Professor Frame's publications over the past fifty years and more have served as an inspiration to at least two generations of researchers in the field of late medieval Irish history. This is the second collection of his essays to be published. The first, consisting of pieces written up to 1995, appeared in 1998 with the title Ireland and Britain 1170–1450. With the exception of two previously published and now updated pieces — one on the initiative to extend English law to (some of) the Irish in 1331 and the other on the justiciarship of Ralph Ufford in the 1340s — all fifteen of the essays contained in Plantagenet Ireland have been written since 1995. Five of them appear in print here for the first time. The remainder have appeared in refereed journals, volumes of conference proceedings and collections of essays in honour of deceased or retired peers.

It is worth noting that a third substantial volume of Professor Frame's published essays could be produced by bringing together work not to be found in Ireland and Britain or Plantagenet Ireland. Such a volume would include contributions to volume 6 of the New Cambridge medieval history (2000); to the U.C.D. journal History Review (2002); to two volumes of the Short Oxford history of the British Isles series (2001 and 2003); to the Social history of England, 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 2006), and to volume i of the Cambridge history of Ireland (2018). It would also include essays in a volume of conference proceedings on the Geraldine dynasty (Peter Crooks and Seán Duffy (eds.), The Geraldines and medieval Ireland: the making of a myth (Dublin, 2017)) and in a festschrift for the legal historian Paul Brand (T. R. Baker (ed.), Law and society in later medieval England and Ireland (Abingdon, 2018)). Finally, in the essays that appear for the first time in Plantagenet Ireland, Professor Frame refers to three more forthcoming articles; a piece on the de Burgh family set to appear in a volume on Irish-Scottish relations, another on the role of Ireland in the Hundred Years War in a volume on that conflict and a third on the historiographical legacy of G. H. Orpen in a collection concerned with the invasion of Ireland in 1169.

This remarkable body of work — and I have made no mention of his several monographs — is given intellectual coherence and force by the author's intense engagement with two issues. These he identifies in the introduction to the volume under review as ‘the character of English rule in Ireland, particularly during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and the position of Ireland within the wider political structures of which, from the time of Henry's Irish expedition of 1171–2, it formed a part’ (p. 15). In reflecting upon how these topics are considered in Plantagenet Ireland — though the observation holds true for his whole corpus of published work — Professor Frame draws attention to the ‘oscillation’ between, on the one hand, the lordship of Ireland's character as a political entity that was ‘territorially incomplete, politically fragmented and culturally mixed’, and on the other, the ‘anything but superficial’ impact upon it of English government and English law.

The five essays in Plantagenet Ireland which have not appeared before in print make up almost 40 per cent of the volume and are the focus of the comments that follow. The shortest of these essays (chapter 10) is a reflection on the influence of the work of G. O. Sayles on the historiography of late medieval Ireland. Never less than a fluent stylist, Professor Frame's prose in this piece is particularly accessible and engaging. Along with H. G. Richardson, Sayles pioneered the use of administrative records in the study of medieval Irish history. While acknowledging the debt of subsequent researchers to these labours, Frame warns that Sayles's tendency to dismiss sources such as chronicles has led to misunderstandings about the nature of magnate power in a frontier society, and that his almost exclusive reliance on the records of the colonial government has widened ‘the gulf between historians of “English Ireland” and those of “Gaelic Ireland”’. In conclusion, however, Frame has no doubt that Sayles's legacy is overwhelmingly positive, and it is difficult to demur from that assessment.

The most narrowly-focused of the other new essays is chapter 11, which considers the career of Anthony Lucy, chief governor of Ireland in 1331–2. This acts as a complement to two earlier studies of other fourteenth-century governors, Ralph Ufford and Thomas Rokeby, which are republished here. Consideration of Lucy's background and actions allows Professor Frame to offer nuanced comparisons and contrasts between two frontier regions of the Plantagenet domains: the western side of the Anglo-Scottish border and Ireland. His conclusion is that Edward III recognised the extent to which the two zones presented similar military challenges while also realising that the power of colonial magnates in Ireland must not be fundamentally compromised if English authority there were to survive. The essay is a good example of Professor Frames's ability to use his command of both Irish and English source material to illuminate themes across the wider Plantagenet stage.

The three remaining new chapters take aim at features of the historiography of late medieval Ireland that Professor Frame has long challenged — namely, the idea that the absence of the king from the island was a problem and a weakness, and that ‘decline’ is a satisfactory description of the late medieval lordship. In chapter 7, ‘Kingship at a distance’, Frame observes that in the context of the Plantagenet realms as a whole, the Irish experience was unremarkable. Gascony, for instance, never played host to an English king between 1289 and its conquest by France in 1453. For most of the time, he argues, the situation in Ireland was neither sufficiently threatening nor sufficiently likely to offer great rewards, to attract a royal visit. Instead, monarchical power was effectively represented by the presence in the lordship of men close to the court and by the ubiquitous deployment of the emblems of royal authority on charters, coins and other mundane objects. He concludes by suggesting that more frequent royal sojourns in Ireland might have destabilised a perennially disturbed polity even further, by interfering in delicately constructed webs of colonial patronage and by raising unrealistic hopes among Gaelic leaders that their concerns might be addressed.

Chapter 8, ‘Devolution or decomposition?’ is a particularly strong and important essay. While Frame acknowledges that the late medieval lordship was ‘in retreat’ and experiencing ‘territorial shrinkage’, he urges that it is misguided ‘to present the troubles of the fourteenth century as though they reflected the dissolution of an embryonic centralized state’ (p. 170). A more realistic assessment of the situation, he argues, is to accept that the lordship ‘had always been a complex, multi-centred polity’, and that in the fourteenth century the crown and the colonial government developed successful ways of engaging with this ‘fragmented dominion’ (p. 163). The analysis that follows of how links with colonial magnates, the towns, the church and the heads of colonial and Gaelic lineages were maintained and adapted to ensure the continuation of English power in Ireland is forceful and persuasive. As Professor Frame puts it in chapter 1, ‘Ireland within the Plantagenet orbit’, which serves as a lengthy and stimulating introduction to the essays that follow, ‘to turn an account of the period into a retrospective indictment of royal policy and its agents is to head down an interpretative cul-de-sac’ (p. 27).

This relatively lengthy review has only hinted at the richness of the essays contained in Plantagenet Ireland. The volume as a whole represents an eloquent elaboration of an interpretation of late medieval Irish history that now holds the field. It is an interpretation that rests on decades of rigorous research, original analysis and effective communication. Typically, Professor Frame does not offer it as some sort of final word on the subject. As he points out (p. 199), substantial amounts of source material are now becoming available that can be interrogated to illuminate the nature of government interactions with individual regions and localities. It is unlikely that such future research will offer fundamental challenges to the ideas contained in Plantagenet Ireland.