Politics and Society in Mid Thirteenth-Century England: The Troubled Realm

Despite the multidirectional nature of modern research, the interpretation of the political history of thirteenth-century England has remained locked into a traditional framework bequeathed by the mid-twentieth-century historian, R. F. Treharne, and embellished by the emphases and accentuations of his present-day successors. Characterised by its conception of community, its constitutionalism, its ready identification of a national enterprise, and its predilection for idealism and ’progressive’ thinking, this framework remains close to the Whig interpretation of English history. It is reinforced by the continuation of reverence for the baronial leader, Simon de Montfort.

In contrast, Peter Coss offers here an alternative approach to the period which is anchored in social mores and cultural values. More emphasis is placed upon the interests, ambitions, and needs of contemporaries, upon social networks of various kinds, and upon how interests both clashed and cohered as people strove to improve or preserve their situations. This was a crisis born of political instability, but in the context of institutional, administrative, and legal growth, that is to say at a particular point in the evolution of the state. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the book reconsiders the generation of the crisis, the factors which influenced its course, and its (partial) resolution. In short, it explores the anatomy and physiology of a troubled realm.

Peter Coss, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History, Cardiff University

A doctoral student of Rodney Hilton at Birmingham, Peter Coss joined the board of Past and Present in 1984 and was a lecturer and subsequently professor at the University of Northumbria. He held the established chair of medieval history at Cardiff University from 1995-2013 where he became head of the School of History, Archaeology and Religion. He held a Leverhulme Fellowship at the University of Pisa and Visiting Fellowships at Magdalen and Exeter Colleges, Oxford. He was awarded a D. Litt. by Cardiff University for his contribution to knowledge and has published six monographs, three editions of historical documents, a dozen edited collections, and more than 50 essays.