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NOBLES AND THE NOBLE LIFE, 1295-1500. (Historical Problems: Studies and Documents, 25.) By Joel T. Rosenthal. George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1976. Pp. 207. £ 5.75. Late-medieval England's lay nobility remain K. B. McFarlane's legacy. His successors still survey the era on noble-royal terms and no lecture or examination strays for long from related themes and evidence. Professor Rosenthal's latest book relies upon this tradition but promises something fresh and useful for everyone, including political sociologists. Unfortu- nately, his rush to relevance too often muddles things we thought we knew, omits things we ought to know, and sets a careless standard for the publication of primary sources. The effort, if anything, has narrowed the McFarlane vision to a nobility defined as parliamentary peers who head powerful families. To be fair, Rosenthal writes to the formula of Professor G. R. Elton's popular Historical Problems series for undergraduates, 'under strict censures regarding length'. His eighty-two page Introduction deve- lops themes of class, class consciousness, wealth, retinues and family, and all are exemplified with eighty-nine pages of documents, mainly snippets and entries from printed calenders. Rosenthal is keen to up-date every- thing, from modernized transcriptions of evidence to a re-fashioned nobility that fits' 'more modern views of elite groups and class structures' No alternative to 'class' analysis is even entertained and presumably Rosenthal would reject arguments that 'nobility', at that time and place, was only a juridical concept. The book rightly begins with the essential problem: how to define 'noble' ? Having chosen the language of class, and having promised in his title to study the noble life', Rosenthal logically defines nobility in aggregate, uniform, and static terms. He shows little mercy to under- graduate readers, tossing them into the deep water of the 'synchronic and diachronic power' that he believes kept this nobility afloat. This replaces the presumably old-fashioned need to define historically and socially the divisions within the aggregate (e.g., duke, marquis, earl, viscount, baron). He concedes that 'many of the distinctions between a baron and a duke were quantitative, but some reflect a degree of real difference'. What are these quantitative versus real differences ? He does not say, preferring that we see this nobility as a uniform, undifferentiated class. This evidently licenses him to use interchangeably noble, peer, lord, aristocrat, and baron in their nounal, adjectival, and adverbial forms. Furthermore, this noble class stretches from late-thirteenth-century 'unstable' paterfamilia, summoned personally to parliaments, through those 'stratified' titula summoned in the fifteenth century as patented creatures of royal patron- age. We end up in a world where all nobles are equal, all their households are 'sumptuous', all are powerful landlords, and each must seek his identity at Westminster. This book, then, presents problems but not simply those created by muddled assumptions and imprecise language. Rosenthal identifies nobility by familiar activities: crown service, church loyalty, wealth, inheritance, retainers, households, patronage, and culti- vated intellect. He does not blame them, as a class, for violence and thinks positively about McFarlane's 'bastard feudalism' for pacifying the country- side. But geographical distinctions are obliterated, Northumberland to Cornwall, as are the diverse ways that many noble prospects were rooted