The House of Lords in the Middle Ages: A History of The English House of Lords to 1540

by Enoch Powell

Genres: British Literature, History

692 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

This British politician's full name was John Enoch Powell but he is always known and wrote as Enoch Powell.

Reviews

[Mike Osborne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This represents an outstanding contribution to the history of this institution so reverently applied with succinct clarity.

[Michael Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powell, a member of Anthony Eden’s government in the 1950s, wrote this extended and detailed survey, he says, because no history of the upper house (as distinct from a history of Parliament) had ever been published. (Wallis is the scholar who took all of Powell’s research and whipped it into publishable shape.) The House of Lords exists because the successful exercise of authority requires seeking the counsel of "the most eminent or influential or representative of the governed," and there’s a surprising amount of structural continuity from the Witan, dating to King Alfred and before, to the early convocations of Duke William. The king’s court was gradually Normanized, however, and by the time King John had lost Normandy and been put in his place by the irritated barons, the upper levels of power in the kingdom had changed dramatically from what they had been a couple of centuries earlier. Powell attempts to cover only the first five hundred years of the Lords and he includes a good deal of genealogy and family history in sorting out aristocratic relationships. There are two dozen plates and hundreds of footnotes pointing the way to further research. As a politician, Powell was problematical at best, but he was an excellent historian.