'Green offers an updated survey of political and social transitions between the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman monarchies. Framed as a history of power and its exercise, this volume reaffirms the traditional historiography of kings, nobles, and churchmen laying the foundations of the modern English state; hence, social change is defined as only that among the politically powerful. Untraditionally, however, Green shifts the post Anglo-Saxon temporal frame from the expected 1066–1135 period to the year 1189, which allows her to include the reign of Henry II. Such an expansion of the transition window, with its inclusion of the Angevin’s legal and administrative kingship as well as of London’s rise as the kingdom’s capital, provides a new optics for the traditional view that the medieval English kingdom was indeed a state. … Power itself is well considered, often with reference to developments in Continental Europe. … Recommended. Graduate students/faculty.' J. P. Huffman, Choice