of this period in English history and is a great reference work. It is heavily footnoted such that the primary literature can be consulted if need be and it is full of very detailed information, such as the number and locations of castles in the county of Hertfordshire during from 1075-1225. This attention to detail is the strength of the book, and here it greatly excels and is very worthwhile. However, those searching for a more general introduction into medieval England and the beginnings of the modern English state should look elsewhere.

This first volume in the "New Oxford History of England" covers the period in British history of most interest to me -- from the conquest to the end of the Norman-Angevin dynasty and the loss of Normandy to France. It also covers those monarchs I find most fascinating: William I, Henry I, Matilda, Henry II, and John. One would expect a work of this sort to be chronological but Bartlett, a professor of medieval history at the University of St. Andrews, has chosen to approach his broad subject topically. He identifies twelve broad subjects and spends 50-60 pages on each, with some three to eight or nine subdivisions in each section, which means it's easy to pick up the book, read the whole of a section in a reasonable amount of time, and put it down again without having to pause in the middle of anything. Very nice for a 700-page book. The first sections are (not surprisingly) "Political Patterns" and "Lordship and Government," which also give a good overview of the issues of the times. I found the section on "Aristocracy," a special interest of mine, especially good. The others cover subjects like "Warfare," "Towns and Trade," "Religious Life," and so on. Bartlett is a very fluent writer and a plain, straightforward stylist, even when things get complicated. And he makes frequent use of extended examples from the original sources, such as (in "The Cross-Channel Aristocracy") the multigenerational struggle of the Laigle family, lords of Pevensey, to keep their superiors in both England and Normandy happy. There are footnotes on every page, though not a separate bibliography, but you'll have to be able to read Latin to pursue most of them. This is the sort of book I expect to be happily absorbing a little at a time for some time to come. But I do have one gripe and that's the inadequacy of the subject index. "Queens" with 35 undifferentiated locators? "Saints" with 40? Horses, of all things, with a string of 57 bare page numbers? Very bad practice, and completely useless to anyone trying to hunt something up. When a book is already 700 pages long, a subject index of fewer than eight pages is simply indefensible.

This is a very well written and very informative survey of Medieval England from late in the reign of William the Conquerer to the early reign of Henry III. Bartlett takes up when the Norman state was well established and devotes much of the text to a thorough description of England as a well developed feudal-manorial society. The general approach is thematic rather than chronologically narrative. Bartlett takes a top-down approach by beginning with the nature of English monarchial politics. Key themes are the essentially dynastic-familial nature of politics, the problems of succession as a source of political instability, the trans-channel nature of the monarchy, and the conflicts with competing powers, particularly the Capetian kings of France. This section includes much of the traditional political history but is primarily a structural history of the monarchy. Bartlett follows with a chapter discussing the structure of the monarchy, royal administration, public finances, and the administration of justice.

A series of chapters devoted to major social institutions follows. He discusses the nature and organization of the aristocracy, the peasantry, towns and trade, and the English church and religious practice. These central chapters are particularly good, providing an excellent analysis of the many facets of English feudal society. Bartlett does very well in showing important trends over this period, such as the increasing role of royal justice and what might be called the professionalization of the institutional church. Reading these chapters gives a very good sense of the many features that make medieval Europe so different from our contemporary world.

Bartlett concludes with a set of chapters devoted more to individual experiences. Intellectual trends, the pattern of daily life and the course of the average life, beliefs about the afterlife and popular religion are all covered well. Again, there is considerable insight into the distinctive features of the period.

Bartlett is a very good writer and an impressive amount of this book is drawn directly from primary sources. Survey writers usually have to chose to emphasize either a chronologically narrative approach or a thematic approach. Bartlett comes down very strongly for the latter, perhaps a bit to the detriment of narration. I would have preferred a bit more traditional narrative of high politics and perhaps a bit less on things like calendars. Nice features of the book are an appended time line of important events and a concise description of important primary sources. Absent is an bibliographic essay of the type found in all volumes of the Oxford History of the United States, a really nice feature for any survey. These are, however, minor complaints about this truly excellent book.