The reviewing of academic books is often more a matter of duty than pleasure. Very occasionally something comes along that is not only a joy to read but a real feast for thought. Such, I am delighted to report, is the present collection: fifteen essays, five of them previously unpublished, from a scholar who not only writes like an angel but, into his ninth decade, continues to tower above all others in his field. That field, as he here defines it, is “as a documents-bound student of politics, government and society, working on what might be described as the ‘Anglo’ side of medieval Ireland” (349).

Chronologically, the collection extends from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fifteenth centuries, albeit with particular focus on the decades after 1300, here with three contrasting studies of successive English chief governors in Ireland: Anthony Lucy, Ralph d'Ufford, and Thomas Rokeby. The Lucy chapter, first published here, adds not a little to our broader understanding, portraying a north country Englishman, well connected in Ireland, yet travelling there with fellow Cumbrians, attempting to bring to one wild and western frontier experience acquired on another. Financial decline and destabilization gathered pace, more or less regardless of such efforts. Even so, in an extended thought piece (chapter 8: “Devolution or Decomposition?”, again newly minted) Frame is at pains to stress the survival of the English colony, in many ways against all odds, allowing by the early fifteenth century for that “new equilibrium” between English and Irish that James Lydon (dedicatee of this volume) was amongst the first to identify.

What, meanwhile, of hopes unfulfilled or expectations blighted? Two chapters in particular—a magnificent new overture (“Ireland in the Plantagenet Orbit”) and a briefer but likewise fresh coda (“Did the Absence of the Plantagenet Kings Matter?”)—balance hope against experience. In the process, old paradigms—crown versus nobility, a retreat into insularity—are set aside. The English royal dynasty remained intimately entangled with the settler elite. We are also reminded that no king of England visited Gascony between 1289 and 1453, almost as long a span of years as divided the visits to Ireland by King John and Richard II without any fatal undermining of Gascon attachment to the crown: surely a dubious assertion this, given that Gascony “went French” in 1453, whereas Ireland somehow staggered on as an English enclave for almost five centuries thereafter? Even by the 1350s, with Ireland now a drain upon, rather than a net contributor to crown finance, new English settlers continued to travel westwards in pursuit of prosperity, and Irish lords fought in Edward III's French wars, after the battle of Poitiers sharing in the ransoming of the Bishop of Le Mans.

A settler elite that, in contrast to its equivalents in Scotland, never entirely blended with the native aristocracy; a denigration of native culture that, from the time of Bernard of Clairvaux, ranked the “Irish” always second best (even, to their bewilderment, those colonists with fully English ancestry); endemic violence and geopolitical divisions; and the ways in which Irish women, unlike their Anglo-Saxon equivalents after 1066, were not legally qualified to transmit office or property: all of these factors ensured that the colony remained on the fringes of Europeanization, luring the English with prospects for commercial or agricultural profit, yet in many respects strange or even repellant to those thus lured. For those with an eye for such things, there are regular reminders here both of other or later colonial experiments and of the assertion by G.O. Sayles (himself the subject of an affectionate yet not entirely uncritical chapter 10) that what medieval Irish history lacks is not an abundance of documentary sources but a sufficient number of historians competent to use them. There are also repeated warnings against “the view from the chancery rolls”: the neglect of local or regional realities and the risk of ignoring an encircling native culture, ever present, vastly significant, yet only dimly perceptible from the standard administrative sources.

Meanwhile, all hail to the publishers of this volume, in which there is hardly a misprint, and only one distinctly false claim: that the English Patent Rolls extend only to 1953 (211). In reality, the last deposited in The National Archives at Kew (though not, I suspect, the latest made) is C 66/5790: the Patent Roll 60 Elizabeth II, part 10, recording letters for the year to 3 February 2012. Such is the abiding strength (or pig-headedness) of the English chancery mind! For the rest, the reader, carried forward on a rich stream of primary source references, is spared the thorns and thickets both of secondary citation and of “cultural theory” with which so much academic writing these days is so repulsively strewn. And for those more at home with twelfth- or thirteenth-century themes, who might assume that Frame's later chapters will be of little interest, do please read on to chapter 14, on the “Two Kings in Leinster”: the story of how, after seven or eight generations, a direct descendant of Diarmait Mac Murchada, last pre-invasion king of Leinster, after 1169 architect of Strongbow's conquests, not only cocked a snook in the 1390s at the visiting Richard II, but lived to tell the tale.