Henry I
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
Henry I, son of William the Conqueror, ruled from 1100 to 1135, a time of fundamental change in the Anglo-Norman world. This long-awaited biography, written by one of the most distinguished medievalists of his generation, offers a major reassessment of Henry’s character and reign. Challenging the dark and dated portrait of the king as brutal, greedy, and repressive, it argues instead that Henry’s rule was based on reason and order.
C. Warren Hollister points out that Henry laid the foundations for judicial and financial institutions usually attributed to his grandson, Henry II. Royal government was centralized and systematized, leading to firm, stable, and peaceful rule for his subjects in both England and Normandy. By mid-reign Henry I was the most powerful king in Western Europe, and with astute diplomacy, an intelligence network, and strategic marriages of his children (legitimate and illegitimate), he was able to undermine the various coalitions mounted against him. Henry strove throughout his reign to solidify the Anglo-Norman dynasty, and his marriage linked the Normans to the Old English line.
Hollister vividly describes Henry’s life and reign, places them against the political background of the time, and provides analytical studies of the king and his magnates, the royal administration, and relations between king and church. The resulting volume is one that will be welcomed by students and general readers alike.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Henry I (who reigned over England and Normandy from 1100 to 1135) is remembered primarily for "Conan's Leap," when he heaved the treacherous Conan Pilatus from a tower, and for his death from an alleged surfeit of lampreys. He deserves better from history, and Hollister's magisterial biography, 40 years in the making, accords him fuller regard. Begun in 1962, the long-delayed manuscript perished in a 1990 fire. Hollister began reconstructing the book but died in 1997, before its completion. Frost, his former Ph.D. student, finished the job. They persuasively cast Henry (youngest of William the Conqueror's three sons) as a major English monarch. Left no land by his father, Henry outwitted one brother; the other one died in a hunting accident. King at 31, Henry I rebuilt baronial alliances, established a charter rectifying governmental abuses, married twice and, having lost a legitimate son, left his kingdom to daughter Matilda. She, too, had to fight to hold onto it, because Henry's nephew Stephen, who suffered stomach problems ("his diarrhea probably determined the history of England... between 1135 and 1154"), initially kept her from the crown. Hollister spares nothing about Henry's reign, yet convinces that his rule was orderly and reasonable in the context of those turbulent times. He "surrounded himself with systematizers" and sought only to reconstruct his father's domains. The drama lay in sibling rivalries, church-state clashes and the ever-changing followers and opponents whom the astute king co-opted, outmaneuvered or crushed. Henry, writes Hollister, "transformed his court from a gang of itinerant predators into a company of well-controlled courtiers," but one almost needs a scorecard to keep track of the players. Illus. not seen by PW.
