The Fifteenth Century. Volume VIII

Volume VIII of The Fifteenth Century, of which Linda Clark is now well established as series editor, contains eight papers, all of impressive quality. These are not, as Clark explains in her preface, proceedings from a conference, but ‘the offerings of a number of historians airing the results of their current research’, and the traditionally alliterative sub-title, ‘Rule, Redemption, and Representations’, while by no means inappropriate, gives little indication of what is to be found here. The longest article is that by Colin Richmond, ‘Sir John Fastolf, the Duke of Suffolk, and the Pastons’, in which he revisits familiar territory, namely Fastolf's will, demonstrating that there really is more to be said about the ‘rule’ of William de la Pole in East Anglia during the 1460s. (Also of considerable interest is the lengthy note by Anthony Smith which Richmond appends to his article.) The other article in the volume which deals with ‘high politics’ is Lucy Rhymer's ‘Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and the City of London’, which examines Gloucester's relations with the Londoners in the 1420s. What she shows is the extent to which Gloucester deliberately cultivated and patronised some of the leading citizens, which helps to explain why they supported him against Henry Beaufort; in other words, the ‘good duke Humphrey’ tag, and the stories of his ‘gracious and favourable’ lordship towards the city, were not just the product of posthumous Yorkist myth-making

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