The Place of War in English History, 1066-1214
J.O. Prestwich might have borrowed the motto of the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss: ‘few, but ripe.’ Like Gauss, Prestwich published modestly—only a dozen articles in a scholarly career of six decades, three-quarters of them coming in its last twenty years—yet produced seminal work on Anglo-Norman military and political history, among other topics. Shortly after his retirement, he was invited to present the Ford lectures for 1983; his performance made a considerable impression. Although he began the process of reworking this material into a book, he never completed the project, revising only two of the six lectures before his death. Fortunately, his son Michael Prestwich, an eminent historian in his own right, has undertaken the task of editing the material to create this volume. The core of the book is the six Ford lectures, very much as given, enriched by two other unpublished pieces presented as appendices. To this, his editor has added a model forward outlining J. O. Prestwich’s life and career, and useful guides to further reading at the end of each chapter.
The first lecture sets the stage, defining ‘war’ broadly, to include “how armed forces were raised, supplied, disciplined and transported” (p. 1) and extends ‘English history’ to embrace the overseas domains and ambitions of England’s kings. It reviews the scale and scope of warfare between 1066 and 1214, noting three periods of particularly intense military activity: the forty years after the Conquest, Stephen’s reign, and the quarter-century from Richard’s accession to the battle of Bouvines. Unlike some recent historians, Prestwich is not inclined to downplay the magnitude of warfare during Stephen’s reign nor to see the struggle only as a civil war over the throne. The lecture concludes by rejecting one model that medieval historians have traditionally used to link war and society—feudalism. When reworking the lecture for publication, Prestwich greatly expanded his dissection of this troublesome term, and this longer critique appears as the first appendix to the volume. Though it shows awareness of similar criticisms made before 1983 (such as Peggy Brown’s), Prestwich’s analysis grows largely out of his studies of military institutions and great familiarity with contemporary chronicles. Thus, he reiterates his convincing arguments about the capital importance of waged troops and relative insignificance of knights raised by feudal obligation, and he attacks the feudal model of politics for ignoring the numerous references to the public good, and indeed the res publica, in Anglo-Norman writers.
The title of the second lecture, “The Conduct of War,” may raise false expectations in some reader’s minds. Rather than a description of how campaigns were waged in this period, it is an argument against the idea that England’s kings were, in Galbraith’s phrase, “ruthless military adventurers,” (p. 14) who made war more from habit than policy. Prestwich contends that even kings like Rufus and Richard I had limited military ambitions aimed at securing what they saw as their just claims and frequently preferred diplomacy and compromise to conflict. Nor did rulers thirst for battle, as the lecture argues by juxtaposing a list of nine battles which English kings actually fought with another of twelve that did not occur—that is, occasions where opposing armies confronted one another without an engagement. Warfare could be brutal, of course, especially for civilians, but Prestwich notes that English rulers were as likely to attempt to limit its violence as to employ arson and slaughter.
The next two lectures share a common approach; each deals with a large topic mainly by detailed examination of a few specific examples. The third lecture explores the rather neglected subject of sea power by looking closely at its role in the Exeter rebellion of 1068, the seizure of Lisbon during the Second Crusade, and Richard’s conquest of Cyprus in 1191. The last two clearly demonstrate the ability of English forces to project significant military power through naval expeditions. The connection of sea power to the Exeter affair is less obvious, but Prestwich makes a convincing case that the incident was at bottom William I’s attack on a stronghold of the Godwins to secure the west from a seaborne invasion by Harold’s sons. Along the way, the lecture presents an intriguing aside on intelligence-gathering in this era, the seed perhaps of Prestwich’s later article on the subject. The fourth lecture, on war and government, begins by contrasting the bureaucratic system which administered Edward I’s military endeavors with a feudal model of “war as a joint-stock enterprise.” (p. 41) Through a précis of the governmental initiatives of Hubert Walter, Prestwich argues that in Richard’s and John’s reigns English administration had already reached a high level of competence. Though the analysis here is skillful, it at times seems rather far removed from the problems of war governance (e.g, Hubert Walter’s decrees on clerical discipline). Pushing backwards in time, the lecture turns its attention to Domesday Book, attacking Galbraith’s view of it as a feudal document and contending that it was part of a tax-reassessment scheme, perhaps linked to expenditures on mercenaries in 1085. Though not as sophisticated as it would later become, English government was in Prestwich’s view a powerful machine as early as the Conqueror’s time.
