Scholars familiar with recent developments in British history will know that two names dominate the historiography of the later medieval period: those of Rees Davies and Robin Frame. In the last twenty years, both have led the way in arguing for the interconnectedness of the several polities that comprised the British Isles and an interpretive model of the medieval past that looks beyond the boundaries of England alone. In 1990, each published a groundbreaking monograph showing how developments on the periphery of England were as meaningful as those specific to that kingdom in shaping notions of power, identity, and community (R. R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1100-1300 [Cambridge, 1990]; Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100–1400 [Oxford, 1990]). Both thereby placed themselves firmly within the ranks of a burgeoning school of “New British History,” and both went on to expound their novel interpretations in long and distinguished careers. In the two volumes under review here, Brendan Smith pays tribute to the legacy of each of these luminaries.

Lords and Lordship in the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages is a manuscript upon which Davies was working when he died in May 2005. It consists of a brief introduction and eight chapters in various stages of completion, though it is apparent from a brief series of notes that the author envisaged a book that was considerably longer, and one that explored in discrete sections the twin concepts cited in its title. Smith's editorial touch is very light: his avowed intention in agreeing to bring the unfinished work into print was “to keep interference with the original text to a minimum” under the assumption that Davies “would have altered at least some of what is now published had he lived” (xi). His decision was well conceived. The result is a narrative redolent of the stylistic flourishes, incisive remarks, and thoughtful perceptions that have always been the hallmark of Davies’ writing, but also a work that reveals the intellectual challenges that he confronted in trying to impose a clear framework over the turbulent history of the British Isles in the years between 1272 and 1422.

As Smith observes, Davies’ claim that the aristocracy has been poorly served in recent historiography is rather tenuous, for detailed studies of English noble families now abound. Not yet sharply articulated but nonetheless apparent in the surviving manuscript is a series of new arguments concerning medieval notions of lordship and the exercise of power, authority, and privilege attendant on them. These were, Davies contends, at once more complex and more sensitive to regional variation than many historians have appreciated. The first five chapters of the book are devoted to an examination of the many contexts in which the aristocracy of the British Isles gave manifest expression to its exalted status. They offer informative surveys of the extravagant display that constituted the backdrop of noble life; of the time, effort, and treasure that the privileged ranks expended on their magnificent homes; of the meticulous care with which noble parents planned their children's marriages; and of the role of war and chivalry in attaining and securing status and rank within the fiercely competitive environment of the royal court. These chapters present a useful synthesis of recent scholarship on the English nobility, but some of Davies’ conclusions and the list of secondary works upon which he drew for information about aristocrats from other regions reveal less familiarity with important scholarship on the mental, cultural, and social worlds of the Irish, Welsh, and especially Scottish elite. Late medieval lords, in Davies’ view, conceived of themselves and their place in remarkably similar ways across the length and breadth of the British Isles; notions of lordship were, in this sense, nearly “universal” (176). Such a conclusion is in some respects applicable to lordship beyond the confines of England, but in others highly debatable.

Of great interest to Davies are the ways in which regional conditions shaped and ultimately defined the actual exercise of lordly power. Here, he finds uniformity and universality much more elusive in the late medieval period; here, too, his observations, if tentative, are most insightful. The last three chapters in the book, although the least thoroughly developed, identify the distinguishing elements of two different kinds of medieval British lordship, one adapted to apply to estates that “sprawled over vast swathes of the country,” the other based in compact “territorial blocs” (179). The first, Davies argues, characterized lordship as it was exercised in England, the marches of Wales, and much of lowland Scotland, the second the kind of lordship specific to native Ireland, Gaelic Scotland, and pura Wallia. In this discussion, Davies concentrates almost exclusively on the former, drawing examples from across the length and breadth of the British Isles. (Intriguingly, these correspond closely to areas that an older generation of historians would have described as lying within the “feudalized zone.”) The expression of lordly authority in such areas, Davies argues, was deeply entrenched in “local traditions and power structures and relied overwhelmingly on the services of local men” (189). The evidence of such varied materials as indentures of service, bonds of manrent, and the giving of livery all suggest that bonds of lordship and dependence, although sensitive to existing social institutions, remained overwhelmingly personal well into the late medieval period (and, indeed, beyond). In England, the Welsh marches, and lowland Scotland, good lordship above all meant real and meaningful “leadership of men.” Even the practice of maintenance, the bugbear of early twentieth-century English historians, may be interpreted in Davies’ way of thinking as “an obligation of good lordship and good clientship” (202, emphasis mine). Frustratingly, Davies’ untimely death prevented him from developing more thoroughly the contrast that he posited between this kind of lordship and the lordship that aristocrats exercised within the Gaelicized portions of the British Isles.

