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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2014
If the sacred back was not always safe from family and associates in the Anglo-Saxon period, still less was it proffered in the Norman and Angevin periods. William I endured the rebellion of one son, William II an accidental death while hunting; Henry I suppressed a baronial rebellion in favor of his feckless brother Robert Curthose; Stephen's reign was characterized by lawlessness and rebellion on behalf of Empress Matilda. Henry II found his whole family actively at war against him, Richard I met his death in a political quarrel in Aquitaine, John was constrained by a rebellion of many barons to issue Magna Carta, Henry III faced constant baronial opposition to his policies, Edward I was compelled to face magnate disquiet from 1297 to 1300, Edward II was deposed (and betrayed by his wife). Edward III alone of the kings discussed in this portion of my article reigned withal quietly (after 1341) and successfully (in terms of familial and baronial opposition, at least until 1376). This is not a happy picture, but it is one that reminds us that family relations were vital to successful kingship and that a king must, if successful, be a canny politician. Unlike Rosenthal, I have chosen to limit my discussion of royal biography for the period 1066–1377 to pointing out the sources that have appeared in print since 1945 and to book-length royal biographies; no longer is it true (in the words of Sidney Painter written in 1949 that prefaced his study of The Reign of King John) that, “when I started to write this volume, there was no adequate account of the reign of a medieval English king.
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2 Painter, Sidney, The Reign of King John (Baltimore, 1949), p. viiGoogle Scholar.
3 For these, see pt. 1 of Mullins, E. L. C., Texts and Calendars: An Analytical Guide to Serial Publications (London, 1968)Google Scholar.
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7 Malmesbury, William of, Historia novella, ed. Potter, K. R. (London, 1955)Google Scholar; and the Gesta|Stephani, ed. Potter, K. R. (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar.
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21 Hollister's book is planned for publication in the English Monarchs series. Richard Southern, “King Henry I,” in Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar.
22 Davis, R. H. C., King Stephen (Berkeley, 1967)Google Scholar; Cronne, H. A., The Reign of King Stephen (London, 1970)Google Scholar.
23 Appleby, John T., The Troubled Reign of King Stephen (New York, 1970)Google Scholar.
24 Christine Lauffray and Pierre Lauffray, Les Plantagenets (Lausanne, 1968)Google Scholar. An example of the less good—to say no more—genre is Bingham, Caroline, The Crowned Lions: The Early Plantagenet Kings (London and Totowa, N.J., 1978)Google Scholar.
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27 For those more sympathetic to Thomas of London in the dispute, the account by Knowles, David, Thomas Becket (Stanford, Calif., 1970)Google Scholar, will perhaps be preferred; yet it is by no means uncritical of the archbishop.
28 Barber, Richard, Henry Plantagenet (London, 1964)Google Scholar; Appleby, John T., Henry II: The Vanquished King (London, 1962)Google Scholar; Schlight, John, Henry II Plantagenet (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; and see the review by Hollister, C. Warren and Keefe, Thomas K., Speculum 51 (1976): 150–53Google Scholar.
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30 Pernoud, Régine, Eleanor of Aquitaine, trans. Peter Wiles (New York, 1968)Google Scholar, reflects on the sculpture: “And sure enough she is reading a book” (p. 267); Kelly, Amy, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (New York, 1950)Google Scholar: “Here Eleanor lies serene, in her hand a small volume, which one of her apologists has said need not be regarded as a missal. Tranquil, collected, engaged with her book …” (p. 494). And so drearily onward.
31 Seward, Desmond, Eleanor of Aquitaine (New York, 1979); the quotation is found on p. 256Google Scholar.
32 Meade, Marion, Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography (New York, 1977); the quotation is on p. 355Google Scholar.
33 Gillingham, John, Richard the Lionheart (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; see also his important article “The Unromantic Death of Richard I,” Speculum 54, no. 1 (January 1979): 18–41Google Scholar.
34 Brundage, James, Richard Lion Heart (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Appleby, John T., England without Richard (London, 1965)Google Scholar.
