Matthew Ward's The Livery Collar in Late Medieval England and Wales: Politics, Identity and Affinity is a convincing revisionist study of two specific, highly culturally charged objects and their meaning between the late fourteenth and the early sixteenth century, namely the collars of “SS” and of suns and roses, representations of which adorn nearly four hundred extant tomb effigies from this period in England and Wales. The “SS” collar began life as a livery collar distributed by John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (1340–1399). Following the seizure of the English throne by his son in 1399, it became a special marker of a link between its recipient and the king. As a result of successive waves of legislation in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century against the wearing of livery by all except the servants of the king, it also became the only legal example of this striking manner of marking the relationship between a lord and his servant. After 1461, with the fall of Henry VI and the arrival of the Yorkist King Edward IV on the throne, the collar of “SS” was superseded by the collar of suns and roses, which served to mark a relationship with a new king—who was also duke of York. The collar of “SS” figures only extremely rarely on tomb representations in this period, even though, as Ward points out, Edward was duke of Lancaster also. After Edward's death and the overthrow of his brother and usurper Richard III, however, the collar of “SS” was distributed once more by Henry VII as a way of establishing his tenuous claims to continuity, for it was, after all, the livery collar of his great-great grandfather on his mother's side, John of Gaunt, as well as of his cousins, the Lancastrian kings of England. The collar of “SS” thus reappears on the tomb effigies of those who received it as a mark of their close relationship with the king.

Ward's major contribution, on the basis of a method which combines art-historical analysis of surviving tombs with the prosopography of those they depicted, is to demonstrate that, with certain rare exceptions, these collars of “SS” and of suns and roses should not be treated (as they have conventionally been in the past) as the politicized declaration of appurtenance to a Lancastrian or Yorkist cause. This is for the simple reason that in all except a handful of instances, the collar represented was that distributed by the sitting monarch at the time of the monument's manufacture. A case study of later fifteenth-century Derbyshire is particularly convincing in demonstrating that what was marked by the presence of this object was service to the sitting king, not diehard allegiance to one party or the other. Indeed, wearers of both “SS” and suns and roses in this county from before and after 1485 were marked more by links with one another (whichever collar they wore) and with honor of Tutbury (a possession of the duke of Lancaster, but which passed into Edward IV's and Henry VII's hands) than with especial allegiance to any particular dynasty. Even a final case study of suns-and-roses collars among the affinity of William Herbert, the Yorkist earl of Pembroke, killed at the battle of Edgecote in 1469, does not really suggest a contrary lesson for, despite the allegiance to Edward IV that unites them, the fact that Edward was still king after 1471 means that their memorials still mark loyalty to the sitting monarch.

Ward is thus left in the rather embarrassing position of arguing that the subject of his thesis, livery collars of “SS” and of suns and roses, are not as exciting as they have traditionally been taken as being, or at least not by reason of the resonances of party allegiance that earlier historians had projected onto them. This is perhaps a result of the structure of the book, which Ward begins by laying out the theoretical groundwork to consider how livery collars might be interpreted as a marker of cultural, social, and political affinities. But Ward does not have the opportunity to develop this fully in the second, case-study section. The specific prosopographical data in the case-study chapters is presented rather abruptly in a manner that could have been confined to appendices, giving pride of place to an exploration of the anthropological argument that the first section made the reader anticipate. Ward suggests that these livery collars marked a specific relationship to the king, but how this functioned exactly is not worked through.

He also suggests, in the final paragraphs of the book, that wearing the same livery also marked their wearers as forming a group, a horizontal relationship as much as a vertical one. This makes one wonder about the broader implications of Ward's study. Both of these types of collar asserted that the owner had a more direct, personal relationship to the king than did all his other subjects. The collar of “SS,” at least, marked a specific allegiance to the king as duke, and perhaps to the king in his private capacity. The suns-and-roses collar, too, was, above all, Edward IV's collar, adopted at his accession. How, then, was this relationship, and the function of these collars, similar and different from other forms of lordship and affinity? One wonders, too, if the social status of those who could afford alabaster tombs and even brasses, married to the unique legitimacy of the king's livery, does not significantly bias our sample against the wearers of the badges of other lords, and of those below the rank of esquire. After all, badges (now illegal) inspired the horror of contemporaries not least because they were worn by lesser men. In this broader context, it could well have seemed to contemporaries that the wearers of livery collars were merely superior kinds of hired thug. This book is an excellent start; it is to be hoped that in his future work Matthew Ward will be able to explore these issues further.