Welsh Journals

society, as has been suggested elsewhere. He makes it clear, however, that the lectures do not purport to draw a universal picture of even a medieval peasantry, since they are firmly located in both space and time. The spatial boundaries are provided by the counties of Warwick, Gloucester and Worcester, described in an earlier work, A Medieval Society, with the present addition of Staffordshire. More importantly, the study is limited in time to the century or so following the Black Death, which Professor Hilton regards as forming a distinct epoch intermediate between the feudal organisation of the agrarian economy and the new style of landlordism which began to emerge towards the end of the fifteenth century. Although this period may have been that in which the peasantry as a class was able to assert a greater economic and social expression of itself than at any other time in English history, the author is concerned that he should not be thought to overemphasise its role in contemporary society at the expense of other classes. Each of the later lectures is concerned with a single theme and some of the obvious candidates for discussion have been passed over in favour of the less well-known ideas of 'The Small Town as Part of Peasant Society' and 'Women in the Village'. Since Professor Hilton has fully discussed the question of freedom and serfdom in other works, it is quite legitimate that he should largely ignore it in the lectures. However, one of his few observations on this matter leaves the reader somewhat in suspense. In a discussion of the literature and sumptuary legislation of the late- fourteenth century, he observes that these sources ignore the fact of the division between free and unfree, although they have much to say about economic divisions within the peasantry as well as the divide between it and other classes. Since in his other works he has shown that lack of freedom was a serious grievance among rebellious serfs in the same period, one may feel perhaps that here is a dichotomy which needs to be discussed further. The final conclusion, however, must be that the lectures make important original contributions to our knowledge of the medieval peasantry as well as reviewing existing ideas. T. H. LLOYD Swansea HENRY V: THE CAUTIOUS CONQUEROR. By Margaret Wade Labarge. Seeker and Warburg, 1975. Pp xii, 219, 10 black and white plates. £ 4.50. Mrs. Labarge, as one would expect from a historian of her experience, has produced a study of one of England's most famous kings which is soundly based on a critical appreciation of the narrative and printed sources for the reign. Its strength lies in its careful placing of the king and his wars in the feudal frame of reference. Henry comes over as a man fully conscious of, and deeply imbued in, the laws of war. In particular, it is refreshing to read an account of his career which takes the notion of a just war on fifteenth-century, rather than twentieth-century, terms. To Henry and his contemporaries this was a legal rather than a moral notion.