Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401-1499.

By Christine Carpenter. Pp. XVIII + 793 incl. 13 figs and 7 tables. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 75[pounds]. 0 521 37016 7

Christine Carpenter's book is among the latest and the most comprehensive of a series of studies of English regional and county communities which have, in recent years, transformed our view of society and politics in the late Middle Ages. Her theme is the Warwickshire gentry in the widest context, not merely the county elite, and she illuminates their participation in the affairs of the realm as much as their preoccupation with local, even parochial, concerns. This is an examination of political and constitutional attitudes as much …