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Folio Society History of England #3
England and Its Rulers: 1066-1307
England and its Rulers has established itself as an attractive and authoritative account of English history from 1066. For this third edition, three new chapters have been added, the bibliography and suggested further reading sections have been fully updated, and additions and amendments have been made throughout.
360 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
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About the author
M.T. Clanchy
14 books10 followersMichael T. Clanchy is a Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has also taught at the University of Glasgow, and is well known for his books, such as From Memory to Written Record (1979; revised and expanded editions 1993 and 2013: a study of the triumph of literacy in medieval England), England and its Rulers 1066-1272 (1983; revised editions 1998 and 2006) and Abelard: A Medieval Life (1997). His interests are primarily in law and government in the 12th and 13th centuries. He is Patron of the London Medieval Society.[
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December 27, 2018I think I'll start today's rambling around the forecourt of my consciousness with Katie's review, her point that this isn't the ideal book to come to with no background knowledge of English history took me rather by surprise, I feel this is a pretty good book, but after her words had percolated down through the treacly morass of my brain I did recall that I didn't read this from a perspective of zero knowledge. From that grudging recognition I tried to reconstruct or follow back some stories to try and get a sense of what a zero knowledge reading might be like - but its beyond me, I certainly didn't take in the Battle of Hastings with my Mother's milk but if I think back to my earliest reading, picture books of castles and knights, the distinctive ladybird history books, many written by L. Du Garde Peach, with simple text on the left hand side and a colour illustration say of Queen Matilda in a white dress escaping Oxford for Wallingford Castle across ice and snow on the right, some other similar book of historical stories - how do I know that William Rufus was shot by Walter Tyrell in the New Forest? Because I remember the picture. On the other hand the death and dismemberment of Simon de Montfort, the French champion of English rights, after the Battle of Evesham is not a story I know from childhood - possibly because publishers were cautious of putting too many castration stories in children's books.
This isn't all a Sterne journey, it has some purpose, but as always the wisdom of Sancho Panza is my guide here, one of Clancy's themes is historiography, or as I might render that into English - the oppressed unliterary language of us peasants - the stories what we tell about past times. These stories we might regard as the deep roots of Brexit, or as a kind of Downton Abbey politics - history itself can be a form of contemporary politics apparent in the choice of stories told and those not told, as much as the colouring and style of the telling. Clanchy highlights Bishop Stubbs and his The Constitutional History of England in its origins and Development and J.R.Green and his A short history of the English People, Rickson's 1808 architectural history of England also gets mentioned, it is entirely down to Rickson that in England there was "Early English" architecture, while the rest of Europe had the entirely indistinguishable Romanesque style, one wouldn't in the aftermath of the downfall of the ancien regime in France admit apparently to the possibility of England being open to any kind of influences from the frightful and wicked mainland of Europe. Clanchy draws out much of their deep silliness, Stubbs wanted to find purely English origins for purely English institutions, Parliament therefore sprung by means unknown, not from the suspiciously French sounding Parlement, but like a train emerging from a tunnel from the Anglo-Saxon Witan, about which, conveniently for him, virtually no more is known than its name, equally neither Simon de Montfort nor the magnates gathered round the young Henry III in 1216, could have established a French inspired Commune of England, instead it must have been an English communality. Distinctive, indeed uniquely English institutions, were the product of a unique and pure English race - the Hereford cow of Humanity. I wonder quite what strange anxieties plagued Stubbs and Green in the early 1870s, the age of steam power, steel foundries, and empire without end, to have stressed in a way they must have appreciated was anachronistic, a vision of the English past as proto-Victorian, indeed more English than Queen Victoria, unsullied by continental fripperies, as if one denied the existence of a medieval commune of England loud enough perhaps one could be certain that the Paris commune of 1870 would have no influence north of the channel? The Stubbs & Green problem is really for Clanchy a dog in the forest issue, they defined still influential judgements from a nationalist perspective that still alienate us from the period, hence the book's subtitle Foreign Lordship and National Identity. All the Kings under consideration in this book were French and Latin speakers, the defenders of national identity against the international political engagements of those kings were also French speakers, living within the French culture of chivalry and prone to fancy new French ideas, courtesy of the troubadours, like romantic love. Their deeds and accomplishments were recorded in French verse or in Latin prose. However notions of John and Henry III as "bad" Kings, generally for nationalist reasons - ie spending too much time, effort, and money in France, or worse, Sicily, are remnants of Stubbs and Green.
