Henry III

David Carpenter’s biography of King Henry III (1216–1272) has been three decades in the making and eagerly anticipated by scholars of thirteenth-century England for almost as long. This book, the first of two volumes, follows Henry from his birth at the royal castle of Winchester through to the momentous collapse of his personal rule in the most infamous year of his reign. The biography is a prodigious accomplishment, not only for the scale of the undertaking but also for the richness of the evidence and the quality of the storytelling. Carpenter deliberately skirts the minutiae of academic arguments to focus on the sources, and the book’s originality stems from the unparalleled command of contemporary record evidence on display, especially unprinted Exchequer and Chancery material. It is clear from the outset that the book, although structured chronologically, is far more than a simple political narrative. The account of Henry’s minority in

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