Welsh Journals

THE REIGN OF HENRY III. By D. A. Carpenter. Hambledon Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 480. £ 40.00. For over twenty years, David Carpenter, as well as producing a large volume on the minority of the English king Henry III, has been publishing significant articles on this reign. A high proportion of the present collection of twenty-one papers is readily available in major periodicals (a fair indication of its quality). And not every article which he has previously published on this reign is included here (e.g. 'Gold and gold coins in England in the mid-thirteenth century'). None the less, this is a useful and very substantial book. But Hambledon Press-unlike Variorum, another player in the field of collected articles-follows a policy of repaginating, thereby invalidating thousands of previous footnote references to the contents of Dr Carpenter's articles. The owner of this book has to use the information on p. vii to write in the former page number on each page, and the library borrower has to resort to mental arithmetic. There was evidently the intention, not fully carried out, of changing page numbers in footnotes to correspond with the new pagination (in a note on p. 194, 'above' should be 'below'); and where they have been changed or other alterations have been made, the printing has been neatly executed. Indeed, some articles have been re-set (which can change the number of pages used). Four articles have not been published elsewhere, giving further justification for the purchase of this volume. It is characteristic of the articles in the book that they adopt a stance between the extremes of other historians. Sometimes a more recent article explicitly recognizes the author's change of opinion on some point in an older one. A fairly brief new piece explores further the financial aspect of the reign, which has been an important element of Dr Carpenter's work. Visual manifestations of royalty interestingly dominate two recent essays. One of the most important items is the new article whose subject matter precedes Henry Ill's reign, 'The dating and making of Magna Carta', where 15 June is argued to be a more significant date than much work of the last half-century has allowed. Another new essay offers a convincing demonstration that Professor Holt's claims for the importance of Magna Carta in improving the situation of tenants-in-chief in the judicial system are exaggerated. By the latter part of Henry Ill's reign their situation may have been little worse than that of tenants on lower feudal rungs, but this was the result of several other matters, mostly occurring in Henry Ill's reign rather than in John's. Having been designed for a recent celebratory volume on the House of Commons, the essay entitled 'The beginnings of parliament' naturally covers more generally familiar ground than most