In my review of C. Warren Hollister’s biography of Henry I noted that during his career he was regarded as the foremost expert on the life and reign of the king. A close second to that title, and the successor to it upon his death is Judith Green. An emerita professor of medieval history at the University of Edinburgh, she made a name for herself with a groundbreaking study on the personnel and operations of his government, which she then followed up with other works on the Norman era. As she notes in her introduction, she was already in progress on her own biography of Henry when Hollister’s was published posthumously in 2001. While such an event may have discouraged others, she continued her work on it and saw it through to its publication five years later.
At first glance there may seem little difference between the two books. Green adopts an approach to presenting Henry’s life that appears standard for biographers of English kings, as she opens with a chapter on the sources for it before spending the bulk of her text covering her subject’s life chronologically. In each of these she emphasizes a key theme during the years she covers, spotlighting an aspect of Henry’s life that focuses her analysis on a major issue or concern. She then follows her chronological presentation with three chapters that provide a more extended examination of three key areas of his reign – Henry as ruler, his relations with the Church, and the composition and culture of his court – before providing a succinct conclusion summing up her argument.
It’s when the reader gets into the text that the key differences emerge. Green makes clear from the start that she offers a perspective of Henry’s reign that is different from Hollister’s in some important respects. As her subtitle suggests she gives more attention to Henry’s rule over Normandy than either Hollister or Edmund King do in their biographies. This likely influenced to her interpretation of how he exercised power as king, which she argues was more traditional in its approach. Unlike Hollister, who emphasized Henry’s innovative use of government in ruling England, Green sees him using a more conventional employment of force to intimidate his barons into obedience. She underscores this by noting the collapse of his arrangements for his daughter Mathilda to succeed him, which is a powerful argument for the personal rather than institutional nature of Henry’s power.
Arguments such as this point to the value of Green’s book as a counterpoint to Hollister’s work. Yet it more than stands on its own as a biography of Henry thanks to the crispness of her analysis and her ability to incorporate within her assessment of his reign a sense of Henry as a person. I finished the book with a clear sense of who Green’s Henry was not just as a monarch but as a man, which is further testament to her skills as both a historian and as an author. Thanks to them, hers is a biography that it as least the equal of Hollister’s, and arguably surpasses it in its ability to provide a comprehensive and cohesive interpretation of Henry as a ruler.