Just one book on . . . Henry I

Having read the biographies of nearly a dozen monarchs for this project, I find myself at an unexpected milestone. With Henry I, I find myself wishing for the first time that there were more studies of his life and achievements than there are available to read. This isn’t a knock on the three biographies I read about his life, all of which are fine works of scholarship. Rather, it’s that from them I gained an appreciation of the importance of Henry’s reign for English history, particularly in terms of the development of the English state. That a range of differing opinions exist within these books as to the nature of these achievements only underscores how much is left to be said about Henry’s time on the throne and his legacy. Clearly there is much room for new scholarship about his kingship.

The three biographies about Henry offer a surprisingly diverse range of entry points about his life, and given Henry’s significance and the limited number of studies about it all are worth reading. Yet while I found Edmund King’s short book on Henry a valuable study, it is one that is best read by readers who have a prior knowledge of Anglo-Norman history. As such it works better as a compliment to other works on the period than as an entry point to Henry’s life in its own right.

Far better suited in that respect is C. Warren Hollister’s biography of Henry for the Yale English Monarchs series. Thorough and insightful, it provides extensive coverage of Henry’s reign and makes an excellent case for its significance to English history. Its value is only marginally limited by the fact that Hollister died before he could complete work on his manuscript, as the editing would have helped to sharpen the case Hollister makes in it of the transformative nature of Henry’s governing reforms. Such revising also could have made it an incontestable starting point for anyone wanting to read a book about Henry, rather than just a strong contender for the title.

One of the remarkable aspects of Judith Green’s biography is that she challenged Hollister’s interpretation of Henry so closely on the heels of the release of his book in 2001. Yet this is just one of the many things that distinguishes her excellent study, which not only offers a different perspective on Henry’s reputation as a reformer, but which provides a coverage of Henry’s rule over Normandy that is lacking in King’s and Hollister’s more Anglo-centric studies. It’s because of this that, while all three studies deserve reading, Green’s is the one that people should seek out as the best single biography of this important monarch.

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