Abstract
At the end of this study of late medieval English politics, it is time to step back from the details and draw some general conclusions out of the issues and ideas that have emerged. Politics had many dimensions in the later Middle Ages, and this short book cannot pretend to have covered more than a few of them. Its specific purpose has been to trace the existence and concerns of a polity at once constructed from individual local and provincial societies and capable of developing a coherent identity and programme at the national level. We may now proceed to summarise the anatomy of this political society and the resulting temper of late medieval politics and to ask whether the new confidence and power enjoyed by its subjects served to emasculate the late medieval state and cause the Wars of the Roses.
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Notes
V. J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London: Blandford Press, 1971) pp. 264–349.
G. Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984);
W. M. Ormrod, ‘The West European Monarchies in the later Middle Ages’, in R. Bonney (ed.), Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
C. Plummer (ed.), The Governance of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885) p. 109.
A. L. Brown, ‘The Commons and the Council in the Reign of Henry IV’, in E. B. Fryde and E. Miller (eds), Historical Studies of the English Parliament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) vol. 2, p. 43.
J. L. Watts, ‘Domestic Politics and the Constitution in the Reign of Henry VI, c. 1435–61’, University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis (1990) pp. 67–8.
K. B. McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon Press, 1981) pp.42, 238–9.
G. L. Harriss, ‘The Formation of Parliament’, in R. G. Davies and J. H. Denton (eds), The English Parliament in the Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981) pp. 45–7.
Though see M. K. Jones, ‘Somerset, York and the Wars of the Roses’, EHR, 104 (1989) pp. 285–307.
Thus I extend the theme of the ‘tragic dilemma’ propounded by A. R. Myers, England in the Later Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971) pp. 15–36.
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© 1995 W. M. Ormrod
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Ormrod, W.M. (1995). Political Life. In: Political Life in Medieval England, 1300–1450. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24128-6_7
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