Shaping the Nation: England, 1360–1461

Abstract

Shaping the Nation: England, 1360–1461. By GERALD HARRISS (Oxford, Clarendon P., 2005; pp. xxi + 705. £35). THE New Oxford History of England is a series which aims to embody ‘the scholarship of a generation’. It aims, in other words, to be authoritative, up-to-date and trustworthy, each volume serving as a work of reference which marks a particular point in the evolution of historical research into what its general editor describes as ‘the state story’, that is, ‘the story of a state-structure built around the English monarchy and its effective successor, The Crown in Parliament … that provides the only continuous articulation of the history of peoples we today call British’ (pp. vii–viii). Not surprisingly, the author of each volume in the series interprets this brief in his or her own way. Robert Bartlett, in his England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings (2000), concluded his survey of the period 1075–1225 with three long chapters on ‘Cultural Patterns’, ‘The Course of Life’ and ‘Cosmologies’, including discussion of such topics as the performing arts, patterns of naming, manners, time and ‘beings neither angelic, human, nor animal’. Gerald Harriss has written a rather different book. Shaping the Nation is divided into three sections: ‘Political Society’, ‘Work and Worship’, and ‘Men and Events’. Given that the focus of Harriss's work over a long and very distinguished career has tended to be on kingship and government, it would not be surprising to find that the real strength of this book lay in its first and third parts. In fact this is not the case. This is an immensely well-informed book throughout, and the range of reading which underpins the section on ‘Work and Worship’—to say nothing of the sharpness of the judgements delivered there—is just as impressive as in the political and narrative sections.

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