Description: This book reassesses the relationship between Edward I and his earls, and the role of English nobility in thirteenth-century governance.
Brief description: Andrew M. Spencer was educated at King's College London, where he won the Derby-Bryce Prize for History, and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Research Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Review Quotes: "Andrew M. Spencer's Nobility and Kingship in Medieval England provides a new and enterprising view of an old subject by arguing, contra almost everyone, that most of Edward's earls were loyalists during the great crises of his reign and that their local power was more dependent on the defence and extension of jurisdictional rights than on their use of retainers to control the shires."
John Maddicott, 'Books of the Year', History Today