Cylchgronau Cymru

entire diversity of the Tudor realms: Sir James Crofts had served as under- marshal of Boulogne, captain of Haddington and vice-president of the council in the Marches of Wales in the five years before he became lord deputy in 1551. How did such experiences colour the governors' Irish policy? Perhaps we cannot tell, but one of the best compliments to this thoughtful book is the speculation it stimulates. S. J. GUNN Merton College, Oxford THE HOUSE OF LoRDs: A THOUSAND YEARS OF British TRADmoN. Edited by John Moore and Robert Smith. Smith's Peerage Limited, London, 1994. Pp. xix, 223. £ 16.95. The origin of this book is a conference held by the Manorial Society of Great Britain at Oxford in 1992: similar volumes on the Monarchy and the House of Commons are envisaged so as to complete a trilogy on the British constitution. Lavishly produced and illustrated, and with over 300 subscribers from among the peerage, feudal barons and manorial lords, it is in terms of scholarship something very much more than the usual coffee- table book, even though some contributors convey the flavour of popularization by many references to recent events. Some such comments are already past their sell-by date! Eight leading historians (among them David Cannadine, John Cannon, Henry Loyn and John Miller) succinctly chart the development of the House of Lords from its Anglo-Saxon antecedents to the present day, and five further chapters cover a miscellany of topics and reflections. The tide of the book is misleading, for it is a broad study of the peerage rather than of the House of Lords as an institution. Not until the fourteenth century did there evolve the concept of a separate House of Parliament for those members of the peerage who were dukes and marquesses, earls and barons. Thereafter such lesser members of the nobility as knights were eligible only for election to the House of Commons. The size of this early parliamentary peerage remained small by later standards for some centuries, no more than seventy and usually less until the seventeenth century, when the peerage trebled to 176 by 1715. The current number is around 1,200, two-thirds of them still hereditary peers. Rank and wealth ensured that many members of the peerage played a leading role in government until the nineteenth century, but they did so as individuals, not as a caste. Professor John Miller rightly scorns the notions that the English Civil War was a baronial revolt or that the Glorious