England in the Late Middle Ages (1307-1536) by AR Myers

England In The Late Middle Ages (1307-1536) by AR Myers constitutes the fourth volume of The Pelican History Of England. Now sixty years old, this particular text examines a period of transition, perhaps from the traditional to the modern, at least in spirit. The author cites the fifteen thirties as the decade beyond which medieval values ​​and assumptions were in terminal decline. However, the modernity that replaced them was merely incipient and took centuries more to transform English society, but the argument made in this book for the fifteen thirty who form the apex of that change is compelling.

The book certainly presents history as a top-down affair. The king and his concerns are always central, and most of the rest revolves around this core. It is the case of Myers that medieval societies were characterized by the need for an all-powerful figurehead whose authority was perceived as derived directly from God. And given this, the history of the entire period was thus the history of the exercise of this authority. There were strong kings, who had the loyalty of those who had their own power, and there were weak kings who thus invited plot, conspiracy and instability. The divine right of kings, it seemed, was subject to Darwinian market forces: those who managed to attract enough authoritative piety prospered, while those who didn’t were bankrolled.

One measure of the monarch’s strength during this period seems to have been the ability to fight foreign wars. The word “foreign” is problematic if one acknowledges the Angevin origins of this empire. In the eyes of those who viewed contemporary life, perhaps, England and her France were never perceived as separate entities, but simply as part of the same unified heritage with a strip of sea in the middle. Myers does not emphasize this view of the political geography of the time, so a sense of England versus France pervades the narrative.

Myers devotes time to the arts, economics, society in general, and church life, as well as depictions of court life, intrigue, and military campaigns. His discussion subtly traces the growth of trade and the rise of a class of new wealthy business families who eventually supplant the old landed gentry. And it is these people who eventually provide the stimulus that fosters the adoption of humanism and other Renaissance traits that had developed a century earlier in continental Europe. Therefore, they seem to occupy the role of a modernizing elite.

The 14th century in England was a century of plague amid almost constant warfare, either with France or, if that had temporarily petered out, internally, where the Wars of the Roses saw the Houses of York and Lancaster vie for the throne. English. Perhaps it was this conflict that resulted in medieval values ​​persisting in England when elsewhere they were already in decline.

But what is really satisfying about Myers’s account of late medieval England is that in a short volume he succeeds in communicating and illustrating the complications and exceptions, as well as the general idea. This is a work of true scholarship and insight that strives to portray the big picture, but achieves it through an attention to detail that brings the story fully to life.