“This book makes an important contribution to the historical understanding of the events surrounding the fall of Richard II and the establishment of the Lancastrian regime.” So says the publisher's blurb on the back of the strikingly designed dust jacket. Driven by their desire to sell copy, publishers (and that includes the normally sober university presses) are occasionally prone to making extravagant claims about their authors’ books. However, in this instance there is no exaggeration for the book delivers exactly what it claims to offer, namely, “a fresh appraisal of the relationship between the English crown and its greatest subjects in the years surrounding the fall of Richard II and the advent of Lancastrian kingship” (v).

In its writing, and partly in its structure, the book betrays its origin as a doctoral thesis, but it is none the worse for that. The author has expertly drawn on the research material that underpinned both his thesis (“The Endowment and Disendowment of Lay Magnates in England and the Welsh Marches, 1396–1408”) and first published work (“Exploitation and Control: The Royal Administration of Magnate Estates, 1397–1405,” in Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval England, ed. M. A. Hicks [Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2001]) to produce a work of scholarly synthesis.

The central theme of the book revolves around the conflicts and shifts in the balance of power between the crown and nobility during the last decade of Richard II's reign and for the whole of the reign of Henry IV. That said, two-thirds of the book concentrates on the reign of Richard II, but, given that Alastair Dunn “does not regard the year 1399 as particularly meaningful” (v), this imbalance in the treatment of the two reigns is more apparent than real. Indeed, the approach adopted by the author serves to reinforce his argument that there was a continuity in the political violence that bedeviled the later years of Richard II's reign and the first half of Henry IV’s.

In a succinct introduction Dunn discusses the scope and aims of his work, the manuscript sources consulted, and the historiography of the period. In order to follow “the prolonged and interconnected crises of crown and noble relations” (129), Dunn adopts a narrative framework in all but two of the book's seven chapters. The first two chapters set the work in its historical context: first, by outlining the legal framework that governed the transmission of estates and the crown's rights of intervention, and, second, by tracing the thorny relationship between the crown and higher nobility in late fourteenth-century England.

In “The English Magnates and the Tyranny of Richard II, 1397–1399,” Dunn makes good use of recent research and concludes that Richard II's tyrannical behavior and coercive mismanagement of his nobility, part of what he believes was “an unsustainable experiment in kingship” (77), made the king's deposition in 1399 inevitable. In “Revolution and Rebellion, 1399–1400,” Dunn charts the rapid fall of Richard and the equally spectacular rise of Henry of Bolinbrooke. He convincingly argues that Henry IV had “learned much from the mistakes of his predecessor,” realizing that “the conciliation of the heirs and dependents of his enemies was a political imperative” (94). Dunn's “Magnate Rebellion and the Lancastrian Crown, 1403–1413” does much to make up for the neglect of Henry IV by historians. It offers a clear and compelling narrative of the key issues that dominated relations between a belligerent nobility and a usurping king.

In the last third of the book, Dunn adopts a thematic approach to his work and revisits familiar “thesis” territory. In focusing on the careers of three lords—John Montagu, Thomas Despenser, and William Lescrope—he shows how personal and familial vicissitudes became inextricably bound up in the broader politics of Richard II's reign. In the penultimate chapter, Dunn discusses the administration of confiscated estates under Richard II in which he adopts a case-study approach by focusing on the West Midlands Beauchamp estates, the Arundel Marcher estates, and the estates of John of Gaunt and Henry of Bolingbroke. In the book's conclusion, Dunn argues that while Richard II experienced only limited success in profiting from the destruction of his enemies and in the redistribution of his nobility's landed wealth, the more pragmatic Henry IV acknowledged the limitation of his power and thus came to a modus vivendi with his nobility.

The author is to be congratulated for a well-researched and cogently argued work of scholarship that historians with an interest in the history of the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV will find both informative and useful.