This is a collection of scholarly articles, previously published in various journals, on the late Medieval period in England, especially the Yorkist era. Some of the articles, dealing with legal matters, are highly technical, so if you don't know what seisin, mort main, and feoffee mean, be sure to have a suitable dictionary available, like the OED. Hicks has several articles exploring piety and notions of family centered around the Hungerfords (these are fairly technical). A number of the other articles related to the Yorkist royal family, and will be very interesting to the many people interested in that era; several relate directly to Richard III.

Reading the notes, I am struck by the amazing amount of research and synthesis required to make sense of the time. Pulling these articles together is a great service for the many students, professional and amateur of the time.

That said, it may sound a little cocky to be unsatisfied with some of his conclusions, two articles are on the Earl of Northumberland and the rebellion of 1489. According to Hicks, this was a "loyal rebellion", that is, not an attempt to overthrow the government but more of a mass demonstration to attempt to present grievances and hope for concessions. The Earl was in fact the only person known to be killed in the rebellion, his retinue apparently having refused to defend him. Hicks has a very interesting article suggesting that this was perhaps at least partly due to animosity over his failure to support Richard III at Bosworth. He oddly rejects the Great Chronicle's statement that this was the reason for the attack that killed him. He for some unexplained reason attributes that solely to the resentment of taxes that sparked the rebellion. But since the rebellion was generally non-violent, this seems like an inadequate explanation.

I also question his account of the Richard Cook affair. Cook was a wealthy merchant who supposed incurred the enmity of the Wydevilles when he refused Jacquetta Wydeville's offer for his tapestries. They are then supposed to have falsely accused him of treason. After an initial aquittal, he was re-tried and found guilty of misprision of treason, and fined 8,000 pounds. Queen Elizabeth tried to screw another 800 pounds out of him as "Queen's gold." Hicks more or less ignores the allegations that the Wydevilles were the instigators, and argues that the other people accused in the treason plot were not wealthy, and it would not have been worth Edward IV's efforts to frame them in order to profit from fines. This apparently assumes that either there was a plot, and Cook was necessarily a part of it, or that there was no plot. It is possible that there was a plot, but Cook was not involved in it, that the others may have been guilty but he could have been framed by the Wydevilles. Hicks tells us that Margaret of York, Edward's sister, defended Cook, and it seems very odd that she would defend him if she thought he was plotting to overthrow her dynasty. Cook's involvement in Henry VI's readeption could either have been anger at being framed, or simple opportunism. After all, he had worked with the Lancastrians when they were in power, and also with the Yorks when Edward took power. I'm sure that most commoners did the same. ( )