One of the distinguishing features of the Yale English Monarchs series has been the editors’ commitment to getting the most renowned experts on the respective kings and queens of England to write biographies about them. The result has been works of high scholarly distinction which reflect some of the latest thinking about not just their subjects but the times in which they lived. The books themselves may not necessarily be the “best” biographies available about that particular monarch, but they all reflect the highest possible standard of scholarship and set a formidable bar for students going forward.
This is why that when the editors commissioned their volume on Henry I they turned to Charles Warren Hollister. Regarded today as one of the great pioneers of Anglo-Norman studies in general and on Henry’s reign in particular, he was a natural choice to write a biography about the king, one that would have been a capstone to his decades of work. Hollister’s labors, though, suffered a tragic setback in 1990 when both his draft manuscript and his extensive research notes were destroyed by wildfires in his home town of Santa Barbara. As dispiriting as this must have been for him, he restarted his work and had written eight of his projected eleven chapters prior to his death in 1997.
These chapters form the bulk of Hollister’s biography. In them he addresses the sources for Henry’s life, his early years and his claiming of the throne, and his military campaigns and foreign policies as king. The remaining three chapters were completed by Amanda Clark Frost, one of his former doctoral students, which she did using his notes and other writings on the subject. These provide an analysis of Henry’s administration and his relations with the Church before describing his final years and his legacy for his realm. It’s a contribution that is acknowledged in the book but not on the cover, which unfairly slights Clark’s considerable role in writing it.
The portrait of Henry that emerges in this book is of a shrewd king who governed his realm authoritatively and innovatively. While acknowledging that Henry’s rule was still very much in the nature of a personal monarchy, the two authors give him considerable credit for building the foundations of the medieval bureaucratic state that would provide such effective governance in the centuries that followed. Yet they qualify this praise with the glaring failure of his reign: that of not providing for a stable transfer of power after his death. It’s a judgment that I expect will loom larger once I delve into the civil war that followed his reign.
This is just one of the many appreciations I gained from a work that was full of interesting insights about its subject. Yet the book also bore signs of its troubled development. There is a disappointing amount of repetition throughout the book, which suggests some of the challenges Frost must have faced in turning Hollister’s draft chapters into a publishable work. Given the circumstances, I can understand why it would be easier to leave as much of the original manuscript untouched as possible, and with everything else that was needed to complete Hollister’s labor it was probably the smartest and safest choice. This is why I was grateful for Frost’s efforts. Thanks to her and everybody else who pitched in to fill the for Hollister we have today a work that embodies much of the learning and wit for which its original author was known. Yet I still finished it with a twinge of regret that Hollister never had the opportunity to complete his work himself. Additional editing and polishing would have made for a truly spectacular book on Henry that would have been the definitive work on his life and reign. That we never saw the book is our loss, but the one we do have does a great job of filling that hole as much as seems possible.
