Biographies of Henry i are clearly much like buses; we await one for years, then two come in quick succession, Judith Green's following Warren Hollister's posthumous one. Both are essentially political biographies. Green devotes ten chapters to a detailed political narrative of the reign, followed by three thematic ones on ruling, relations with the Church and the court. The themes of these last three chapters reflect traditional historiographical concerns with Henry i and administration (though Green argues against the view of him as an ‘administrative king’) and the significance of his reign in King–Church relations. The last chapter arises from more recent historiographical interests, including Green's own; it whets the appetite for more. The book's strength is its focus on Henry and his activities, telling the story of events, especially in Normandy; correcting, perhaps over-correcting, a tendency to present him largely in an English context and in relation to institutions and governance, attempting a shift of focus from administration to power, though to some extent this is still an ‘old Henry’ of aims and policies not a ‘new’ ruler of strategies, techniques and process. The ‘new’, more Norman, Henry, is placed firmly within recent trends in the study of French ‘feudal anarchy’, in the world of castellans rather than Exchequer clerks. The result often reads as a relentless tale of sieges, ‘revolts’, noble violence and strife – with Henry's role as fire-fighting. This was no doubt how it often was, and must have seemed to Henry himself. It is also how it seemed to Orderic Vitalis, whose Ecclesiastical history is the backbone of the story, helping explain, for example, the absence of western Normandy, and to a large extent Britain, from its detailed unfolding. Orderic's bleak perspective has some influence on the picture of random violence which emerges, and that deserved more acknowledgement. It called for more consideration of the game, the norms, the strategies – the habitus – through which the events Orderic presents can be understood if not predicted. Chapter xi gives some guidance, and should arguably be read first.

Readers of this Journal will be presented with a Henry who is traditional – and to some extent ‘new’ – in his insistence on inherited rights, and the ‘old’ Henry in his backing of reform and control of appointments. Norman bishoprics get due attention, and the significance of border ones, like Sées, as of border zones in general, becomes clear. Henry appears as a generous patron, especially of familial houses, including nunneries; family is a theme which would have repaid more systematic attention. The detailed narrative provides the context in which to read the strategies and tactics of Archbishop Thurstan, and of key moments in the primacy struggle; all this too operated within, and as part of, the ‘game’. Papal claims as well as crusade are new elements in Henry's world, and feature on Henry's political board and in his strategies. ‘Inherited rights’ – of kings as well as archbishops, bishops and monastic communities – were redefined, if not defined, by such new assertiveness. Henry's spiritual crises (as argued by Southern) are doubted; concern with penance seen as more that of chroniclers than of the king. The piety can thus appear as conventional, if not skin deep. But like some early medieval kings before him, Henry took power in a combination of court and moral reform. Differences there undoubtedly were, not least Henry's greater concern for the costs of the court; this was a new world in some respects. But in others Henry was, indeed, a traditional king.