Sandra Raban. England under Edward I and Edward II 1259-1327. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. xii + 204 pp. $62.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-631-22320-7.
Reviewed by W. M. Ormrod (Department of History, University of York)
Published on H-Albion (August, 2001)
The Values of the Past
The Values of the Past
In this closely packed and lucidly written study, Sandra Raban has created an immensely rich and illuminating picture of English life during the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries that will be of use to new students and established scholars alike. Raban is well-known for her distinguished work on mortmain legislation and on the Hundred Rolls, and much of that specialised knowledge is put to excellent use here, deployed in a manner that is at once accessible and unpatronising. The book proceeds thematically, providing summaries and analyses of rural and urban life, of religion and culture, of government and politics, and of England's relations with the wider world.
Raban is well-read in the period and makes excellent use of primary sources and of a considerable range of existing scholarship. Far from being overwhelmed by her material, she establishes independent lines of thinking and writing and is capable of producing striking new perspectives on the period. In terms of the rural (and, to a lesser extent, the urban) economy, there is now such a huge body of research along with a major divergence of opinions, as to the nature and causes of change during the generations immediately before the Black Death, that it would have been easy to sit on a series of fences and state that our understanding of the period is too imperfect to allow for firm conclusions. Instead, Raban argues for a diversity of circumstance and experience during this period, demonstrating (in a manner that other scholars have sometimes been reluctant to do) that local and regional conditions could vary strikingly and that different sectors of the economy could react in very different ways to the range of natural and manmade disasters that England suffered during the early fourteenth century.
This emphasis on diversity extends also to cultural issues. Raban is especially astute at resisting recent trends in scholarship that see the early fourteenth century as a kind of cradle of Englishness. Drawing helpful comparisons with the diversity of modern 'English' cultures, she stresses that class and gender, as well as region and language, could have a fundamental influence on the outlook of the men and women who populated England before the plague. This sense of immediacy and of explicit comparison with today's society informs many parts of the book and will doubtless help students to identify more readily with an age and a society so distant from their own--though it might be said that this sense of identity will be easier to nurture among those who actually inhabit the landscapes of Raban's England.
Although the texture of this book is immensely rich in terms of evidence and detail, it might be remarked that the geographical range of the examples tends to be skewed in favour of East Anglia and, more precisely, that area centered on the historic county of Huntingdonshire that Raban has made so much her own in her other publications. This emphasis on one locale can be immensely beneficial: the author's understanding of the topography, the people and the issues that controlled their lives and livelihoods is infectious, and one comes away from this book with a real sense of how ordinary folk understood their world around the year 1300. On the other hand, Raban's own emphasis on diversity means that there is occasionally rather too little information on the very different experiences of those who inhabited the far north or the south-west, for example.
The great virtue of Raban's historical thinking is that it takes nothing for granted. Faced with the great governmental surveys (the Hundred Roll inquiries of Edward I's reign, on which she is an acknowledged expert), Raban takes a healthily cynical view as to both the purpose of the survey and the quality of the evidence that it generated. Equally, understanding that her modern audience will not necessarily share or understand the religious beliefs or social outlook of the later Middle Ages, she approaches such matters in a manner that dignifies the otherness of medieval culture, celebrating its differences rather than deriding its limitations. A block of time whose terminal dates are primarily defined by political events (from the Provisions of Oxford to the deposition of Edward II) has been turned in her capable hands into a meaningful period with a distinct, almost palpable, identity of its own. This sense of identity is personal in the best of senses: Raban really knows the people about whom she writes. To make this explicit, and to acknowledge both the benefits and the hazards that accompany such long and deep acquaintance with one's period, is the sure hallmark of scholarly greatness.
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Citation:
W. M. Ormrod. Review of Raban, Sandra, England under Edward I and Edward II 1259-1327.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5370
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