In this recent monograph, Defending English Ground: War and Peace in Meath and Northumberland, 1460–1542, Steven Ellis returns to the research questions he first posed some twenty years ago in Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power (1995). Ellis's work has been instrumental in reminding us that the dynamics of the crown's relationship with its leading subjects in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England was rich and complex, dependent on a number of geographical, cultural, and political contexts. The model of lowland England, which in the work of A. J. Pollard, Sir Geoffrey Elton, and others was taken to be the exemplar for the realm as a whole, did not apply in large parts of the kingdoms over which the kings of England ruled. In his latest book, Ellis has shifted his focus from the individual noble dynasties, such as the Dacres and Fitzgerald earls of Kildare, to two of the counties that formed the frontier region: Meath in Ireland and Northumberland on the Scottish border. He argues, persuasively, that the two counties were fundamentally similar in terms of demographics, economics, and, most importantly, in the way in which society was organized along communal lines, providing for semiautonomous regions where the responsibility for local defense was collective and communal to a far greater extent than that which obtained in the southern counties of the realm.

Ellis's analysis exposes some of the differences between the kingdom of England and the lordship of Ireland and the emerging Renaissance polities of western Europe. Unlike France, for instance, there was no standing army, and the defense of the border regions rested as much in local communities and landowners as it did with the agents of royal authority. This remained the case throughout the period under study, again highlighting the uneven pace of Tudor state formation across the British Isles.

Ellis begins by analyzing the response of Edward IV to the civil war that continued in both counties after his victory at Towton in 1461. In Meath the Yorkists responded by abolishing the royal liberty of Trim and encouraging the county's self-government under the effective leadership of the earls of Kildare. In Northumberland a similar policy was followed from 1470 with the restoration of the fourth earl of Northumberland to his family's lands and influence. This decision served the Yorkist regime well in the crisis of 1471, but Northumberland's independence would have ultimately fatal consequences for the last Yorkist king, Richard III. For the bulk the book, however, Ellis concentrates on the effectiveness—or otherwise—of Henry VII and Henry VIII in governing these frontier counties. Despite the crown's often uneasy relationship with the Fitzgeralds, the defense of the county at Meath against the Gaelic Irish was, for the most part, effective. In Ireland, the empowerment of local communities and local landowners encouraged and allowed them to take responsibility for the defense of their county with minimal interference from the crown.

The situation in Northumberland, however, could not have been more different. Decades of hostility and mistrust between the crown and the local nobility, the crown's refusal to provide the proper resources to defend the Scottish borders, and the very real threat of Scottish aggression all contributed to the disastrous failure of Tudor policy in the North and the so-called decay of the borders. Ellis details the relationship between the crown and the landowners of Northumberland in great detail, drawing on a mass of archival and secondary material. Yet his analysis does not really spring any surprises: Tudor policy failed because Henry VIII did not trust the Percys and other leading northern families and the government in Westminster fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the problems facing the border counties. In arguing this, Ellis is repeating the analysis of R. R. Reid, M. E. James, and many other historians, but there is a case to be made that the problem of borders was not so much a crisis perpetuated by royal government but one that had its origins in a fundamental crisis of noble power. As Ellis himself acknowledges, the fifth earl of Northumberland refused the office of warden in 1522, probably preferring the comforts of his houses in Yorkshire and Sussex to the rigors of life in Northumberland. Similarly, Henry VIII repeatedly showed his willingness to give the sixth earl the responsibility of guarding the East and Middle Marches only for Northumberland's simple incapacity to discharge his responsibilities to become starkly apparent during the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. If Henry VIII was at fault in the “decay of the borders” it was because of his determination to hold onto the notion of private noble power, clear in his promotion of Northumberland's right-hand man Sir Thomas Wharton to the peerage in 1544, instead of radically changing the system of local government and defense.

Defending English Ground is a very welcome contribution to one of the most persistent debates in Tudor historiography. The balance between the private power of the aristocracy and the public authority of the crown, indeed the whole process of Tudor state formation, was played out at different speeds and in very different political and cultural contexts throughout the English realm. If nothing else, Ellis's book is a reminder of the complexity of that process.