The second and final volume of inquisitions for the reign of Henry V. This volume of the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem completes the inquisitions for the reign of Henry V. The period covers Henry's second invasion of France and his third and final campaign there, brought to an end by his death at Vincennes in 1422. Inquisitions were taken after the deaths of several prominent casualties of the wars, including several tenants in chief who held lands in many counties. Of particular interest for tenurial and economic historians, settlements of property are recited and most estates minutely described and valued. Apart from the inquisitions there are the usual analogous documents such as assignments of dower and proofs of age and, in one instance, a partition of land between coheirs. Women appear holding land not only as tenants in chief but jointly with their husbands and as dowagers. Families include Ros, Clifford, Fitzwaryn, Scrope, Arundel, Courtenay, Dymmok, dela Pole. J.L. KIRBY and JANET H. STEVENSON are both contributors to the New Dictionary of National Biography.

Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England offers a new history of Middle English romance, the most popular genre of secular literature in the English Middle Ages. Michael Johnston argues that many of the romances composed in England from 1350-1500 arose in response to the specific socio-economic concerns of the gentry, the class of English landowners who lacked titles of nobility and hence occupied the lower rungs of the aristocracy. The end of the fourteenth century in England witnessed power devolving to the gentry, who became one of the dominant political and economic forces in provincial society. As Johnston demonstrates, this social change also affected England's literary culture, particularly the composition and readership of romance. Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England identifies a series of new topoi in Middle English that responded to the gentry's economic interests. But beyond social history and literary criticism, it also speaks to manuscript studies, showing that most of the codices of the "gentry romances" were produced by those in the immediate employ of the gentry. By bringing together literary criticism and manuscript studies, this book speaks to two scholarly communities often insulated from one another: it invites manuscript scholars to pay closer attention to the cultural resonances of the texts within medieval codices; simultaneously, it encourages literary scholars to be more attentive to the cultural resonances of surviving medieval codices.