Under ordinary circumstances a reviewer is wise to observe the maxim that reviews should address the book as written and not wander into the territory of what he or she thinks the book should have been. Volumes in the New Oxford History of England, however, seem to constitute an exception to this rule. As the late J. M. Roberts explained in his “General Editor's Preface” (vii–viii), “the New Oxford History of England is intended to be more than a collection of discrete or idiosyncratic histories in chronological order. … Each author has been asked to bring forward what he or she sees as the most important topics explaining the history under study, taking account of the present state of historical knowledge, drawing attention to areas of dispute.” He then added these caveats, “But each volume, allowing for its special approach and proportions, must also provide a comprehensive account. … Volumes have to be demarcated chronologically but continuities must not be obscured. … Any single volume should be an entry-point to the understanding of processes only slowly unfolding, sometimes across centuries.” The trouble is that Gerald Harriss's Shaping the Nation only partially meets some of these expectations and entirely fails to meet others. This is a pity, for viewed simply as a book, it contains much that is praiseworthy.

Harriss divides his book into three parts: “Political Society,” “Work and Worship,” and “Men and Events.” Throughout his book he includes vernacular quotations that will enrich the understanding of readers for whom Middle English is not terra incognita. In part 1 he examines the components of the royal court and government and includes chapters on the nobility, the gentry, and the local polity. He addresses the issue of whether the connections within communities and affinities are primarily causes for cohesion or disintegration. Here and in subsequent discussions of the political and economic topics that most interest him, Harriss gives a thorough, balanced, and up-to-date treatment of the issues at hand.

Part 2 contains chapters on agrarian society, trade, industry, towns, the institutional church, religion, devotion, and dissent. Harriss handles many of these topics effectively. His treatment of Wycliff, his followers, and the persecution of the Lollards is notably thoughtful and insightful.

Part 3 is primarily a narrative history of the period. Harriss concentrates on the war in France and on the more traditional political history of England. His interpretation of events in England is generally successful, and his discussion of Lancastrian Normandy is exceptional. His analysis of the war with France after 1428, however, has a problem—Jeanne d’Arc.

Harriss attributes the eventual English loss of France and the 100 Years’ War to the successful coronation of the dauphin as Charles VII and to a combination of English bad policies, inadequate financing, and military mistakes. Jeanne d’Arc's enormous if uncanny impact on Charles, the French as a whole, and the French and English armies, together with her ability to drive back the English front lines some two hundred miles in order to escort Charles to Reims for his coronation, are not mentioned. Nor does Harriss mention the ten thousand gold francs the English paid the Burgundians to get custody of Jeanne—a fact that should have made him realize her importance, as should the surviving English records.

Harriss misunderstands other topics as well. In discussing the cause of the Black Death, for example, he tells his readers, “The nature of the infection seems open to doubt … [but] it could not have been bubonic plague” (218). In fact, the plague was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which manifests itself in humans in three different ways: bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, and septicemic plague. Each manifestation is transmitted differently, produces different symptoms, and kills different percentages of its victims at different speeds. Pneumonic and septicemic plague, however, are derivatives of bubonic plague, and so bubonic plague must be present in order for either of the other two forms to appear.

Climate, as a subject of historical importance, is never mentioned. The term “climate” does not even appear in the index, nor does “demography” or “ecology.” Also missing from the index are terms like “art,” “painting”, “literature,” “fashion,” “songs,” and “secular music.” Harriss discusses English perpendicular architecture (340–44), but not architecture in general.

Harriss writes about peasants in his chapter on agrarian society, but much that he says is erroneous. He does not understand the actual impact of the plague. It is true that wages initially rose sharply, but so did prices, inflation, and taxes. Surviving peasants who had lived on the brink of extinction were significantly less likely to starve to death, but many still lived in miserable conditions in which malnutrition and seasonal hunger were common. A small percentage of peasants acquired sufficient new lands to cease to work the land and to live instead off their rents or the labor of others. They thus ceased to be peasants and became what might be termed agrarian entrepreneurs. Some of their names appear both on lists of rebels in 1381 and later on lists of members of the Commons. Harriss, however, misinterpreting the real effects of the plague and believing that peasant postplague conditions were much better than they were and that they quickly became static, concludes that the period 1360–1461 was “a time of general peasant well-being” (245). This misinterpretation, in turn, distorts what he has to say about the peasantry.

Women do not fare well at Harriss's hands. Queen Margaret of Anjou is the only prominent woman to play an active political role in this book, but then she had physical control of her husband for four years. Female peasants, not surprisingly, fare worse.

Many broad questions are not addressed in this book. For example, how do the feudal lords of the thirteenth century, who saw themselves as the principal representatives of the community of realm, evolve into an aristocracy so self-absorbed and greedy that its members pose a threat not just to each other and the king but to the nation as a whole? By what process does the curriculum of the Inns of Court, coupled with the explosive growth in the number of lawyers, infect the mentality and behavior of Harriss's political society? What effect does the percentage of English land controlled by the church, which rose from slightly less than 20 percent at the time of Domesday Book to approach and probably exceed 50 percent by 1400, have on Harriss's period? Such issues were presumably what Roberts imagined in writing of the need for the New Oxford History of England to incorporate “processes only slowly unfolding, sometimes across centuries” (viii).

In short, Shaping the Nation is an old-fashioned book, interesting in content, but narrow and exclusive. As Roberts observed in his preface, the ways in which historians today understand and define their profession are very much broader and more inclusive than the ways in which history was understood in the mid-twentieth century, and the New Oxford History of England was intended to reflect these changes. Most historians of medieval England will want to read Harriss's book and make a place for it on their shelves. Regrettably, they will have to continue waiting for the sort of book that Roberts envisioned and historians still need.