Nigel Saul's Knights and Esquires

Jess · Post by **Jess** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 9:44 pm

Anyone read Nigel Saul's Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century?

Is it worth the $150 or even an ILL?

^ · Post by ^ » Sat Jul 11, 2009 11:13 pm

Always google books these days. Many books are previewed some with large portions. And as a general rule Oxford press books that have not been reprinted after their original printing cost a lot, I wish they would reprint more as some of their books are seminal studies.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Oh6SVx ... navlinks_s

Jess · Post by **Jess** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 7:55 am

I did. I'm kind of a google nut. I could only get the table of contents and a few pages from the book and couldn't tell if I wanted it. So I read some reviews of it.

but I was wondering if anyone here had actually read it?

^ · Post by ^ » Sun Jul 12, 2009 9:30 am

Jess wrote:I did. I'm kind of a google nut. I could only get the table of contents and a few pages from the book and couldn't tell if I wanted it.

As with all books part of it is going to be what you expect to get out of it. Atleast for me google game me 27 pages of introduction. If after reading that you don't have an opinion as to whether or not you want to see more of the book enough to ILL it then you probably don't. I wouldn't spend $100 based on that unless you read the intro and just are really moved by it. The intro of an academic book should give you the context of the book and what the author intends to say so if he isn't going to talk about things your interested in then it probably isn't worth your time.

I would guess that none of the regular posters on this board have read it for two reasons, firstly most of the heavy academic readers don't read 14th century stuff, there are a good number of early medieval folks, several 15th century and several 16th century. Secondly when the topic of distinction between knights and squires comes up I've never seen anyone mention it as it would obviously be worthy of such. You might check La Belle's reading list and see if it is on there. I have a study or two that are somewhat similar studies of a county's gentry for the 15th century and they are very interesting but it is not exciting stuff because in order to study enough people to make the study work you are dealing with a lot of things like tax records and office holding and military service records. Saul's book is likely a little more "exciting" as he is looking at the period when the English gentry really starts to take shape as we would know it in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Jess · Post by **Jess** » Mon Jul 13, 2009 4:30 pm

I decided to ILL it today after work, and googled it again here at work for the citation. This time, the preview allowed me to see very little of the Introduction, but many more pages throughout the body of the work. I'm not sure how google decides what preview pages to display, but apparently this varies...

Next time, I'll google it several times if I can't decide.