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When it comes to Scotland, English historians are often still guilty of presuming that, before the Wars of Independence at least, the government of their northerly neighbour was unsophisticated and in desperate need of the help of English institutions in becoming an effective state. This sort of speculative thought is of course one of the more myopic pillars of English exceptionalism.

This book focuses on the records of the Privy Wardrobe, a department of state that was responsible for supplying the king with arms and armour in the Middle Ages. The accounts of the keepers of the Privy Wardrobe survive from the 1320s to the early 15th century and contain a wealth of information about arms, armour and other items in their possession.

As a concept and as a practice, the provision and reception of counsel was a crucial cornerstone of the polities of medieval and early modern Britain. Those in positions of authority, whether king, regent, ruling council or mayor, were expected to hear virtuous advice. This would, it was fervently hoped, guide the course of governance and ensure just rule.

As Martin Heale states at the very beginning of The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England, ‘the importance of the late medieval abbot needs no particular emphasis’. This was a group of men with responsibility for the spiritual and material wellbeing of thousands of monks and canons.

I knew David Hey for 30 years, and it is with great sadness that I offer this review of his last and posthumous book. I recall well how I first met him. It was Easter 1985 and I was on my way to the British Agricultural History Society conference to give a paper. I hadn’t been to that conference before, nor had I ever given a paper to a conference (as opposed to a seminar).

The 13 essays in this book are the outcome of a conference (with the addition of a few other papers) held at Winchester University in September 2011.

Jim Bolton is a much respected and well liked figure in London academic circles, who took up a post at Queen Mary College (as it was then called) in 1965 and has remained there ever since, despite his official retirement in 1994. He works on the medieval economy, and kept the subject alive during episodes when specialists in that subject were in short supply in the University of London.

Many clerics had a low opinion of Henry the Young King of England in his own lifetime, but infinitely more damaging to his long-term reputation was how his memory was damned in 1875 by the Regius Professor, and eventual Anglican bishop, William Stubbs.

This is a book about two well-known dynastic verse histories commissioned by Henry II, the Roman de Rou by Wace and the Chronique des ducs de Normandie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure.