Welsh Journals

idealism. In the chapter on religious life, only Wyclif ('the last of the fourteenth century generation of turbulent, adventurous dons') seems to have Professor Lander's approval; the passage on him (pp. 116-18) is an excellent one. The devotion of the laity, however, is dealt with roughly: 'it served to stress, perhaps even to increase, an emphatic and gross materialism'. The last two chapters on education and the arts and on government and society are admirable. Professor Lander puts these aspects firmly in their place; education (p. 148) and architecture (pp. 153-57), and indeed royal finance and taxation (pp. 103-14), are seen in a perspective that reaches into the sixteenth century and beyond. The chapter on the economy is a sound survey in which the particular example is most skilfully deployed. And towards the close of the book Professor Lander relents a little; his comparison of the ravages and casualties of the 'Wars of the Roses' with those of the Civil War (p. 163) is a telling one. There are many such stimulating paragraphs in this book, yet there are others which are disturbing. Few students are going to be attracted by the people who inhabit the fifteenth-century England of Professor Lander. C. F. RICHMOND Keele SPECTACLE, PAGEANTRY, AND EARLY TUDOR POLICY. By Sydney Anglo. Clarendon Press, 1969. Pp. viii, 375. 84s. In this work of polished scholarship, Dr. Anglo has provided us with all that we need to know about 'festivals, disguisings, masks, plays, tournaments, and royal entries with their attendant civic pageantry' during the period 1485-1559. One would have thought that these years covered a good deal more than 'early' Tudor policy, but be that as it may, whilst we have here an exhaustive and very detailed account of spectacle and pageantry, we are not given very much about 'policy' in any meaningful sense of the term. In fact, as one reads Dr. Anglo's perceptive and erudite analyses of one spectacle and one pageant after another one cannot help wondering whether to connect them with 'policy' is not to use the wrong word, a word altogether too strong in its connotation. It is hardly too much to say that the only policy revealed in these spectacles, etc., was the purpose of those responsible for their production to imbue the audiences with a reverence, respect and general enthusiasm for the successive royal regimes. But this is hardly more than 'propaganda'. All the spectacles and pageants, the hidden meanings of some of which Dr. Anglo is adept at explaining, were in fact propaganda. How far it is right to apply the epithet 'Tudor' (Early, Middle, or Late) to this propaganda, except in the sense of period, must depend upon the extent to which any particular item was in reality inspired by the Court. Dr. Anglo