Welsh Journals

REVIEWS THE BLACK PRINCE THE BLACK PRINCE. By Barbara Emerson. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976. Pp. x, 298; 8 black and white plates, and 8 maps. £ 4.95. THE BLACK PRINCE. By Hubert Cole. Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1976. Pp. 223; 75 black and white illustrations, and 8 maps. £ 5.95. THE BLACK PRINCE AND His AGE. By John Harvey. B. T. Batsford, 1976. Pp. 184; 8 black and white plates, and 1 map. £ 5.50. These three treatments of the Black Prince and his age naturally dupli- cate each other in many respects: the same quotations from Froissart, Venette, Walsingham and other contemporary writers; the same reliance on certain key modern authorities (Hewitt and Russell especially); and perhaps inevitably many of the same illustrations, even down to the almost identical dust jackets of Emerson and Cole-the magnificent effigy from his tomb at Canterbury. There are, of course, differences of emphasis. Emerson's book is the most detailed, covering the life of the Prince from his birth at Woodstock on 15 June 1330 to his death at Westminster, on Trinity Sunday, 8 June 1376, after a long, lingering illness diagnosed unanimously by the three authors as amoebic disentery. She has made a generally careful study of the most important secondary literature and has also consulted a number of manuscript sources. She grapples not only with diplomacy, military affairs and the nature of chivalry but also, to a limited extent, with the Prince's administration of his widely scattered possessions. Cole's book is much more an account of military campaigns but even as a description of this aspect of the Prince's life, the one to which he perhaps attached most importance. Cole is but marginally interested in financing and organisation. More space is devoted to contemporary sumptuary legislation and current fashions of dress than to royal indebt- edness, taxation, purveyance and the problems of supply. But he fights the Prince's battles in style after following campaigns on the ground (giving useful references to present road numbers), from the fields and forest of Crecy, through the lanes and hedgerows of Poitiers to the now partially built-upon site of the dull red plain of Nájera. John Harvey is less concerned with wars and rumours of wars. He dismisses the Prince's first expedition up the Garonne to the Mediterranean at Narbonne in less than four sentences, whereas Cole devotes ten pages of text and illustration and Emerson fifteen pages of text to this chevauchée. Harvey's treatment of government and war finance can be even more inappropriately cavalier. Referring to 1345 when Edward III, according to Professor Fryde, owed the Bardi £ 63,000 and possibly another £ 40,000 interest1, Harvey refers to the king's 'kindly efforts' to help the Italian 1 Cambridge Economic History of Europe, III (1965), 460, and cf. idem, 'Financial resources of Edward III in the Netherlands, 1337-40', Revue Beige de philologie et d'histoire, XLV (1967), 1142-1216, for relations with the Bardi and Peruzzi.