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37 Painter, The Reign of King John (n. 2 above); Painter intended to write a companion volume dealing with “military and naval institutions, and the development of the common law” (p. vii). Alas, this fine scholar and gentle man never lived to complete the study. Warren, W. L., King John (Berkeley, 1961, 1978)Google Scholar. Clanchy, M. T., England and Its Rulers, 1066–1272 (Totowa, N.J., 1983)Google Scholar, does not recommend Painter's King John as a “best work” on the reign (p. 193); this is inexcusable and inexplicable. Noteworthy among the nonscholarly histories of John's reign, and typical of them, is Alan Lloyd, King John (Newton Abbot, 1973); while this book is generally sympathetic to John, its bibliography omits studies central to the reign (Holt's The Northerners and Magna Carta, Charles Young and C. R. Cheney on Hubert Walter), it is hideously overwritten, and it abounds in vagueness (“one historian,” “one chronicler”).
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39 For the canonical view, see Jolliffe, J. E. A., Angevin Kingship, 2d ed. (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Keefe, Thomas K., Feudal Assessments and the Political Community under Henry II and His Sons (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983)Google Scholar.
40 Powicke, F. M., Henry III and the Lord Edward, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1947)Google Scholar. A new biography of Henry III has been advertised for California's English Monarchs series; David Carpenter is the announced author.
41 Clanchy, Michael T., “Did Henry III Have a Policy?” History 53 (1968): 203–16Google Scholar; Clanchy shows that he did. See also Studd, J. R., “The Lord Edward and Henry III,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 50 (1977): 4–19Google Scholar.
42 Costain, Thomas, The Three Edwards (Garden City, N.Y., 1958)Google Scholar. Costain finds a bishop [sic] of Canterbury (p. 156) and refers throughout to Earl Thomas of Lancaster as “Cousin Lancaster” and to Philip IV of France as “Philip the Unfair.”
43 Prestwich, Michael, The Three Edwards: War and State in England, 1272-1377 (New York, 1980)Google Scholar.
44 Ibid., p. 146.
45 Chancellor, John, The Life and Times of Edward I, with an introduction by Antonia Fraser (London, 1981)Google Scholar.
46 Galbraith (n. 36 above), 2:130.
47 Hutchinson, Harold, Edward II: The Pliant King (London, 1971)Google Scholar. See as well the interesting article by Cuttino, G. P. and Lyman, Thomas W. “Where Is Edward II?” Speculum 53, no. 3 (July 1978): 522–44Google Scholar, which queries both the traditional story of the means of his murder and the final resting-place of Edward's remains. Compare Fryde, Natalie, The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 201–6Google Scholar.
48 Prestwich, p. 325. Packe, Michael, King Edward III, ed. Seaman, L. C. B. (London, 1983)Google Scholar.
49 Jordan, William Chester, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (Princeton, N.J., 1979)Google Scholar. Richard, Jean, St. Louis (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar; Sivéry, Gérard, Saint Louis et son siécle (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar. Strayer, Joseph R., The Reign of Philip the Fair (Princeton, N.J., 1980)Google Scholar; Strayer, the dean of American historians of medieval France, devoted forty years to the preparation of his study (p. xvi), Sivéry fifteen (p. 11).
50 See n. 41 above; McFarlane, K. B., “Had Edward I a ‘Policy’ towards the Earls?” in The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar. But see chap. 5 of Prestwich (n. 43 above).
51 Lewis, Andrew W., Royal Succession in Capetian France (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar.
52 Ibid.; and Wood, Charles T., The French Apanages and the Capetian Monarchy, 1224-1328 (Cambridge, 1966)Google Scholar.
53 Mathew, Gervase, The Court of Richard II (London, 1968)Google Scholar.
54 Lyon, Bryce D., “What Made a Medieval King Constitutional?” in Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. Sandquist, T. A. and Powicke, M. R. (Toronto, 1969)Google Scholar; Wood, Charles T., “Celestine V, Boniface VIII and the Authority of Parliament,” Journal of Medieval History 8 (1982): 45–62Google Scholar.
55 Alexander, James W., “The English Palatinates and Edward I,” Journal of British Studies 22, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 59–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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