“Treason has a history that is all its own,” wrote Pollock and Maitland, and yet no one until recently has tried to write it. (The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, vol. 2, p. 502.) A pair of volumes by John Bellamy, now fifty years old, remain the standard scholarly treatment of the subject, with a focus on the 1352 Statute of Treasons and the English Reformation. (The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1970); The Tudor Law of Treason: An Introduction (Routledge, 1979).) Boyer and Nicholls have written something much broader in scope. They begin with the Bible and take us all the way to “the death of treason” and the appearance of successor crimes like “Treason Felony.” The result is praiseworthy and a highly useful book for those seeking an introduction to the various stages in treason’s life cycle in England. It also makes clear the challenge of trying to write a full history of treason, whose subject touches on so many others: war, politics, law, legal institutions, society, culture, and ideas, both in England and the wider world. What should a history of treason look like?

As Boyer and Nicholls conceive it, the subject is mostly high politics. In “Treason at the King’s Discretion,” they trace the development of an unwritten, customary law of treason through treachery, conspiracy, and attempts on the king’s life (35–36). In “The Great Statute and Its Aftermath,” the authors suggest the Statute of 1352, which defined kinds of treason, did little to constrain discretion, since new cases immediately confounded the categories and were pushed into Parliament, where they received a political resolution (93–96). The heart of the book is a chapter on the Tudors, “An Ultimate Weapon of State,” followed by “The World Turned Upside Down,” which takes up the Civil War, on which both authors have published extensively. As they see it, the many treason statutes of the Reformation reflect a view of treason legislation as “a solution to national ills.” (126) This marks treason’s high point; the attainders of Strafford and Laud 100 years later and the trial and execution of King Charles I irreparably damaged treason prosecutions in England (184).

The book describes itself as an introduction. The authors have elected, understandably, to limit their engagement with the historiography, but a framework would have helped to explain more fully why they selected the evidence they did. Without structure to support it, a litany of bloody conflicts takes on the feel of “one damn thing after another”; treason looks like the most faithless of crimes, constantly manipulated to serve the ends of power. That may be true, but perhaps not. A focus elsewhere would of course produce a different picture. For example, though peasants play a negligible role in Boyer and Nicholls’s discussion of medieval England prior to the Black Death, we have long known that they were political actors and subject to punishment for treasonous conduct, though juries might decide to protect them. (Sophie Therese Ambler, “The Common Law and Civil War in Fourteenth-Century England: The Prosecution of Treason and Rebellion Under Edward II, 1322–1326,” J. Legal Hist. (July 2024) (citing the existing literature).) How do medieval juries fit into “treason at the king’s discretion”? Connecting medieval and modern juries on this point—protecting those charged with treason—would give us a strikingly different theme.

What is the authors’ verdict on the reasons for the fall of treason? By the final chapter, “The Death of Treason,” earlier claims about the significance of Charles I’s execution have receded into the background, and treason’s decline is given a more lawyerly framing as the product of prosecutorial discretion. There is little reason to charge treason anymore (241–42). This seems undoubtedly relevant, but is it a cause? The authors also suggest that modern sensibilities may be to blame for treason’s decline, which again seems plausible, and they cite disturbances and tears of witnesses at executions as evidence (244–47). Yet the medievalist will surely call to mind examples of weeping and wailing at medieval executions, though treason then had a long future in front of it. (Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1996), pp. 3–4, 222–23.) It is hard to know what to make of all this. The book is rich in factors, but to pick out a cause from among them is difficult.

This is not an uncommon difficulty, and it does not undermine the great usefulness of The Rise and Fall of Treason. It is not just an introduction, whose chapters might beneficially be assigned to students; for the historian, it provides a trustworthy reference to current thinking across a wide period. Bellamy gets a companion, if not a replacement. This should make the book an important source for some time to come.