In her introduction to The Letters of Edward I: Political Communication in the Thirteenth Century, Kathleen Neal describes it as a book “as much, or more, about letters and ‘letter-ness’ as it is about Edward and his kingship” (6). To write such a book involves a delicate balance between two very different historiographies. It is not an easy task, one of the reasons why in her preface she admits it has taken her ten years to write, because “there is so much to say about letters that it took me a long time to find a way to say something about them” (ix). While the balancing act does not always succeed, it has certainly been worth the wait to see the fruits of Neal's labors, and her volume adds significantly to the corpus of both the historiography of letter writing and to that of the kingship of Edward I.

The crux of Neal's argument is that royal letters, kept in their thousands, in the SC1 class in the National Archives have been overlooked by both literary and political historians. Literary historians have tended to dismiss the often formulaic products of the mighty bureaucratic machinery of late medieval monarchies as poor cousins of the rhetorical accomplishments of twelfth-century monastic authors. Political historians, on the other hand, have largely mined SC1 for content, for Gradgrindian facts about the doings of kings and those within what we might broadly define as political society.

Administrative and legal historians have examined royal letters most closely, but in focusing on diplomatics have been looking for uniformity, for the means and process of standardization within royal chanceries, thus to tell the story of their development. To Neal, however, royal letters are a much greater source than any of these discrete types of history have yet appreciated. As one of her subheadings puts it, she looks at letters not just in politics but as politics. The letters in SC1 were not part of popular politics but were circulated to those within the governing elite, and the language contained within them was carefully designed not just to obtain immediate compliance from the recipient but also to reinforce that reflexive compliance upon which royal authority depended. Letters thus do not lose their importance to historians or their effectiveness to contemporaries because of their formulaic nature; instead, they grow in importance and effectiveness because of their very routineness and number. As Neal puts it, “The formulaic nature of the royal letter in the reign of Edward I was a factor considerably to its advantage as a vehicle of royal power and authority” (5).

What is most interesting for debates about the kingship of Edward I is the care with which these letters were constructed. The view of Edward I, famously summed up by K. Bruce McFarlane (“Had Edward I a ‘Policy’ towards the Earls?,” in The Nobility of Later Medieval England: The Ford Lectures for 1953 and Related Studies [1973], 248–67, at 267), as a king who “preferred masterfulness to the arts of political management,” has recently been questioned and significantly modified by a new generation of historians who have refocused Edward's kingship on his English subjects and the ways in which he built and maintained his authority and successes. Neal, coming from a very different direction, demonstrates just as effectively the attention that Edward and his officials paid to “the arts of the political management,” especially in the 1270s and 1280s.

Each chapter of The Letters of Edward I deals with a different aspect or audience of letter writing in Edward's reign, and in doing so Neal builds a picture of a king who addressed different people in subtly distinctive ways, using different registers of authority when addressing one group or another, or the same group in particular moments. One of the most interesting chapters is that on the way in which letters were drafted and redrafted, and the care taken over individual words, such as a letter to Llywelyn ap Gruffydd during the Arywstli dispute that bedeviled Anglo-Welsh relations between the two Welsh Wars. Here, the king laid out to Llywelyn his recent actions in the case and how he had acted in accordance with the ideals of good kingship, such as through his taking the counsel of his magnates. Edward reassured the prince that “no one can be in doubt that men so wise and diligent would give us any counsel that was dissonant with right or reason” (69). The first draft of the letter, however, used the word equitati rather than racioni and, Neal concludes, the latter word was eventually used because Llywelyn might indeed have doubted that English magnates would act towards him with equity. The care taken over a single word demonstrates that this was indeed a king who, even when displaying his masterfulness over Llywelyn, took great pains over the political management of his most dangerous vassal.

From the 1290s, with many of the companions of his prime now dead, Edward's sure political touch weakened and political missteps appear in his letters more frequently. Neal's final chapter examines in detail the rhetoric Edward used during the years of crisis to try to elicit the support he needed from his subjects and how he had to change tack on several occasions when his first attempts failed. Neal thus adds to our understanding of these years significantly. It is interesting, however, that the loss of Robert Burnell and the effect that this might have had on the skill and care that went into royal rhetoric in these years is not discussed in more detail. Moreover, one senses that Neal is only touching the surface of what can be mined from this trove, and that much more light could be shone on other themes and incidents in Edward's reign. At 183 pages, excluding the appendix, the book feels a little short. Any fears on this score, however, are allayed by Neal's comment in the preface that the book “is far from everything that could be said about letters, and probably not the last word I will have to say about them, either” (ix). Given what The Letters of Edward I achieves, this reviewer, for one, is looking forward to what she has to say next about these ubiquitous but subtly illuminating sources.