A certain amount of studying history therefore requires the unlearning of assumptions that one has taken for granted. One of these that Clanchy picks up on is Magna Carta, which when one thinks about it, it is incredibly bizarre that the political ambitions of the Barons get written into a version of English and colonial daughter states as the fathers of political liberties. How fortunate that we forget that everyone of English race is descended from peasants to whom the Barons would not have offered the merest whiff of liberty.
The other major theme is national identity, which will comes as no surprise to readers of the excellent From Memory to Written Record, the first point is the rapid disappearance under the Normans of the English high culture of the Anglo-Saxon era, one way of tracking this is through the new loan words flowing across the channel: including agreement, burglary, court, debt, evidence, justice, police, fines, prison, constable, arrest, government, tax, and money - the one notable English legal term that survives is gallows (p59), another is the sharp trend away from English personal names to French ones (like Henry, John, Richard, William, Stephen, Geoffrey and so on). In 1066 29% of property owners in Winchester had foreign names, by 1207 this had reached 82%. English was more or less suddenly in the years after Hastings no longer the language of administration, the social elites or literary activity with the exception down to 1154 of the Peterborough manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. The immediate oligarchy around William the Conqueror was French speaking. The irony is that not only was the lordship foreign (Normans giving way to Angevins and Poitevans) but so are defining figures of National identity like William Marshal and Simon de Montfort, many other figures from Archbishops Anselm and Lanfranc (Italians) through to Gerald of Wales and Walter Map (Norman-Welsh) are cheerfully international, role models for the free movement of people and ideas.
One question that Clanchy asks is how much change can one attribute to the few thousand military settlers who came in with William from Normandy, Brittany and Flanders and no less martial several thousand monks sworn to follow their Lord Abbot in the service of Christ the King, the mighty Cistersians earn themselves some space in the book as colonisers just as they did in real life. There are no certain answers to such a question, one can argue, and some have, for the continuity of some Anglo-Saxon forms and traditions of government after 1066, equally that these were not significant, in a shocking moment Clanchy asserts than England even before conquest was a Feudal Society - following here my Lord Marc Bloch of excellent memory, a noble scholar . I can only hint at my shock by saying I feel the need to retreat into seclusion and listen to Mozart's Requiem at loud volume for some time. By following Bloch then Clanchy is asserting that England was caught up on the same feudal tide as the rest of Europe and not some bizarre Arturo-Churchillian fortress aloof from mainland affairs. And we see this in the development of historical and religious writing as well as the spread of French literary forms and styles eventually into English.
Clanchy invokes R.C. van Caenegem to point out the distinctive course of English Common Law, there are developments which are peculiar to England, just as there are to Spain or Scandinavia, but awareness of their distinctiveness arises for Clanchy from an understanding of European culture as a whole, not a reading backwards of English or British peculiarities into the past and attempt to paint them in white and red even when like Parliament or the Romanesque, their non-English origins scream out.
Along the way William II and Richard I die prematurely of archery violence, Henry I of lamprey pie, Stephen fights his cousins Matilda the Empress and Robert FitzHenry, John dies barely mourned, Henry II dies angry, Henry III gets over ambitious and has to be rescued from Parliament demanding Barons by his long legged son Edward. While William the son of a Tanner's daughter and a Duke of Normandy with no sense of smelldies after been thrown from a horse.
The Normans were famous for fighting and their haircuts, the later kings for speaking Occitan and having wide ranging international ambitions until Henry III was as tough, opinionated and mercurial a politician as any of them and , like them, he suffered from pursuing strategies which were becoming too ambitious for a king of England (p230) the next generation would turn (mostly) to bullying their island neighbours. This was more acceptable so long as the king continued to win, in politics it is always a mistake to lose.
