Feudal Assessments and the Political Community under Henry II and His Sons

Feudal Assessments and the Political Community under Henry II and His Sons by Thomas K. Keefe offers a groundbreaking study of the financial and military foundations of the Angevin monarchy. Drawing on the major feudal surveys of the twelfth century—the Infeudationes militum and the Cartae baronum—Keefe reexamines the machinery of knight service, scutage, and taxation to argue that Henry II and his successors created not just an administrative system but a political community bound together through obligations of service and money. By combining close statistical analysis with a reassessment of classic debates about scutage and feudal quotas, the book challenges long-held assumptions that Angevin kings consistently overreached and that baronial resistance fatally limited their fiscal ambitions.

At once a contribution to medieval political, legal, and military history, this study reframes the dynamics of power in twelfth-century England and Normandy. Keefe shows that scutage, aids, and assessments were neither routine exactions nor failed experiments but central to the monarchy’s negotiation of authority with the realm’s greatest landholders. His reinterpretation suggests that Angevin government was more adaptive, and baronial cooperation more durable, than traditional narratives of oppression and revolt allow. Feudal Assessments and the Political Community under Henry II and His Sons thus illuminates the interplay of finance, lordship, and community in the making of the English polity, offering scholars a richly documented and revisionist account of medieval governance.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.