The fifth lecture continues the strategy of moving chronologically backward from 1214 to the Conquest. Entitled “War and the Economy,” it devotes much of its space to sketching a picture of economic conditions in this era. Prestwich deploys telling examples, like the activities of the Flemish merchant Hugh Oisel around 1200, to argue for the vitality and sophistication of England’s economy. For the Anglo-Norman period itself, he criticizes Vinogradoff’s and Postan’s rather negative assessments, noting along the way some of the limits of Domesday Book as a source for economic history. The lecture also investigates some of the effects of military activity on the economy. For Richard’s and John’s reign, these were on the whole positive: demand for metals stimulated mining and the iron industry, war taxes and the necessity to reward royal servants led to transfers of estates from inefficient to improving landlords, while demands on English manpower were light and England itself spared the ravages of campaigns. Prestwich admits that the picture for the Anglo-Norman era is a bit bleaker, given the disruption and destruction that attended the Conquest and subsequent wars within England, but observes that Norman administrative skills were brought to bear on the economy, while expansion in the north and into Wales enriched both king and aristocracy.
Prestwich’s final lecture ventures some conclusions. Though Angevin government and military institutions were more elaborate than those of a century before, the difference was in his view one of degree, not of kind. The lecture develops this point in part through a discussion of counsel to the king, tracing the antecedents of clauses 12 and 14 of Magna Carta and rejecting strongly the idea of ‘natural counselors’ in the Anglo-Norman period. Overall, no simple verities or system capture the place of warfare in this era, it was by turns “important and destructive” and “limited and often constructive.” (p.82) The work concludes with an appendix on feudalism (discussed above) and another on the makeup of Anglo-Norman armies. The latter is a chapter from a book that Prestwich planned but later abandoned; judging by the its references, the chapter dates to the 1960s. It exhibits Prestwich's mastery of primary sources and sets forth some of his views more fully than the necessarily terse Ford lectures could. Unsurprisingly, it contains some lovely insights, such as Prestwich's exegesis of the phrase milites gregarii. Readers unfamiliar with the issues that Prestwich addresses in the lectures may want to read this appendix first.
More than twenty years passed between Prestwich's Ford lectures and the appearance of this work. Have the lectures stood the test of time? Certainly, on many issues scholarship has pushed beyond what was available to Prestwich in the early 1980s; much more work has been done on Domesday, for instance, and feudalism has been attacked on even broader grounds than he attempted. Even on some very specific points, later scholars have independently reached conclusions that Prestwich argued for, quite unaware of his views. For example, both Ann Williams and Emma Mason have presented accounts of the siege of Exeter that emphasize the role of the Godwins. Furthermore, Prestwich's work can at times seem rather backward-looking. His critique of feudalism concentrates a good deal on works of earlier scholarly generations: Stenton, Poole, Painter, Vinogradoff. Prestwich's contemporaries who attempted to reinterpret the topic are not mentioned; Hollister's Military Organization of Norman England and Powicke's Military Obligation in Medieval England never appear in either text or notes. One reason for this may be that Prestwich was ahead of his time. As the biographical forward shows, he was deeply skeptical of feudalism from the beginning of his career, so it is natural that his critique of it would be formed around works available in the 1930s and 1940s. More generally, Prestwich's desire to explode grand historical schemas (like feudalism) that did not accord with his masterful knowledge of the sources agrees well with one dominant trend in medieval historiography over the last generation. His work, then, remains eminently worth reading, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Michael Prestwich for granting us access to it. Yet we may regret that J.O. Prestwich did not publish more, and publish earlier.