Stephanie Trigg sets out ‘to use some of the records and histories of the Order of the Garter … to elucidate the role of this medieval chivalric order and its ritual forms in the cultural history of England’, and her book is a valuable guide to the standing and reputation of the Garter knights and their ceremonies from Tudor times onwards. She writes from a literary rather than a historical viewpoint, and the reader must be prepared to grapple with current literary theory as applied to historical writing. This has mixed results: in a key passage, she invokes the idea of ‘proud historical fictions’ which ‘attempt to exclude shame by placing it at a temporal or ontological remove … [and] enact through the very gesture of repression an inexorable return to shame’. The problem with this is that the shame must be there in the first instance, and the weakness of the book is in the treatment of the famous story of the secular origin of the Order. Edward iii picks up a garter which a lady has dropped, and when his courtiers mock his action responds by swearing to make the garter a symbol of honour, saying, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (‘Shame on him who thinks evil of this’).

For Trigg, this is an alternative version of the founding, treated for the most part as equally valid with the historical evidence. ‘The statutes’, in her view, ‘present only a formulaic record of the Order's founding and its reason for being, rather than a historical account of its origin’, and ‘do not “remember” the original foundation in any straightforward way at all’. However, what the statutes of the Company of the Garter do tell us is what Edward founded. There is nothing chivalric in the statutes, and only one clause bearing on military matters, which says that the king shall give preference to Garter knights when choosing the commanders for a campaign. None of this has anything to do with ladies’ garters, which are not recorded as an item of clothing until several decades after the Order's foundation; in 1349, the generally accepted foundation date, the garter was a well-known item of male attire, a suitable badge for a fraternity. The popular story (fama vulgi) told in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was invented to bring the Order back into fashion when its original glory was diminishing: English armies led by Garter knights were being steadily driven out of France, and the mood of the court was very different from that of the previous century. She would have been nearer the mark to say that the shame of the English defeats led to the invention of a shameful story for the Order's origins; the tale belongs to the renewed popularity of chivalric romances in the fifteenth century, and to the culture which produced Edward iv, builder of the magnificent new Garter chapel but also an incorrigible womaniser.

From the Tudor period onwards, Trigg's account is a highly useful and well-researched study. Her one fault in the later part of the book is to cast her net too wide, and to bring in wider aspects of the status of the royal family in popular opinion which do not really relate to the Order itself, or to be distracted by the duke of Devonshire's garter in Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson. She herself admits that the Order does not ‘compel the same kind of attention and reverence it used to’, and quotes Prince Philip as saying, ‘It's a nice piece of pageantry … Rationally it's lunatic, but in practice, everyone enjoys it, I think.’ In effect, it has been marginalised, partly because the whole honours system is less respected than half a century ago, and partly because it has a relatively low profile as an organisation, with just the annual St George's Day feast as its public appearance. These, Trigg argues, are cogent reasons why the story of the dropped garter persists: ‘the Order appears most often as something that needs to be explained’. And that process of explanation begins, despite her apparent hankering after a sexual and social undercurrent in the original foundation, at a time when the Garter knights were already well established, a century after Edward iii created his Company of the Garter. But this is to end on an unduly critical note: the book is engaging and has a great deal to offer readers interested in the vagaries of fortune of the greatest of the surviving orders of chivalry.