Welsh Journals

THE REIGN OF HENRY VII: SOME RECENT CONTRIBUTIONS IN the Preface to my book on Henry VII,1 dated July 1972, 1 asserted that the work was to be regarded as an interim report on the then existing state of knowledge, and that much arduous research would be needed, as well as further detailed study of known material, before we could hope to be as well informed as we might be. I did not, however, anticipate that so many significant contributions would be made by so many scholars of diverse interests in the space of seven or eight years. The time and opportunity have now come to survey and assess these contributions and to call the attention of students of the period to the substantial and growing body of new knowledge.2 To start as it were at the beginning, or rather even earlier, we have to modify the received doctrine that there never was a statute made in 1428 or 1430 pertinent to the eventuality of Katherine of Valois's remarriage. I accepted T. Artemus Jones's conclusion on this matter. Assertions to the contrary, he believed, rested on unsupported statements by Sir Edward Coke in his Institutes (1629), followed by Cotton's Abridgement of Parliamentary Records (1657), and by others, notwithstanding that no such statute on the rolls had ever been found nor any evidence that the original membrane had been torn off, as some had asserted.3 The text of any such statute remained completely lost since the seventeenth century-until 1976-77, when Dr. R. A. Griffiths found and published4 what is undoubtedly such a text, a discovery all the more startling because it was found in a small bound volume of statutes in the archives of the borough of Leicester, wherein it appears as chapter 7 of the Parliament of 1427-28 (6 Henry VI), written in a mid-fifteenth-century hand. Dr. Griffiths's explanation of why the text should have been retained in the Leicester archives is cogent. The castle and honour of Leicester at that time were part of the duchy of Lancaster and had been conveyed to Queen Katherine as part of her dower in 1422, 1 Eyre Methuen, reprinted in 1977 with a number of minor corrections, for many of which I was indebted to Professor G. R. Potter. 4 These contributions will be mentioned so far as possible in a sequence following that of the chapters of the book to which they mainly relate. 4 Op. cit., p. 5 n. 1 and n. 4. 4 'Queen Katherine of Valois and a Missing Statute of the Realm', Law Quarterly Review, XCIII (April 1977), 248-58. For two other versions of slightly later date and of unknown provenance identified in British Museum, Royal MS. and in B.M., Stowe MS., see Griffiths, loc. cit., 248 n. 4 and 258.