At times the pace is so brisk that one does feel that one is on the tour bus, monuments to the left and the right pointed out before the page count dictates that we must hurry back on board and drive to the next site. Later editions are longer, and possibly more relaxed in tone.
This isn't all a Sterne journey, it has some purpose, but as always the wisdom of Sancho Panza is my guide here, one of Clancy's themes is historiography, or as I might render that into English - the oppressed unliterary language of us peasants - the stories what we tell about past times. These stories we might regard as the deep roots of Brexit, or as a kind of Downton Abbey politics - history itself can be a form of contemporary politics apparent in the choice of stories told and those not told, as much as the colouring and style of the telling. Clanchy highlights Bishop Stubbs and his The Constitutional History of England in its origins and Development and J.R.Green and his A short history of the English People, Rickson's 1808 architectural history of England also gets mentioned, it is entirely down to Rickson that in England there was "Early English" architecture, while the rest of Europe had the entirely indistinguishable Romanesque style, one wouldn't in the aftermath of the downfall of the ancien regime in France admit apparently to the possibility of England being open to any kind of influences from the frightful and wicked mainland of Europe. Clanchy draws out much of their deep silliness, Stubbs wanted to find purely English origins for purely English institutions, Parliament therefore sprung by means unknown, not from the suspiciously French sounding Parlement, but like a train emerging from a tunnel from the Anglo-Saxon Witan, about which, conveniently for him, virtually no more is known than its name, equally neither Simon de Montfort nor the magnates gathered round the young Henry III in 1216, could have established a French inspired Commune of England, instead it must have been an English communality. Distinctive, indeed uniquely English institutions, were the product of a unique and pure English race - the Hereford cow of Humanity. I wonder quite what strange anxieties plagued Stubbs and Green in the early 1870s, the age of steam power, steel foundries, and empire without end, to have stressed in a way they must have appreciated was anachronistic, a vision of the English past as proto-Victorian, indeed more English than Queen Victoria, unsullied by continental fripperies, as if one denied the existence of a medieval commune of England loud enough perhaps one could be certain that the Paris commune of 1870 would have no influence north of the channel? The Stubbs & Green problem is really for Clanchy a dog in the forest issue, they defined still influential judgements from a nationalist perspective that still alienate us from the period, hence the book's subtitle Foreign Lordship and National Identity. All the Kings under consideration in this book were French and Latin speakers, the defenders of national identity against the international political engagements of those kings were also French speakers, living within the French culture of chivalry and prone to fancy new French ideas, courtesy of the troubadours, like romantic love. Their deeds and accomplishments were recorded in French verse or in Latin prose. However notions of John and Henry III as "bad" Kings, generally for nationalist reasons - ie spending too much time, effort, and money in France, or worse, Sicily, are remnants of Stubbs and Green.
A certain amount of studying history therefore requires the unlearning of assumptions that one has taken for granted. One of these that Clanchy picks up on is Magna Carta, which when one thinks about it, it is incredibly bizarre that the political ambitions of the Barons get written into a version of English and colonial daughter states as the fathers of political liberties. How fortunate that we forget that everyone of English race is descended from peasants to whom the Barons would not have offered the merest whiff of liberty.
The other major theme is national identity, which will comes as no surprise to readers of the excellent From Memory to Written Record, the first point is the rapid disappearance under the Normans of the English high culture of the Anglo-Saxon era, one way of tracking this is through the new loan words flowing across the channel: including agreement, burglary, court, debt, evidence, justice, police, fines, prison, constable, arrest, government, tax, and money - the one notable English legal term that survives is gallows (p59), another is the sharp trend away from English personal names to French ones (like Henry, John, Richard, William, Stephen, Geoffrey and so on). In 1066 29% of property owners in Winchester had foreign names, by 1207 this had reached 82%. English was more or less suddenly in the years after Hastings no longer the language of administration, the social elites or literary activity with the exception down to 1154 of the Peterborough manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. The immediate oligarchy around William the Conqueror was French speaking. The irony is that not only was the lordship foreign (Normans giving way to Angevins and Poitevans) but so are defining figures of National identity like William Marshal and Simon de Montfort, many other figures from Archbishops Anselm and Lanfranc (Italians) through to Gerald of Wales and Walter Map (Norman-Welsh) are cheerfully international, role models for the free movement of people and ideas.
