ANNE F. SUTTON, The King’s Work: The Defence of the North under the Yorkist Kings, 1471-85 (Donington: Richard III and Yorkist History Trust in association with Shaun Tyas, 2021. £30. 540 pages. ISBN: 9781907730924).

Anne Sutton, who died on 18 June 2022, epitomised the aims of the Richard III Society to ‘research into the life and times of Richard III and to secure a reassessment of the material relating to this period and of the role in history of this monarch’. She was not only convinced that the traditional accounts of the last Yorkist king were untenable, but she also devoted herself to advancing knowledge as the editor of The Ricardian from 1977 (which she developed into a respected academic journal), as a trustee of the Richard III and Yorkist History Trust publishing fifteenth-century texts from its formation in 1987, and by a stream of books, articles and essays based on her own impeccable research. It is thus fitting that her last work, one of the most ambitious she undertook, was published by the Trust not long before she died. The kernel of the book is the role of Richard III, both as duke of Gloucester and as king, as Warden of the West March. The second, and far longer, part combines detailed studies of the government and society of Cumberland, Northumberland, Durham, and the north-east of Yorkshire with a gazetteer of the places in the marches and near the northern coasts. These places, who held them and how they fitted into a network of defence in depth, were critical for the protection of the border. Sutton systematically catalogues how ‘the king’s work’ of defending the realm against the Scots (from the Solway Firth round to the Humber estuary) was organised, who the principal agents were and how they worked with Richard, duke of Gloucester, Edward IV’s brother and principal deputy in the region from 1471 to 1483, and then for two years as king himself. Sutton set herself a gargantuan task of both analysing and describing the organisation of the late-fifteenth-century defensive network as well as revisiting the political narrative over the fifteenth-year period. She leaves few documents unexamined, be they acts of parliament, international treaties, royal commands, or private records. All are analysed in detail, often clause by clause. This includes, inter alia, an invaluably thorough discusiion of all the surviving records relating to the dispute over the ‘Debateable Lands’ between England and Scotland on the West March. Her most important insight is that the focal point of Richard III’s presence in the north was the Wardenship of this March, focussed on Carlisle, not, as many have assumed, possession of the lordship and castle of Middleham and other estates in County Durham, Westmorland and the North Riding of Yorkshire acquired in 1471 and thereafter. This was the office that the Nevilles of Middleham had occupied for most of the fifteenth century and the lordships had always provided the basis for defence in depth throughout the region, providing what one might describe as a military reserve through licensed indentures of retainer and less formal links with the local gentry. Through these men, and their connections, who were dominant in strategic ports along the coats and controlled key fortificaitons in the marches and beyond, Gloucester exercised military and political leadership. To take one example of many, a section on the Wapentake of Langbaurgh (Cleveland) shows, how, with a territorial base in three manors attached to the lordship of Sheriff Hutton, through the service of the Conyers (Yarm) and Strangways (East Harlsey and Whorlton) families inherited from the