The papers in this collection were presented at a conference celebrating the 850th anniversary of Henry II's accession to the English throne. Such scholarly festivities do not necessarily yield important papers, but most of the ones in this collection are worthy of the attention of anyone with a serious interest in the period. This volume even has an introduction that is interesting. Nicholas Vincent surveys how interpretations of Henry II have changed from Hume (1761) to Warren (1973) in response to the publication of sources, declining prejudice, and shifting ideas about what topics deserve emphasis. This exposition only falters when the focus turns to improvements in our knowledge after 1973. The introduction lists books aplenty, but not interpretive ideas, and the same reticence appears when it introduces the articles themselves. The problem may be space. The anniversary celebrates king-centered history. The participants are mostly working on topical subjects that have their coherence on different chronologies and their significance in many debates. Given this diffusion, the best approach is to go through them by subject.
Three of the articles deal with English government. Paul Brand provides a rigorous description of the development of the common law writs during Henry's reign, and the article also addresses some of the larger questions. Brand concludes that Henry saw the provision of justice as one of his key roles and that the legislation that authorized the modernization of English law required consent. Martin Allen contributes an equally careful account of Henry's modernization of the coinage (the end of periodic re-coinages and increased control over minting). The reader will also find a discussion of theories that seek to explain the growth in the money supply that began in Henry's last years. This phenomenon is probably one cause of thirteenth-century inflation, but its explanation is still elusive in Brand's view. Nick Barratt's article deals with Henry II's income and offers a second explanation of inflation. After a brief overview of the general economic situation in this period, Barratt succeeds in recovering the broad outline of Henry's revenue, which began at a low level and rose to over 30,000 pounds by the late 1170s. The largest element in this rise came from the profits of justice. Barratt then speculates that Henry's fiscal success and subsequent spending helped spark the beginnings of inflation. This article is one of the most important in the volume because it puts our knowledge of Henry's income on a reasonably sound foundation.
Ann Duggans's reinterpretation of Becket and Henry II belongs with this group of articles as much as with church-state relations. Duggans argues that Henry provoked a crisis with the Church in his early years by attacking ecclesiastical judicial privileges and that Becket's resistance to Henry in 1164 was understandable. What lay behind the conflict was Henry's vision of the comprehensive nature of his judicial authority. If this thesis is correct, it would increase Henry's share of the blame for starting the conflict and require a shift in emphasis in evaluating it consequences. This article will probably start a controversy, and a major question will be Duggans's evidence for bad relations before 1164—especially her contention that one of the key maxims of the common law was in place so early.
Two of the contributions to this collection are the fruit of the programmatic impetus to integrate literary and cultural studies more closely with history. Ian Short's charming article on fantastic stories has a serious point—to show the openness of high culture in the North in the twelfth century to oral culture—and Martin Aurell provides a detailed example of the phenomenon in action. The objective of his inquiry is to assess the propaganda value of Arthurian stories in Henry's time, and he establishes that such materials were still most potent in Celtic lands. While Henry and Eleanor may have acted as patrons for the purveyors of the matière de Bretagne on occasion, an otherworldly resistance leader who inspired the Welsh and Bretons was of little use to them. This attitude changed in the next generation.
One of the most hopeful trends in contemporary scholarship on the Angevin empire is the increase in studies on Henry's French lands. Works in this area will probably transform interpretations of the whole era. Only one article that takes this approach is present in this collection. Daniel Power looks at Normandy under Henry II. The subjects that he investigates are too numerous to list here. His attempt to illuminate Norman government by putting it against the background of assembly politics in the early Middle Ages is quite interesting, and the list of Norman assizes that he has assembled should be an example to others who study Henry's government in his French lands. This article is impressive, and one hopes it is an advertisement for a longer study.
Four papers relate to diplomacy and war. Seán Duffy argues that Henry II was an expansionist from his early days with respect to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. This thesis is at odds with conventional wisdom and probably will arouse resistance. Edmund King shows how the settlement of the civil war in 1153 should be interpreted as an unfolding peace process that owed its success in large part to the restraint imposed on Stephen and Henry by their supporters. This interpretation fits the evidence surprisingly well.
The third article in this group is Joan Dunbabin’s. She brings her usual clarity to an account of relations between Henry II and Louis VII, although the focus is rather more on Louis. Dunbabin convincingly argues that Louis achieved little in his rivalry with Henry and that historians have exaggerated the advantage that his lordship over Henry provided. John Gillingham reinforces this point in a paper that is a tour de force. By investigating Henry II's supposed homages to the French kings, he demonstrates that historians have stretched the number of such occurrences and attributed anachronistic importance to the relationship. This study shows the danger that can appear when we use a timeless concept of feudalism deductively.
The final two articles are difficult to classify because they combine political topics with cultural studies broadly conceived. They both are characterized by ingenuity and breadth of vision. Matthew Strickland endeavors to prove that Henry's heir, the young Henry, was not a feckless athlete, and Nicholas Vincent conducts a multifaceted attack on the enigma of Henry's court. The latter is dazzling in an intellectual sense.
This collection of essays is, then, worthy of attention. It gives the reader samples of many of the strands in the scholarship on the Angevin empire, and it contains a number of valuable articles. One might even be able to catch intimations of some of the surprising conclusions that these disparate approaches may someday yield if this review were longer.
