Let me be clear before I begin this review: I very much wanted to like this book and looked forward to reading it. Unfortunately, I cannot say that it was an enjoyable or particularly illuminating read.
Tetlow, an independent scholar of religious studies who most recently has been scholar in residence at Loyola University of New Orleans, engaged in a meticulous exercise of archival and primary source research to unravel the history of a particular family, the de Hercé/Hercy/Hersey (as its patronymic changed in spelling over the years) from shortly before their appearance in the army of William I in 1066 to the early seventeenth century, when some of them figured among the Puritans who settled in colonial Massachusetts. The holder of several degrees focusing on religion and ancient languages as well as a J.D., Tetlow is well known as a scholar of women in the early church, with several books and other publications under her belt. The imprint, Wipf & Stock, publishes primarily works on Christian theology and religious studies. I am highlighting this area of specialty because if they had sent the manuscript in progress to well-known medieval historians better versed in both prosopography (which Tetlow claims she is doing—she is not) and family history, I suspect that the book would have been very different from what they ultimately published. Final caveat: I am not enjoying writing this review, but I feel that it is important to do so honestly and mindfully.
Let me begin with a compliment: Tetlow has proven herself a diligent and careful researcher of documentary sources. She clearly spent countless hours poring over the standard chancery records calendared as Close, Patent, Fine, Charter, and Liberate Rolls as well as publications such as the Parliamentary Rolls, those of the Pipe Roll Society and the Royal Manuscript Commission, and the publications of several county records societies. According to her acknowledgements, she did pursue on-the-ground archival research, but those documents do not appear in her bibliography, although they do in footnotes and the archive names in the abbreviations page. There are no websites or online archival collections listed in her bibliography or footnotes, but it is likely that at least some of her manuscript sources derived from digital collections accessible online, such as the National Archives, which has digitized the Ancient Petitions (SC 8) and the University of Houston’s Anglo-American Legal Tradition website (AALT). Tetlow has, indeed, covered a lot of the bases, especially since her study encompasses such a long period of time—the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. The problem arises as to what she did with the information she acquired through this extended research project.
Medievalists who deal with family histories and genealogies for Great Britain and Ireland are very familiar with two encyclopedic collections: GEC, Complete Historical Peerage and the Dictionary of National Biography. Neither of these are pleasure reading. They are merely catalogues of people, their activities, and their relations in abbreviated form. Family histories, especially recent ones, eschew that format in favor of a far more approachable narrative style, with discussions of generations of family members interspersed with extended analyses of the ways in which such members interacted with the larger institutions of Crown, Church, and Community. Tetlow’s work reads like an entry in the Complete Peerage on steroids: lists upon lists of (mostly male) names with lists of appointments to administrative positions, summonses, troop levies, and the like, followed by wives married, children begotten, and more names. After a few pages, it is impossible to keep track of anyone. Summations of the careers of the heads of household for each generation offer no analysis and the only consistent statement Tetlow makes about wives is that they managed households and estates when their husbands were away, and about daughters, that they married. Context is provided through the regurgitation of good-king/bad-king tropes derived from a secondary source bibliography that favors works published twenty years ago and more. More troubling, especially for a scholar of women, is the profound absence of solid recent work on women in medieval society, with the exception of the excellent collection on writing medieval women’s lives edited by Amy Livingstone and Charlotte Newman Goldy (Palgrave, 2012) and a sprinkling of others—none of which the author has actually utilized as models of analysis. Tetlow claims to be doing a prosopographical study but that methodology—using statistical analysis with a fixed population to assess the role of that population in (in this case medieval) society—is utterly absent from what is essentially a massive genealogical overview of one family and its satellite contacts (through marriage) over a long stretch of time.
It is clear that Tetlow is far more comfortable with the period after 1500, because when she reaches that century, she becomes far more fluent about religious controversies and the roles some women played. This, however, does not help her narrative, because the Hercy/Hersey (by this time the spelling of their name had been Anglicized) angle drops out and instead there are extended descriptions of events such as the torture of Anne Lester—whom she claims is a distant relation to the family—and discussions of theological and political issues that the Hercy men participated in but little. While it is clear that by the Tudor era the Hercys had ingratiated themselves to the crown by being faithful administrators and servants—and that they profited thereby—there is no suggestion that they were political or religious leaders. Moreover, Tetlow, although she mentions their Lancastrian connections in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, says not a word about the religious dissent of that era, which paved the way for the English Reformation. John of Gaunt’s own chaplain was John Wyclif. His grandson, Henry V, was a virulent anti-Lollard. A discussion of how the family navigated their political pathways with pragmatic choices as to their religious loyalties in the era before the Tudors would have been welcome. After all, the radical religious theories of the Cambridge theologians did not emerge out of nothing, and the Hercy family apparently controlled a large number of advowsons in the Midlands, where they held a lot of property, to which they appointed mostly Cambridge men.
It is only in the last few pages (before the appendices, which outline yet more genealogies of related families) that the impetus of this book becomes clear. Early in the reign of James I, one of the many John Hercys in the family—this one from the cadet branch who hailed from Berkshire—became intimately connected to the Talbot earls of Shrewsbury, to whom they were also distantly related. A substantial collection of letters written both to Hercy and from him have survived in the Talbot Papers and the Sheffield Papers, both housed at Lambeth Palace Library in London. An entire book could have been written about this one relationship between John Hercy of Berkshire and the Talbots, based on these letters. It seems clear to me that Tetlow came upon these letters and started working backwards, becoming interested in this family whose fortunes were directly linked to their connections to both magnate and royal families and their networks. Failing to really unpack the relationships expressed in those letters was an opportunity lost.
I have no idea as to whom the reviewers of the manuscript might have been. Whoever did review the manuscript missed quite a few errors in things such as definitions of land terminology (bovates and carucates are reversed, for example, in terms of the amount of acreage in each) and aspects of law. Given the scope of the book, it is understandable that such small things would be lost. However, one big thing—the intended audience—I think was also overlooked. For whom is this book intended? The footnotes are impenetrable, limited as they are to one or two per page, so people trying to access similar kinds of documents would be unable to do so. Casual readers would be confounded by the format of the book and the lack of a clear thematic thread other than “Here are these people. They did these things. End of story.” Professional scholars might find particular sections of the book somewhat relevant to their own studies, if they were familiar with the people involved or had a reason to see what the Hercys were up to in, say, the reign of Edward III, but only as a reference book. Historians of medieval women would be frustrated by the lack of assessment of women’s activities and experiences in the family, simply because the kinds of sources used automatically left them out of the picture until things like wills began to be written and preserved. No one could use this book as a model to follow of family history: they would be better served by seeking out tried and true standards such as Joel Rosenthal’s Patriarchy and Families of Privilege in Fifteenth-Century England (University of Pennsylvania, 1991), which discusses the careers of similarly-placed families such as the Stonors and is genuinely prosopographic in methodology.
To say that I am truly sorry I cannot write a positive review of this book saddens me. It could have been so much more than it was, had the author had a good editor, appropriate pre-publication reviews, and a knowledgeable press.