This book, a product of Steven Gunn's 2015 Ford Lectures, covers a century of war, from the 1470s to the 1570s, and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the impact of Tudor conflicts on English society. Gunn assesses how the English thought about, prepared for, fought, and died in war, persuasively arguing that Henry's subjects (and those of his children) shared the woes of the “busy world of war” with their Continental neighbors. While historians have not necessarily overlooked Henry's wars, the author finds they have not fully recognized their transformative effect on the formation of the English state. While not disputing the importance of the Reformation or the Elizabethan poor laws, Gunn sees the military demands placed upon the center and the periphery, and the response of the king's subjects to those demands, as equally important to the state-building process, owing to the fact that “warfare also generated paperwork” (52). Henry's wars, as Gunn makes very clear in this superb study, also generated their fair share of human and financial costs.

Readers will find the eight compact chapters filled with fascinating stories and vignettes that reveal the extent to which war touched the lives of men and women from all orders of English society. Crisscrossing the country, we meet strangers exchanging news of “our soldyeres” fighting in France; clergy selling plate to aid troops in suppressing rebellion; nobles willing to risk life, limb, and fortune for the sake of reputation; and townsfolk grumbling over new taxes or having to supply arms or armor for yet another of the king's wars. Gunn has mined county and municipal record offices and a cornucopia of manuscript and printed sources to produce an impressive work of scholarship. In fact, the 147 pages of endnotes and bibliography are worth the price of the book alone and should be the first stop for anyone interested in pursuing research on war and society in Tudor England.

The book opens with a brief historical overview of England's wars in the late Lancastrian and Tudor periods, weighing the extent of English participation in the military revolution. Where some have found Henry's wars peripheral and dull in comparison to those of his contemporaries—Francis I, Charles V, and Suleiman the Magnificent—Gunn notes that the growth of the English army and the country's military mobilization rates were increasing faster than the population as a whole. Wars and threats of wars required the state to find innovative ways to organize, administer, and pay for its national army and navy. The changes that accompanied the military revolution in England took place at a slower pace than on the Continent. With that in mind, Gunn challenges the notion of the demilitarization of the English nobility, suggesting “ideas of gentility were mutating” (54) with younger sons and bastards replacing their fathers and eventually becoming the professionals who served in Ireland and the Low Countries. Similarly, by the reign of Elizabeth, the lieutenancy had assumed a greater role in the administration of military affairs, resulting in a “broader reconfiguration of the landed elites participation in war” (70). Though Gunn points out that the majority of Englishmen never fought in a war, Tudor conflicts touched rural and urban communities alike. In his chapter on towns, the author points to the constant pressures urban communities faced in mustering recruits, provisioning local defenses, and cajoling rate payers into coughing up more money to pay Henry's taxes. While there were tensions, it was not all grumbling. Civic pride was evident at musters where men were cheered by nobles and commoners, and councils sent off soldiers in new coats embossed with their town's badge.

No historian can overlook the sinews of war, and Gunn's chapter on finances reveals that the Henrician state was “remarkably successful” (74) in raising revenue, though the methods of direct taxation weighed heavily on the population. Similarly, England may never have “turned Germany” in Henry's day, but border and coastal communities could suffer significant losses in raids, with cattle, goods, and prisoners often taken by Scots, French, and Spanish marauders. Yet, war also paid well, with many profiting, including merchants shipping coal to London, builders supplying the construction of fortifications and ships, and even goose farmers, who provided feathers for the thousands of arrows required by Henry's armies. Finally, Gunn does not shy away from the miseries of war, noting that English soldiers were just as capable of carrying out atrocities on civilian populations as Continental mercenaries. But even amid all these horrors, Gunn can just as easily raise a chuckle. His comparison of the Tudor gun shield to a “lethal dustbin lid” (91) and almain rivets to a Ford Capri suggest that the lectures, like the book they produced, were as enjoyable as they were informative.