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Oxford History of England #3
From Domesday Book to Magna Carta, 1087–1216
A landmark study of key century in medieval history, this book comprises the history of the century and a quarter which elapsed between the compilation of Domesday Book and the issue of the Magna Carta, the two greatest documents of English medieval history. The volume opens with chapters inwhich the position of the monarchy and social and economic background of the period in its feudal, rural, and urban aspects are discussed. In the political sphere it describes the building up of the great continental dominions, which in the time of Henry II are known as the Angevin Empire, and thecollapse of the battle of Bouvines in 1214; it embraces also the attempts of the English kings to establish their supremacy over Scotland and Wales, and the conquest of Ireland. The work of the ecclesiastical reformers and the conflicts between church and state associated with the archbishopsAnselm and Becket and Pope Innocent III are discussed. The progress of education, the contribution of Englishmen to the twelth-century renaissance, the literature, and the art of the age are brought under review. Finally, the great development of the common law brought about by the legal reformsof Henry II is traced, and the book ends with a description of the events leading up Magna Carta and its sequel, civil war, in which the reign of King John was brought to a close.
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First published December 31, 1956
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 7, 2020
Simnel, merchet, villein, distraint, enfeoffment, scutage, compurgation. These are some of the words you'll encounter in the book, often with no explanation. Thank goodness for Wikipedia.
That, combined with the author's use of Latin quotations without translation, is my first complaint about what is an overall decent history of the period.
My second criticism is of the chronology. Poole chose to interrupt the chronology with topical chapters on things like relations with the church. I found this confusing since he would be starting the chronology all over for the purposes of covering the history of the topic. The reader would have been better served, in my opinion, by his integration of the subjects into the main narrative.
That, combined with the author's use of Latin quotations without translation, is my first complaint about what is an overall decent history of the period.
My second criticism is of the chronology. Poole chose to interrupt the chronology with topical chapters on things like relations with the church. I found this confusing since he would be starting the chronology all over for the purposes of covering the history of the topic. The reader would have been better served, in my opinion, by his integration of the subjects into the main narrative.
March 21, 2018
Domesday Book to Magna Carta (1087-1215) by Austin L. Poole is one of the several volumes in the Oxford History of England series which together make an edifice as ancient, venerable and monolithic as Stonehenge. I read two of the preceding volumes (The English Settlements and Anglo-Saxon England) last year, and enjoyed them thoroughly. For all that they are somewhat dated in presentational style, they make up for it in lucidity of prose and scholarship.
Domesday Book to Magna Carta is no exception. The period between Domesday and the Great Charter extends to just over a century - basically the twelfth century, with short overlaps into the preceding and succeeding centuries. It encompasses the reigns of William the Conqueror, William Rufus, Henry I, Stephen, Henry II, Richard the Lionheart and 'Bad' King John. Poole doesn't like any of them very much. In fact, he finds his protagonists a largely bad lot. Although often intelligent, energetic and capable, they were often arbitrary, calculating and cruel. For all that, he goes some way to rehabilitating the character of King John who, although arbitrary and cruel, was very much a victim of circumstance. The Barons with whom he wrestled for control of government were, if anything, even worse, and clearly had no intention of abiding by the clauses of Magna Carta even when John had signed it.
It was during this turbulent time that the lineaments of what we would recognise as modern England emerged. Institutions we take for granted, especially in the legal and judicial world -- things such as Crown courts, trial by jury and so on - first stirred in this period, culminating in Magna Carta, seen in hindsight as the embryo of constitutional monarchy. Many of the technical terms used by lawyers to this day to bamboozle their clients, such as 'assize' and 'seizin', are Norman French in origin.
In some ways, though, the Medieval world was quite alien to our way of thinking. There weren't 'countries' as such, but a patchwork of baronies, counties and other fiefs, interlinked by a network of lordship, vassalage and suzerainty that was always subject to change by intermarriage and switches of allegiance as well as by conquest. So, whereas the Kings of England regarded Normandy as a part of the nation across the Channel, they also ruled various parts of France, even though they owed the King of France fealty for these selfsame regions -- but were fighting the same King for most of the period. Some of this is rather hard to follow, and one could have done with a few more maps and especially genealogical charts, the few proffered being relegated to footnotes and seized on with gratitude wherever they occurred.
