A monumental mediaeval muddle
C. J. Tyerman
THE HOLLOW CROWN: A HISTORY OF BRITAIN IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES by Miri Rubin Allen Lane, £25, pp. 380, ISBN 071399066 ✆ £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 The history of England in the 14th and 15th centuries has traditionally been regarded either as a corrupt aftermath (as in ‘Bastard Feudalism’) or a confused prelude (as in the ‘New Monarchy’ of the Tudors). Its most vivid narrator remains Shakespeare who, perhaps surprisingly, supplies the title for this earnestly modern new account by Professor Miri Rubin of London University’s Queen Mary College. As so often, tradition misleads. To these centuries belong the origins or establishment of such enduring features of national life as the collegiate universities of Oxford and Cambridge; Justices of the Peace; parliamentary scrutiny and audit of public finances; the legal profession; the Order of the Garter; printing; and English as the language of literature and government. These centuries saw the most radical demographic shift in recorded history, the Black Death and the subsequent outbreaks of plague killing up to half the population, the new circumstances of the rural economy leading to the slow demise of serfdom. The survivors produced lasting intellectual and religious diversity, some of it branded by conservative contemporaries as ‘Lollardy’, that survived the 16th-century Reformation, as well as the many striking physical monuments to spiritual hope and anxiety that punctuate the landscapes of the Cotswolds or East Anglia. Henry V, the most impressive monarch of the period, survived as a recognised icon of Englishness into the 20th century. The political society created by the permanency of public warfare with Scotland and France was prone to dramatic or sordid dislocation witnessed by the convulsions of the Peasants’ Revolt or the so-called Wars of the Roses. The myth of England’s inviolacy since 1066 was exposed by four successful invasions (1326, 1399, 1471, 1485). The English became notorious for killing their kings; five of them met violent deaths, five were deposed (one of them, Henry VI, twice). Yet the institutions of public life and private community that emerged formed the patterns of central and local government that survived to the Civil War, England’s ancien régime.
Professor Rubin attempts to chart this society by using the widest lens, a method some academics call histoire totale. The political narrative is constantly interrupted by discussion of the physical, material and intellectual. The lives of men and women of all stations are presented at close quarters in a deft and erudite display of anecdote, statistics and detail. The richness and diversity of existence are particularly well caught in the descriptions of religious devotion and the experience of women, discriminated against but hardly passive. The dense picture of communities unnerved by plague but enjoying a better diet and drinking more ale, of farmers forced to diversify, of towns coping with self-government, of wide social and geographic mobility, of increased commercialisation is balanced by sympathetic and often vibrant portraits of individuals pitting their lives against hardship, faith, sex, neighbours, the law, opportunity, aspiration and the environment. The work is stuffed with arresting insights and incidents.
Yet these virtues are clouded by some rather costive writing and an extraordinarily disjointed structure. Each chapter jumps from topic to topic, often without connection between them or even coherence within each section. Thus, in the final chapter, seven pages of political analysis of 1461-71 are followed by two headed ‘Restoration and Reconstruction’, then 12 on Parishes and Clergy, succeeded by two and a half on Law and Learning, two on Landed Society, three on Books and Reading, then back for two pages on Politics and Parliament, before diverting to Trade and Urban Life. This section unexpectedly slides from a discussion of manorial estate management to the filial piety of the Yorkist family and from there to political iconography, propaganda and Richard III. All very interesting, but very odd. This confusing, confused and breathless jumble is repeated throughout the book, as if voluminous notes have been hastily downloaded in a random heap. Thus much excellent material and fruitful argument are scattered. Rubin’s pointillist technique rarely manages to suggest a larger image, merely a chaos of discrete dots. This may be deliberate, to mirror the confusion of actual living, but it obscures much of value and makes the book hard to enjoy. Those looking for a history of Britain, as the title advertises, will also be bewildered at the absence of Scotland. This is a book about England, with a few excursions into Wales and Ireland.
More seriously, Rubin appears either remarkably casual or remarkably innocent of what used to be called facts. Contrary to the title, she is far more at home with pious female vegetarians, the Frygs of Bredon or Christine Carpenter — the failed Surrey anchorite that is — than with politics and government. In no way does the political narrative or analysis match that in the preceding volume in this series, by David Carpenter, on 1066-1284, a work as scrupulously accurate as it is lively, or the magisterial new work on the 14th and 15th centuries by Gerald Harriss. Much of the political commentary appears rushed, at times abstract to the point of obscurity, at others repetitive. The whole text is mired in an astonishing array of simple errors that should make a first-term undergraduate blush. Almost every time Rubin is confronted with high politics she abandons historical grip. In five pages on Henry V, to take a sadly typical example, there appear to be at least eight howlers, such as dating Agincourt a day early, misdating Henry’s marriage as 1415 not 1420 and having the king arrive in triumph in London at Tower Bridge (an embarrassing solecism repeated later). Slovenly copyediting may explain how Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, appears on the same page as Henry V’s half-brother (which he wasn’t) and uncle (which he was). A clenched style may account for some of the muddle. Unfortunately, the weight of wrong information throughout the book undermines faith in its reliability to the extent that it cannot be recommended to the student or general audience for whom it is presumably aimed and who would otherwise have gained much from Rubin’s imaginative recreation of English society.
C. J. Tyerman’s most recent book is Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades (OUP).
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