This volume “arises” (as the preface tell us) out of a conference, “Jurisdiction of the Constable and Marshal(s) and of the Admiralty in Later Medieval England and France,” held in the summer of 2015. That conference itself formed part of a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust being undertaken by the Anthony Musson and Nigel Ramsay that was focused more specifically on the English medieval Court of Chivalry. This helps to explain why, despite its title, all but one of the eleven essays included in the volume (the sole exception being Lorenzo Tanzini's chapter, “The Consulate of the Sea and Its Fortunes in Late Medieval Mediterranean Countries”) are focused on late medieval England and France (not late medieval Europe as a whole) and also why rather more of the chapters relate to the Court of Chivalry than to the Court of Admiralty. Only one of the chapters, Anne Sutton's excellent, “The Admiralty and Constableship of England in the Later Fifteenth Century: The Operation and Development of these Offices, 1462–85, under Richard Duke of Gloucester and King of England,” manages to bring together the history and working of both courts and the development of their jurisdiction (though over a much longer period than her title suggests). In “Some Dubious Beliefs about Medieval Prize Law,” John Ford also links the two by arguing that historians of the Admiralty court need to revise their accounts of the early development of prize law in the light of the late Maurice Keen's account of the law of arms as applied in the Court of the Constable and Marshal. Thomas Heebøll-Holm's “The Origins and Jurisdiction of the English Court of Admiralty in the Fourteenth Century” covers the emergence of a distinct and permanent court of Admiralty in England. He argues that this should be dated as late as 1360 and to the aftermath of the Treaty of Brétigny, the period when Edward III directly controlled the coastline of France from the Pyrenees to the Loire and indirectly much of the rest and also held Brest, Barfleur, and Calais.

Five of the eleven chapters in the volume are linked more or less directly to the jurisdiction which the English Court of Chivalry exercised in the fourteenth century over disputes about the entitlement to particular coats of arms. In “French Armorial Disputes and Controls,” Laurent Hablot provides a comparative dimension by looking at the different kinds of dispute which arose in relation to the display or wearing of coats of arms in France and how and where they were resolved. In “Heralds and the Court of Chivalry: From Collective Memory to Formal Institutions,” Richard Barber shows that the variety of roles played by heralds in the thirteenth and fourteenth century England did not include participation as witnesses or experts in disputes over coats of arms and that it was only in the fifteenth century that they began to play a role in their registration. Three excellent chapters focus on the evidence recorded in the only case from the Court currently in print (Scrope v. Grosvenor). In “Sir Robert Grosvenor and the Scrope-Grosvenor Controversy,” Philip Morgan provides a clear account of the background to that case, the process of gathering evidence for it and the surviving records of that evidence, its outcome and what can be known of the unsuccessful defendant, Sir Robert Grosvenor, and his family. In “From Brittany to the Black Sea: Nicholas Sabraham and English Military Experience in the Fourteenth Century,” Andrew Ayton uses Sabraham's testimony in the case on behalf of the Scropes plus other surviving evidence to reconstruct the career of a sub-knightly professional soldier from Northumberland. Sabraham had not only fought in France and Scotland in Edward III's wars but also further afield in Egypt, Constantinople, Prussia and with the English condottieri Sir John Hawkwood in Italy. Julian Luxford, in “Art, Objects and Ideas in the Records of the Medieval Court of Chivalry,” shows how much can be learned from witness testimony about the display of coats of arms on tombs and in windows and on screens and the display's connection not just with lay patrons who commissioned it but also with churchmen wishing to advertise their social capital to visitors, concluding that the three big cases for which evidence survives “stand as some of the best available evidence for the social life of things in late medieval England” (74).

In “Arming for the Judicial Duel in Fifteenth-Century England,” Ralph Moffat prints the first text of a treatise originally written in English in 1434 but surviving only in two seventeenth-century copies by a serjeant armorer. The treatise describes the preparations for an individual participating in a judicial duel in a trial for treason before the Constable and Marshal (the fifteenth-century version of the Court of Chivalry), which seemingly reveals that battle was only to be fought on a full stomach after dinner. Bertrand Schnerb completes the volume with “The Jurisdiction of the Constable and Marshals of France in the Later Middle Ages.” This is a worthwhile volume with some excellent papers. Even scholars working in the area will find something new and for others it is a good starting point for learning about what is known and knowable about these two courts in England and France in the later Middle Ages.