For all this strangeness, there is a lot about the twelfth century that's oddly familiar. After all, this was the period from which we get most of what we imagine are the tropes of the Middle Ages. The twelfth century was the heyday of the mounted knight and his squire; of heraldry and castles; of tournaments and sieges; of the lord in his manor and the villein in his cot; the Crusades and the Age of Chivalry. The age started with the institution of the Feudal System; at its end, with Magna Carta, the first signs of its dissolution. But the bit in the middle is the source of everything you see in A Game of Thrones and lampooned in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
My interest is mostly literary. For it was in this brief interval that English (qua 'Old' English) as a means of literary expression was utterly extinguished, supplanted by Norman French, relegated to the status of vernacular unfit for polite society -- only to reemerge triumphant as a vehicle of consummate linguistic power and subtlety.
Most of the important documents of the period were, of course, written in Latin, for which examples Poole offers no translation, clearly expecting any serious student of history to be fully conversant with that language, the extinction of which from most school curricula therefore one can hardly regard as progressive.
Literary works, not just legal, were written in Latin, such as the Historia Regum Brittaniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth, written around 1136. It was this confabulous grimoire that traced the ancestry of the British to Brutus, a refugee from Troy - something of a common device in those days -- and whence we get just about everything there is to know about King Arthur and hisKerniggits Knights of the Round Table.
It was this Arthurian impulse which saw, in the mid-twelfth century, the re-emergence of English as a literary language, having merged the sonority and power of its Old English roots with the subtlety and finesse of its Norman French overlay to emerge, even stronger, as what we would recognise as Middle English.
Notwithstanding inasmuch as which it is from Historia Regum Britanniae that the poet Wace wrote Roman de Brut, in Norman French, around 1150, and Layamon wrote Brut, around 1200 - one of the earliest major works in post-conquest English, for all that it is early Middle English and fairly obscure. The same themes were carried on, in times to come, in Gawain and the Green Knight (in the 14th century, again in somewhat obscure Middle English) and eventually Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1485), one of the first printed books in England -- and in fully modern English that anyone can read today without a dictionary at hand. Domesday Book to Magna Carta, then, provides the essential historical background for anyone who, like me, wishes to start fossicking around in the roots of our own literary tradition.
Domesday Book to Magna Carta is no exception. The period between Domesday and the Great Charter extends to just over a century - basically the twelfth century, with short overlaps into the preceding and succeeding centuries. It encompasses the reigns of William the Conqueror, William Rufus, Henry I, Stephen, Henry II, Richard the Lionheart and 'Bad' King John. Poole doesn't like any of them very much. In fact, he finds his protagonists a largely bad lot. Although often intelligent, energetic and capable, they were often arbitrary, calculating and cruel. For all that, he goes some way to rehabilitating the character of King John who, although arbitrary and cruel, was very much a victim of circumstance. The Barons with whom he wrestled for control of government were, if anything, even worse, and clearly had no intention of abiding by the clauses of Magna Carta even when John had signed it.
It was during this turbulent time that the lineaments of what we would recognise as modern England emerged. Institutions we take for granted, especially in the legal and judicial world -- things such as Crown courts, trial by jury and so on - first stirred in this period, culminating in Magna Carta, seen in hindsight as the embryo of constitutional monarchy. Many of the technical terms used by lawyers to this day to bamboozle their clients, such as 'assize' and 'seizin', are Norman French in origin.
In some ways, though, the Medieval world was quite alien to our way of thinking. There weren't 'countries' as such, but a patchwork of baronies, counties and other fiefs, interlinked by a network of lordship, vassalage and suzerainty that was always subject to change by intermarriage and switches of allegiance as well as by conquest. So, whereas the Kings of England regarded Normandy as a part of the nation across the Channel, they also ruled various parts of France, even though they owed the King of France fealty for these selfsame regions -- but were fighting the same King for most of the period. Some of this is rather hard to follow, and one could have done with a few more maps and especially genealogical charts, the few proffered being relegated to footnotes and seized on with gratitude wherever they occurred.