Smith's respect for Davies’ scholarship is apparent in his reluctance to tamper with the text of the manuscript, and those looking for his take on Davies’ thought-provoking claims will find only limited commentary in the introduction. His real contribution to this edition is made in the bibliographical entries that he has added to each of the draft chapters. Davies’ arguments for an interpretive model that supports a uniformity of aristocratic experience across large portions of the British Isles are based on a body of secondary literature that reflects surprisingly little of the considerable volume of scholarly writing that, beginning in the mid-1990s, has explored the encounter between the cultures of the Gaels and Europeans in the later medieval period. Smith's bibliographical additions to each chapter reveal the richness and quantity of this work, and historians familiar with these titles will surely wonder whether, given more time to digest this material, Davies might not have portrayed the exercise of lordship as more complex and nuanced than he posits here. Smith's suggestions for additional readings, in short, do much more than update the author's original bibliography: they underline the compelling new directions in which Davies’ early efforts have led scholars in the years since he first revolutionized the study of the medieval British aristocracy.

Smith deploys his skills as an editor in a different fashion in the second volume under review. In Ireland and the English World in the Late Middle Ages, he brings together a series of essays in a tribute to the scholarship of Robin Frame, who recently retired from a long career at the University of Durham. The opening chapter presents a concise and highly complimentary review of Frame's contributions to the “New British” school of history, and offers thoughtful comparison and contrast between scholars who have advocated a “nationalist,” “particularist” approach to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century history and those who, like Frame, have argued for a broader, more comprehensively British take on the political developments that marked the period. He identifies among the more enduring of Frame's contributions to current historiography an appreciation of the ways in which contested authority in late medieval Ireland both reflected and shaped relations with England and, more broadly, political relations between England and its several neighbors. Characteristic of Frame's work, Smith comments aptly, has been a readiness to reexamine the conclusions he has drawn over the course of his career in light of new scholarship and to reevaluate the importance he has attached to the struggle for power between central and local power structures in the period after 1318.

Several of the essays in this collection (those by Paul Brand, Paul Dryburgh, and James Lydon) echo Frame's oft-cited argument that Ireland proved a valuable training ground for soldiers, administrators, and ecclesiastical careerists, offering humble men and up-and-coming aristocrats alike the opportunity to build wealth, status, and possessions by deploying in a challenging setting a variety of clerical, judicial, diplomatic, and, above all, military skills, if not always in ways that contemporaries admired or praised. Other essays remind readers that in the medieval period, the reach of the English crown was far-flung indeed, both geographically and conceptually (see the essays by Andrea Ruddick and J. R. S. Phillips). Still others treat the problem that fluctuating boundaries presented to an ambitious English crown determined to exert real and meaningful power in areas that success in war brought temporarily or notionally under its control (essays by R. M. Blakely and S. G. Ellis), and the challenges political and linguistic (see here the essay by Steve Boardman) that accompanied the exercise of military might. Three essays (those by Beth Hartland, Katharine Simms, and Elizabeth Matthew) offer new contexts in which to reexamine Frame's abiding interest in the consequences of England's troubled relations with the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish populations of late medieval Ireland.

This is an eclectic collection, and not all the essays fall comfortably within the ambit of the single, unified “Irish and English world” implicit in the title of the book. Collectively, however, all explore the broad theme of center and periphery that has informed so much of Robin Frame's scholarship, and all bear eloquent testimony to the breadth and depth of his scholarly oeuvre. More clearly still, all confirm his long-held opinion that the political development of the British Isles in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries involved a series of constantly evolving paradigms ill-suited to simplistic historical interpretations that privilege continuity over change and uniformity over diversity.

The two volumes reviewed here are well worth reading side by side. Smith's careful editorship has ensured that each in turn pays well-deserved homage to the seminal work of Rees Davies and Robin Frame. Each further offers a thoughtful assessment of the place of these scholars within the modern historiography of the British polity and a useful signpost for future enquiry.