Treachery and Retribution: England’s Dukes, Marquesses, and Earls, 1066-1707
Despite the title, this is in effect a political history of England from the Conquest to the Act of Union, told in 200 pages. It is written in the form of short ‘news summaries’, 3 or 4 to a page, arranged in chronological order, reign by reign. Although the focus is on the relationship between monarchs and their nobles the summaries also cover the main foreign wars and dynastic marriages. Treachery and retribution abound, but they are not the whole story.
This terse summary emphasises how unstable the English state was, with a near-absolute monarchy struggling to control the local magnates with hardly any coercive power of its own. It relied entirely on shifting alliances with ‘loyal’ nobles against ‘rebels’. Political change was seldom possible without violence. The wonder is that the state functioned at all, let alone endured for all those centuries.
