Publisher's Synopsis
This is the first book on Henry III's reign for forty years, and it provides a comprehensive narrative of his reign to 1245, demonstrating the crippling effect of the king's long minority on the conduct of policy. In the decade following 1236 his administrators attempted to surmount the political and financial difficulties that resulted, but their efforts foundered in the face of personal rivalries and the king's own unpopular military ambition abroad. Henry was eventually forced to adopt fundamentally different approaches towards crown finance, conciliar government, and relations with the magnates, which in turn helped to provoke the most dramatic crisis of the reign, the baronial revolt of 1258. Integrating political, diplomatic, economic, and social history, the book offers a fresh insight into the world of medieval royal policy and finance, and includes the first structural analysis of royal income for any thirteenth-century monarch; it also sheds new light on the position of the Jews in medieval English society.;Readership: scholars and students of medieval British and European history, particularly the political, economic, and social history of thirteenth-century England, medieval finance, and European Jewry in the period.
