Welsh Journals

THE NoRMAN Kings. By James Chambers. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1981. Pp. 244; illust. £ 7.50. This is a thoroughly bad book and, were it not for the reviewer's duty, having wasted his own time, to warn off potential readers (including those evidently of Book Club Associates), the most agreeable treatment would be a discreet silence. It is amazing that it should have been accepted in a series ('Kings and Queens of England') which contains John Gillingham's Richard I, and the General Editor, Antonia Fraser, clearly has much to answer for since her Introduction (multum in parvo and two howlers in the first two sentences) displays even more ignorance of the period than does the author. Mr. Chambers's text itself is mostly narrative of very little use, and thoroughly indigestible when it comes, say, to Henry I's activities in Normandy and France, or to the reign of Stephen. Whenever it is necessary to explain, analyse or even describe, mistakes and mis- conceptions abound as landmarks in a wide-ranging lack of understand- ing. Thus, in the first chapter alone we find pre-Conquest England peopled exclusively by Saxons (sic and passim) who, however, have been driven out of the Danelaw (p. 17); peasants are serfs and thegns are barons (p. 16); Saxon bishops live in halls with women (ibid.); the pallium is a 'cloak of honour' (p. 29); Edward the Confessor is the younger not the elder son of Ethelred and Emma (pp. 12, 19); and the Saxon monarchy is elective (pp. 12, 32, 33, 34, 99 etc.). Elsewhere and later (yes, I have read it all) things get no better: Hastings 'cost England its freedom' (p. 51); feudalism involves estates held 'in the fee of "knights' service" (p. 66); William the Conqueror is a hypocrite (p. 87); Rufus indulges in 'impetuous despotism' (p. 94); the Clare is earl of Tunbridge [Wells?] where there is a castle (p. 104); Robert Curthose 'against all common sense' went on a crusade (p. 113)­though we are not told which, nor anything about the crusading movement to which the Normans, after all, contributed more than any other people. Needless to say, Stephen's reign, in spite of all recent work, is a frightful mess ('Nineteen long winters', pp. 168 et seq.), and feudal anarchy prevails throughout all France (passim). Characteris- tically, more space is given to speculation on the death of Rufus (pp. 116- 25) than to, for example, the battle of Hastings or St. Anselm. Clearly there is no point in going on, except to comment on the lavish illustrations which are doubtless meant to be a selling-point of the book. They are superficially attractive, and one would guess that Mr. Chambers has been well served by his picture researcher (Caroline Lucas) but must himself, with the publisher and General Editor, bear responsibility for the ultimate irrelevance of many of them. Over and over again persons or events in the book are illustrated from manuscripts anything up to 400 years later, which is about as sensible, and educative, as showing Henry VIII in a dinner-jacket or the Younger Pitt in jeans. These illustrations are neither listed nor numbered, so that references are difficult; but what is the point of illustrating the book, and a chapter on Stephen, with two photographs of Dover castle showing the keep of Henry II and the outer curtain of Henry III? Not even the captions are always immune from error: thus, not only the central lantern tower of St. Albans was originally built of Roman brick (p. 72) but the whole abbey church, while the information that the Tower of London was 'built by a monk called