One question that Clanchy asks is how much change can one attribute to the few thousand military settlers who came in with William from Normandy, Brittany and Flanders and no less martial several thousand monks sworn to follow their Lord Abbot in the service of Christ the King, the mighty Cistersians earn themselves some space in the book as colonisers just as they did in real life. There are no certain answers to such a question, one can argue, and some have, for the continuity of some Anglo-Saxon forms and traditions of government after 1066, equally that these were not significant, in a shocking moment Clanchy asserts than England even before conquest was a Feudal Society - following here my Lord Marc Bloch of excellent memory, a noble scholar . I can only hint at my shock by saying I feel the need to retreat into seclusion and listen to Mozart's Requiem at loud volume for some time. By following Bloch then Clanchy is asserting that England was caught up on the same feudal tide as the rest of Europe and not some bizarre Arturo-Churchillian fortress aloof from mainland affairs. And we see this in the development of historical and religious writing as well as the spread of French literary forms and styles eventually into English.
Clanchy invokes R.C. van Caenegem to point out the distinctive course of English Common Law, there are developments which are peculiar to England, just as there are to Spain or Scandinavia, but awareness of their distinctiveness arises for Clanchy from an understanding of European culture as a whole, not a reading backwards of English or British peculiarities into the past and attempt to paint them in white and red even when like Parliament or the Romanesque, their non-English origins scream out.
Along the way William II and Richard I die prematurely of archery violence, Henry I of lamprey pie, Stephen fights his cousins Matilda the Empress and Robert FitzHenry, John dies barely mourned, Henry II dies angry, Henry III gets over ambitious and has to be rescued from Parliament demanding Barons by his long legged son Edward. While William the son of a Tanner's daughter and a Duke of Normandy with no sense of smelldies after been thrown from a horse.
The Normans were famous for fighting and their haircuts, the later kings for speaking Occitan and having wide ranging international ambitions until Henry III was as tough, opinionated and mercurial a politician as any of them and , like them, he suffered from pursuing strategies which were becoming too ambitious for a king of England (p230) the next generation would turn (mostly) to bullying their island neighbours. This was more acceptable so long as the king continued to win, in politics it is always a mistake to lose.
At times the pace is so brisk that one does feel that one is on the tour bus, monuments to the left and the right pointed out before the page count dictates that we must hurry back on board and drive to the next site. Later editions are longer, and possibly more relaxed in tone.
May 31, 2012
First off - this isn't quite the political overview of England as it's title would suggest. If you're coming into medieval English history with no background, I'd recommend starting somewhere else (or, maybe even better, keeping a good genealogical chart on hand). This one is a little light on the factual details and assumes you know the general outline of who everyone was and generally what they did. You won't get a meticulous outline of the precise claims to the throne held by Stephen and Matilda or a detailed breakdown of John's financial misfortunes.
With that in mind, this is a really fun book and avoids lots of the pitfalls that sometimes plague more traditional political overviews. First off, it's a fun read and it presents a reasonable amount of information to take in. Lots of political histories rapidly turn into huge info dumps that make reading it in more than small pieces nearly impossible without having all the facts slip right out of your head a few days after finishing. This book isn't going to tell you every detail about English government. But it does present its chosen information really well and very engagingly, and you'll probably remember most of it. It's all structured around the idea presented in the subtitle - that English history at this point was shaped by periods of foreign influence through the Normans, the Angevins, and the Poitevins, but that simultaneously an increasing idea of 'Englishness' was starting to emerge. It's not a perfect structure, but it does give the book a nice sense of cohesion.
It does a couple of specific things really well. Clanchy is very good at presenting various sides of a debate. English history is full of contentious subjects (the importance of the Norman conquest, whether John was an idiot or not) and this work does a nice job of outlining the different schools of thought in a fair way without seeming wishy-washy. Clanchy is fairly opinionated, and is open about that, but he does a nice job of presenting both sides. That said, if you want a nice and traditional trashing of John or Henry III, this is probably not the book for you.
