Welsh Journals

suggest that this estimate is too high. When ecclesiastical lords and the higher nobility are excluded and allowance is made for men holding in more than one place, 343 vills had only 265 baronial and gentlemen proprietors. Again, he points to men who sat indifferently, even at this early date, for shires and boroughs. The name Beauchamp or Grey among parliamentary burgesses may be clear indication of gentry invading borough constituencies in a fashion anticipating Tudor practice; but perhaps that Sir John Morice who sat at different times for Cambridge and Cambridgeshire had a different significance. In the fifteenth century the Morices were esquires of Trumpington (and still serving as M.P.s for Cambridgeshire); but for far longer they had been Cambridge shopkeepers and property-owners. As long ago as 1279 Nicholas Morice held a messuage in that town he had inherited from his father and grandfather and which his grandfather 'had by hereditary right after the death of his ancestors'. There is much which needs to be known about these bourgeois gentlemen in medieval English society; but on this matter, as on so many others, Dr. Denholm-Young deserves our gratitude for having opened up a wide field of medieval social history and raising a whole range of questions to which future investigators must address themselves. EDWARD MILLER Sheffield CONFLICT AND STABILITY IN FIFTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND. By J. R. Lander. Hutchinson University Library, 1969. Pp. 216. 12s. 6d. (paper back), 30s. (hard cover). This is an intriguing book. On the one hand, Professor Lander gives a clear account of England in the fifteenth century, and students will be grateful to him for that; on the other, he takes a dim view of the people whose lives he describes. He has little sympathy with the manners, and less charity for the men, of the age. In a book of this nature the need to be short and sharp means that statements rather than suggestions have to be made. The two chapters on politics are where this is most noticeable. Many of Professor Lander's judgements on kings and others may be right, but that is not the point: the blunt manner in which they are made is misleading. They might sound well enough in a tutorial; they look odd in print. Perhaps the duke of York did have 'little political sense'; perhaps in the duke of Suffolk 'greed and piety were carried to schizophrenic extremes', but we don't really know and are not likely to. Moreover, after a succession of such withering pronouncements one is bludgeoned into disbelief: they can't all have been that stupid or that grasping or that bad. Between the 'complete insincerity' of Henry V's diplomacy with France before 1415 and the thuggery of Thomas, Lord Wharton after 1544 there is no trace of disinterestedness, let alone