It is surprisingly rare for historians of post-Conquest English politics to deal with the longue durée from the Conquest to the end of the middle ages. A work that does so is accordingly to be welcomed, all the more so if it addresses a major issue. As K. B. McFarlane taught us, and as all historians of medieval English political history have taken to heart, the nobility and their relations with the king are central to politics in this period. A study of the causes and consequences of the fall of nobles is therefore likely to tell us a great deal about the nature of power and politics at the highest levels. There is a lot of information in this book, one or two good insights (e.g., the observation that noble disgrace and death were increasingly enacted in a very public and theatrical fashion), and two important related themes. First, there is the change from complete or nearly complete confiscation in the post-Conquest period, accompanied often by very nasty punishments, to a mostly more forgiving attitude toward both the sinners and their sins from the late twelfth to the early fourteenth century, and then a reversion to more brutal and unforgiving policies. Second, there is the generally more violent tone of late medieval politics.

Despite these virtues, the book does not really come off. This is for three main reasons. Most importantly, J. S. Bothwell has given little thought to the nature of king-noble relationships or to the role of the nobility within the body politic, and what thought he has given to such matters takes little account of the postwar transformation of this area of enquiry. Extraordinarily, a half century into the McFarlane era, he thinks that the nobility's real power base in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was in Parliament, and, confirming that he is a Whig at heart, he believes that, unless firmly controlled, they were a powerful threat to the monarchy. He even concludes, in a passage that Stubbs himself would have approved of, that the problem with late medieval politics was that, having been nicely domesticated in Parliament, they too often escaped on to the battlefield. In fact, much of his reading is very out of date or limited: for example, an article of 1966 is referred to as “recent”; his handling of Henry I's “new men” fails to take account of the work of the last thirty-five years; he is unaware of the difficulties associated with the concept of the medieval court. Above all, the massive growth industry on “bastard feudalism,” which has been so informative on the function of the nobility in the late middle ages, including on the all-important relationship of land and power, might not exist. Indeed, the importance of this relationship right across his period largely escapes him. Second, although conscious of the significance for his subject of the emergence of the common law, he handles it very uncertainly. Third, as these latter two points indicate, he has not given much consideration to how the polity worked. Thus, he cannot explain the fluctuations regarding confiscation and the violence of politics because to do so requires thought about a number of structural issues that are either not addressed at all or are only partially addressed. These pertain to the peculiarities of the Anglo-Norman realm, the process of settlement and colonization throughout the British Isles, the law, the emergence in this period of what can only be termed a state, the changing role of the nobility within the state, and the changing dynamics of their relations with the king.

It does not help that the work comprises a series of thematic chapters, each offering examples from right across the period, with just occasional passing remarks that bear on some of these essential issues. Moreover, this arrangement leads Bothwell to conflate episodes that occurred under very different circumstances. For instance, Edward III, Richard II, and Henry VI are cited as examples of kings who granted out confiscated estates, the first one doing it well and the second two badly, without any consideration of the different objectives of the first two or that the last was barely cognizant and in the middle of a civil war when confiscation and regrant were done in his name. Bothwell's unshakeable conviction that kingship essentially amounted to the distribution of patronage is in fact the sum of his reflections on the body politic, and it is the only aspect of postwar work that he has imbibed. Accordingly, Richard II's grandiose plans after 1397 for reshaping power structures in England are reduced to the error of “concentrating [patronage] on a very small group of favourites” (108).

A further result of the absence of close chronological treatment is the failure to recognize how far allowing disgraced nobles or their heirs to work their way back was a matter of policy for Edward III and elevated to a major arm of policy under the Lancastrians—indeed, that, after the Anglo-Norman period, complete or nearly complete and permanent confiscation did not resurface as an accepted tool of monarchy until Edward IV and his successors, a period beyond Bothwell's remit. References are made to restorations but as if this were just a minor alleviation of a sad state of affairs for the families of the fallen. The conclusion does pull things together chronologically, but it cannot hide the lack of serious thought about the fundamentals of medieval English governance and politics. This was a bold project, of the sort that more historians should attempt, but the achievement does not match the ambition.