Clanchy also does a really nice job of bringing in chronicle sources. They often get ignored by historians for being biased - which is a fair point - but they're still the best way to get at the heart of a time period and what (a very specific group of) people thought about what was going on. So the fact that Clanchy brings in contemporary opinions in addition to the modern interpretations of each monarch not only makes for a more balanced and source-based take on the matter, but it's also just really interesting. Medieval chroniclers are loads of fun, and tell some great stories. It also allows for some nice little asides about how English writers / chronicles varied from their continental counterparts (spoiler alert: they tended to be especially sarcastic).
Also, Clanchy unsurprisingly does a great job of demonstrating how language affected English government during the period (Clanchy's more famous book, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066 - 1307, delves more deeply into this idea). There are great little asides about the development of the English language and how simply writing stuff down drastically changed how government functioned.
Overall, not a comprehensive introduction, but a good and readable one.
With that in mind, this is a really fun book and avoids lots of the pitfalls that sometimes plague more traditional political overviews. First off, it's a fun read and it presents a reasonable amount of information to take in. Lots of political histories rapidly turn into huge info dumps that make reading it in more than small pieces nearly impossible without having all the facts slip right out of your head a few days after finishing. This book isn't going to tell you every detail about English government. But it does present its chosen information really well and very engagingly, and you'll probably remember most of it. It's all structured around the idea presented in the subtitle - that English history at this point was shaped by periods of foreign influence through the Normans, the Angevins, and the Poitevins, but that simultaneously an increasing idea of 'Englishness' was starting to emerge. It's not a perfect structure, but it does give the book a nice sense of cohesion.
It does a couple of specific things really well. Clanchy is very good at presenting various sides of a debate. English history is full of contentious subjects (the importance of the Norman conquest, whether John was an idiot or not) and this work does a nice job of outlining the different schools of thought in a fair way without seeming wishy-washy. Clanchy is fairly opinionated, and is open about that, but he does a nice job of presenting both sides. That said, if you want a nice and traditional trashing of John or Henry III, this is probably not the book for you.
Clanchy also does a really nice job of bringing in chronicle sources. They often get ignored by historians for being biased - which is a fair point - but they're still the best way to get at the heart of a time period and what (a very specific group of) people thought about what was going on. So the fact that Clanchy brings in contemporary opinions in addition to the modern interpretations of each monarch not only makes for a more balanced and source-based take on the matter, but it's also just really interesting. Medieval chroniclers are loads of fun, and tell some great stories. It also allows for some nice little asides about how English writers / chronicles varied from their continental counterparts (spoiler alert: they tended to be especially sarcastic).
Also, Clanchy unsurprisingly does a great job of demonstrating how language affected English government during the period (Clanchy's more famous book, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066 - 1307, delves more deeply into this idea). There are great little asides about the development of the English language and how simply writing stuff down drastically changed how government functioned.
Overall, not a comprehensive introduction, but a good and readable one.
October 15, 2012
This was assigned reading for my Medieval England university class. I thought it was an okay book. The writing and content are decent, but it seemed like the author jumps around too much. Each king's reign is covered chronologically, but within that chapter events are frequently not in chronological order. People and events are often mentioned in passing, sometimes to be explained later but more often not. It's downright confusing at times and I think it would be much worse if I wasn't also attending lectures on this subject.
October 25, 2013
Horrible. What is an extremely interesting era in history was made so utterly dull and un-followable that I had to put it down and search out another source for this time period. Honestly, history is a great story waiting to be told. Why do historians make it so dead and deadening?
February 22, 2011
This is a very good book. Its easy to read for a history book and has lots of well researched information.
April 21, 2019
A wonderfully-detailed account of the kings of England from William the Conqueror to Edward I, using both contemporary chroniclers' and modern historians' works to construct analysis and judgement on the character of these famous rulers and their methods of kingship.
October 23, 2020
I love my English history but this was so boring and like a text book, I just had to give up before I got half way. Sorry to the author, but just not for me.
October 21, 2013
While this book is nowhere as comprehensive of its subject as the title would have you think, it's nevertheless an erudite, deeply-researched, clearly interpreted and highly readable account. I look forward to reading Clanchy's other works.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews