Welsh Journals

THE McFARLANE LEGACY: STUDIES IN LATE MEDIEVAL POLITICS AND Society. Edited by R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard. Fifteenth Century Series 1, Alan Sutton, Stroud, 1995. Pp. xviii, 218. £ 40.00. This handsome volume inaugurates as a series the sequence of conference proceedings that have served fifteenth-century studies so well since 1970. Its treatment of a formative influence on our understanding of late medieval politics is timely, since allegedly McFarlane's successors have lost direction and the study of the field itself is in retreat. Almost thirty years have passed since K. B. McFarlane's death and over twenty since the publication in 1973 of his Ford Lectures, The Nobility of Later Medieval England. We need to consider, the editors suggest, who are his true heirs, whether his inheritance is too restrictive, whether he was always right, above all 'whither now'. Hence the eight essays collected here, the work of McFarlane's pupils, disciples and their pupils. They fall into three categories. Two, by Simon Payling on the marriage contracts of non-inheriting daughters, and Anthony Tuck on the international recognition of the Lancastrian dynasty, are detailed and comprehensive off-cuts of on-going studies. Another three treat large themes with important implications: Simon Walker on political saints, Linda Clark on magnate affinities in Parliament, and Isobel Harvey on popular politics. Each will be much read and quoted. Clark's essay is especially welcome as the History of Parliament's supplement to McFarlane's 'Parliament and Bastard Feudalism'. Clark supplies biographical and statistical data and perceptive nuances to play down the authority of the Lords within the Commons. We may not really know what happened in most elections nor in parliamentary sittings; we (like her) may frequently have resort to 'no doubts', 'doubtlesses', and 'must haves'; but now these have some real substance to underpin them. Finally, a heroic trio sweep across the whole of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century politics and its historians. Gerald Harriss typically provides a clear statement of political structures to rival and contrast with Sir Geoffrey Elton's celebrated Tudor 'points of contact'. Anthony Gross seeks a new explanation for late- medieval political malaise and finds it, at least after 1399, in the loss of legitimacy by the monarchy. Christine Carpenter founds a plea for constitutional history on a survey of the historiography or some of the historiography, for where among her innovative administrative historians are A. L. Brown, J. R. Lander, R. Virgoe, R. E. Horrox and even G. L. Harriss? By constitutional history, she means 'a fuller understanding of the mentalite of the governing classes and their political culture'. Ironically, perhaps, these essays left this reviewer wondering what was politics? If not