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The book is divided into two unequal sections. In the first section, Dr. Frame analyses the nature of English lordship in Ireland as exercised by three groups-resident lords, absentee lords and royal government. By studying the English governing elite in Ireland as one, he is anxious to remind us that the dichotomy between royal government and seignorial power in Ireland is and was wrongly drawn, since both were concerned to sustain the English colony; he is also intent on showing that the key to an understanding of the politics of the period often lies in the intricacies and intimacies of family and local history. It is to a sustained narrative of the politics of English Ireland that Dr. Frame moves in the second section of his book. The sheer density of that narrative makes heavy demands on the reader; but it is that density itself which gives conviction to the narrative as Dr. Frame unfolds the complexity of political tensions within the English community. He locates those tensions firmly in their twin settings-that of the feuding, competitive world of the Anglo-Irish lords and their lineages on the one hand and the broader orbit of English political life, within which resident and absentee lords alike moved in greater or lesser degree, on the other. Furthermore, he never loses sight of the themes which it is the intention of his narrative to unfold-the tension between an intrusive and often clumsy colonial government and the resident lords, the necessary compromises of a frontier society at war, the inter-twining of the politics of English Ireland in the broader frame- work of the political, military and social concerns and patronage patterns of the king and aristocracy of England, and above all the rapid emergence in the 1340s and 1350s of a distinctively Anglo-Irish political community. Dr. Frame's monograph has added massively to our knowledge of the politics of fourteenth-century Ireland; but the real excitement of his book, as of his earlier work, lies in his capacity to make us think afresh about many aspects of medieval Ireland, and thereby of other medieval societies. He is, for example, deeply sceptical of the view of Ireland presented through the administrative documentation of the Dublin government and constantly warns us of the way in which the assumptions and even the vocabulary of the official sources have impeded historians from recognizing 'social and political actualities'. Those 'actualities' included a recognition that political and social stability in Ireland depended very considerably on accepting the position and winning the trust of the resident English lords. To draw distinction between the interest of kings and lords or between royal government and the great liberties is to succumb to the false perspectives of English administrative officials, compounded by the centralist and royalist prejudices of English historians. It is no surprise, therefore, that Dr. Frame has no time for the 'law and order' brigade of historians, for whom the solution to the Irish problem was a large dose of strong royal government and firm measures to halt the hibernicization of the English settlers. Viewed from Westminster, the English colony in Ireland may indeed have appeared in 'decline' and many of its lords, in the contemporary phrase, 'degenerate'; viewed from Ireland (if not from Dublin), however, the policies and compromises of those lords were an attempt to cope with the problems of living in a half-conquered country while preserving 'the intricate tissue of political and social connections' which bound them to England. It is this duality which makes a rounded