Talk about another side of history!

Most histories of medieval England spend at least some space lamenting the lack of sources. "History" wasn't really something people wrote in the Middle Ages. The monasteries wrote mostly about church affairs. There are a lot of "chronicles," particularly from London, but they all copy each other and they're often largely hearsay. The result is that most modern histories find themselves relying on three or four contradictory, prejudiced, disorderly sources.

"But at least," they might say, "they're sources!"

Which brings us to the poems in this book. I had never dreamed that there were poems about, say, the Battles of Towton and Barnet. The historians say they have nothing to go on. And I'll freely allow that we can't really trust these poems. But they give us the feelings of the author about how people actually felt (or, at least, were told by propagandists to feel) at the time. It's a really different take, and one I think the historians could do more with.

As poetry, most of the items here are pretty bad. Their interest lies in their contents. I'd say that is justification enough to look for the book. Particularly given Professor Robbin's excellent, detailed notes on sources and dates, plus historical explanations of what is going on. I'll admit that I would have liked those better if there weren't so much reliance on Hall's extremely distorted history (if it weren't for that, I'd have given the book five stars). But Robbins has done an amazing job of assembling hard-to-find materials into one anthology of the most important historical poems of the Middle English period. The result is highly recommended for students of literature, history, and sociology alike. ( )