For all this strangeness, there is a lot about the twelfth century that's oddly familiar. After all, this was the period from which we get most of what we imagine are the tropes of the Middle Ages. The twelfth century was the heyday of the mounted knight and his squire; of heraldry and castles; of tournaments and sieges; of the lord in his manor and the villein in his cot; the Crusades and the Age of Chivalry. The age started with the institution of the Feudal System; at its end, with Magna Carta, the first signs of its dissolution. But the bit in the middle is the source of everything you see in A Game of Thrones and lampooned in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
My interest is mostly literary. For it was in this brief interval that English (qua 'Old' English) as a means of literary expression was utterly extinguished, supplanted by Norman French, relegated to the status of vernacular unfit for polite society -- only to reemerge triumphant as a vehicle of consummate linguistic power and subtlety.
Most of the important documents of the period were, of course, written in Latin, for which examples Poole offers no translation, clearly expecting any serious student of history to be fully conversant with that language, the extinction of which from most school curricula therefore one can hardly regard as progressive.
Literary works, not just legal, were written in Latin, such as the Historia Regum Brittaniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth, written around 1136. It was this confabulous grimoire that traced the ancestry of the British to Brutus, a refugee from Troy - something of a common device in those days -- and whence we get just about everything there is to know about King Arthur and his
It was this Arthurian impulse which saw, in the mid-twelfth century, the re-emergence of English as a literary language, having merged the sonority and power of its Old English roots with the subtlety and finesse of its Norman French overlay to emerge, even stronger, as what we would recognise as Middle English.
Notwithstanding inasmuch as which it is from Historia Regum Britanniae that the poet Wace wrote Roman de Brut, in Norman French, around 1150, and Layamon wrote Brut, around 1200 - one of the earliest major works in post-conquest English, for all that it is early Middle English and fairly obscure. The same themes were carried on, in times to come, in Gawain and the Green Knight (in the 14th century, again in somewhat obscure Middle English) and eventually Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1485), one of the first printed books in England -- and in fully modern English that anyone can read today without a dictionary at hand. Domesday Book to Magna Carta, then, provides the essential historical background for anyone who, like me, wishes to start fossicking around in the roots of our own literary tradition.
March 14, 2009
I'm reading this concurrently with England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings which makes both reads more complete and interesting, If you like this period of English history. I guess I do...
October 23, 2019
This is a thorough, balanced and sensible account of a period in English history which is less well known.
I found it thoroughly readable, which surprised me a little since I began with a prejudice that it would be more of a text book to be used as an ad hoc sourcebook, than an account to be read from cover to cover.
Perhaps most interesting were (1) a comprehensive account of the Anarchy, when Stephen and Matilda fought for the crown, and (2) a review of the popular hostility towards King John, based on what seems a completely reasonable premise that the barons were as bad as, or probably worse than, John: King John, for all his faults, was honest in his attempts to implement Magna Carta; the barons were duplicitous throughout.
I found it thoroughly readable, which surprised me a little since I began with a prejudice that it would be more of a text book to be used as an ad hoc sourcebook, than an account to be read from cover to cover.
Perhaps most interesting were (1) a comprehensive account of the Anarchy, when Stephen and Matilda fought for the crown, and (2) a review of the popular hostility towards King John, based on what seems a completely reasonable premise that the barons were as bad as, or probably worse than, John: King John, for all his faults, was honest in his attempts to implement Magna Carta; the barons were duplicitous throughout.
May 11, 2021
A comprehensive history of the first French kings of England. I have a different perspective of King John now as this is a more nuanced and sympathetic view than the stereotypical picture of John. While it is mostly easy to read there are terms that non-historians will be unfamiliar with that are not explained in the book. Wikipedia though is a great resource for those explanations. Also I don't speak latin and there are quite a few latin phrases and sentences with no translation; not a major distraction but a little annoying.
May 17, 2025
Some good old fashioned dry English history from an academic teaching at Oxford. Written in the 50's when history writing was a very serious and tedious task! Still a good read if you like the dry. I do and it made me nostalgic.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews