Welsh Journals

administrators who, as Griffiths shows in the case of Gruffydd ap Nicholas, used delegated authority in their own interests. In a still broader context the latest essay in this volume surveys the legal and political status of the subjects of the English crown in Wales, Ireland, Gascony, the Channel Islands, and Calais. This exploration of the relation between centre and locality at different levels and in different contexts has thus been Professor Griffiths's main preoccupation. The problem of governing the localities involved a continuing tension between royal agents and local elites. The English crown lacked the resources, tradition, or will to rule through paid agents of the crown, but to delegate authority to local nobility was, almost always, to court disaster. In the north, successive Lancastrian kings had advanced the power of the Nevilles, binding them to the dynasty with marriages and favours, but in a justly famous essay Griffiths showed how, finally, their dynastic ambitions revived the destructive feud with the Percies and embroiled England in civil war. In south Wales the stakes and the actors were smaller, but the policy and its consequences were the same. Lancastrian government became identified with, and dangerously dependent on, the hegemony established by Gruffydd ap Nicholas, whose ruthless rule, in defiance of both local complaint and royal reproof, is analysed in two detailed studies. Royal favour did indeed secure Gruffydd's loyalty to the bitter end, as it did that of Edmund Mountford, who used his connection with the royal household to deprive his elder brother of his inheritance by a mixture of force and legal chicanery, thereby helping to polarize political society in Warwickshire between the Neville and Stafford factions. Each of these 'case studies' from different areas and different levels show how the political society of mid-fifteenth century England became riven with division and conflicts of interest. At the same time they illuminate the lives and opportunities of these ambitious aspirants to political influence, another theme developed in some of the shorter studies in this volume. Welsh gentry and English younger sons were both among the un- privileged, for whom royal or seigneurial service was a ladder of opportunity, as it was at a less political level for the burgeoning tribe of lawyers and financial officials. Griffiths's short study of the long and faithful service-even unto death at the battle of St. Albans-of William Botiller, a civil servant whose honesty and no more than average competence yielded him an adequate livelihood, forms part of a wider survey of the role of this class in his Royal Historical Society address. If these men had an eye for the leases, forfeitures, and sinecures,-the droppings rather than the pickings of royal patronage-they did not lack a pride in their lifetime of service. The assertion of John Throgmorton, servant of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick and his chamberlain in the royal exchequer, that 'I have been all the days of my life in my country's service in the world as the world asketh', breathes, if not patriotism, at least the pride of the professional bureaucrat. Most bureaucrats managed to survive political revolution, which tested the loyalties of those in more personal service. Courtiers who had lined their pockets from Henry VI's generosity were marked men in 1450, sent to Wales to intercept their declared enemy, Richard of York, whose aspirations to the place of principal advisor of the king and controller of royal