Gerald Harris, Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461

Harriss, Gerald. Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.

I've placed above a gif of Grumpy Cat because, in the end, I just couldn't find a single image to encapsulate the work that Harriss does in this text. A massive 600+ page tome, Shaping the Nation sets out to cover a rather ambitious history of the political development of England from 1360-1461. In it, Harriss takes on several historical models and complicates them, producing interesting perspectives on long held assumptions in the process. In his initial section, for example, Harriss argues that England in this period developed into a Mixed Monarchy, maintaining components of Theocratic Monarchy while also making the king, to some extent, answerable to the people. Harriss uses this model to add nuance to the development of the English monarchy, especially when compared directly to the Absolute Monarchy of France. 

In addition to methods of kingship, Harriss also suggests that social identity undergoes a significant change in this period. Esquires, for example, begin to take on equal social ranking with knights, without the stipulated military service, and knights themselves become both less numerous and less separated from the lower gentry. Thus, due in large part to a change in the military necessity for knights in the field the knight loses some of its social esteem, becoming more a marker of status. 

In regards to the impact of the plague on England's economy, a heavily researched area, Harriss brings in recent research that both suggests that the illness(s) spreading were not likely the bubonic plague, and points to the decline in birth rates as a likely equal culprit to the decline in population during this period. Likewise, according to Harriss labor remained in high demand as grain prices remained strong, but as these fell landowners switched economic ventures, converting to pastoral agricultural due to the significantly decreased labor cost. This follows the lines of Nightingale's essay, suggesting that diversification in the face of unstable markets is what allows some areas and individuals to maintain stability despite the volatility around them. 

And in the end diversification is a large part of Harriss' point. In his conclusion, Harriss suggests that the truly remarkable aspect of England during this period is the ability to survive and even thrive during such a significant range of political, social, and economic crises, which Harriss in the end attributes to the diversification going on in this period, the mixing of all ranges of society and economy that he sets up in his description of Mixed Monarchy.