Mighty work
MICHAEL BORRIE
English Historical Documents: Vol IV 1327- 1485 edited by A. R. Myers (Eyre and Spot- tiswoode 10 gns) The score is nine down and three to go as this monumental series breeds up majestic. ally to its appointed dozen. And monumen- tal is the word: the present volume is a wrist-bending 4 lb containing 1,000 pages of documents and a further 250 pages of text, bibliography and genealogical tables. The selection of materials for it must have imposed the severest test so far encountered by an editor in the series. The period covered is more than twice as long as any subsequent volume, and is even greater by a dozen years than its two immediate pre- decessors. The sheer bulk of the public records and chronicle sources for the thirteenth century is intimidating enough; in the following 200 years it swells enormously and is joined by new and important sources of information, such as the vernacular litera- ture that sprang into life in tip fourteenth century, and the more intimate, personal apercus provided by such collections as the Paston and the Stonor letters. There is more, vastly more, of everything. To the prolifer- ating bureaucratic detritus of an increas- ingly complex and meddlesome government must be added the documentary spoor of an increasingly literate, materially pros,;er- ous and showy society : more and longer wills, inventories, book lists, household accounts, letters and writings of every kind.
Professor Myers has solved his difficult problems of selection and organisation most ingeniously, in such a way as to make the volume, for all its bulk, a very easy tool to use. The documents are grouped in four main divisions, dealing with politics, the machinery of government, the Church and education, and, finally, economic and social developments. Each group is preceded by a substantial introduction and a good biblio- graphy. The main divisions are broken down into smaller, coherent topics, which between them illustrate almost every aspect of the life of the period for which there is written record. In the group dealing with the Church and education, for example, will be found selections of documents about devotional writings, the growth of lay literacy, the universities and the administrative structure of the Church. Selections of material illus- trating standards of living, houses and households, travel and the prevalence of violence find their place in the group dealing with economic and social developments. Re- ference is made quick and easy by the complete list of all the documents at the front of the book. The documents are, as in the other volumes in the series, all in English and mostly presented without comment.
There is probably no better way of get- ting into the immensely complicated history of the period, either for the undergraduate or the interested general reader, than a steady diet of browsing through this volume. If he wants an easy start, he might plunge into the section on standards of living and read the account of the coronation feast of Henry VI: 'Meat blanched, barred with gold, jelly divided by the writing and musi- cal notation, Te Deum Laudamus. Pig gilded. Crane Bittern. Rabbits. Chickens gilded . . . Fritters, a leopard's head with two ostrich feathers . . . A subtlety, the emperor and the king who is dead, armed, and their mantles of the Garter, and the king that now is, kneeling before them . . : His appetite aroused, he might then turn to a recipe in the same section: 'Take a peacock, break its neck, cut its throat and flay it, skin and feathers together . .
Or, skipping back through the pages, the reader may light on the interesting plea of contempt and trespass held before the Lord Mayor of London in 1364, when two tavern- Os were adjudged to be punished for selling red wine 'unsound and unwholesome for man, in deceit of the common people', one by being made to drink a quantity of it, the other by having the rest of it poured over him. The law is, as always, full of gems. In a passage culled from the forbid- ding bulk of the Statutes of the Realm, 1463, we learn of the ingenious frauds prac- tised by wool merchants, who wrapped up poor wool in a good fleece and padded it out with tar, stones, sand, grass and dirt. The learned professions, then as ever, were a little more polite if no less efficient in their extortion, as appears from the account of a surgeon's ethical code by John of Arderne in his Treatise of Fistula in Ano: 'If he sees that the patient is eager for the cure, then the surgeon must boldly adjust his fee to the man's status in life. But the surgeon should always beware of asking too little, for this is bad both for the market and the patient'.
But this is of course the icing on the cake. The bulk of the volume is the solid stuff of history, presented with the high standards we are accustomed to in the series. It should succeed admirably in its dual function, of providing a sound introduction to the general documentation of the period for the student and general reader, and of steering the more inquisitive of them to the original texts and records from which this excellent selection has been made.
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