Margaret McGlynn. The King's Felons: Church, State, and Criminal Confinement in Early Tudor England Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 400. $145.00 (cloth).

In The King's Felons, Margaret McGlynn tells the story of how in the early Tudor period common law judges sought to utilize the privileges of benefit of clergy and sanctuary to reform the criminal justice system and provide an alternative to capital punishment.Although this reformed system saved the lives of thousands of men (and a handful of women) over the course of the sixteenth century, ultimately it was a "story of failure" (1), for by the 1540s this new model of criminal confinement for felons was crumbling from within.The King's Felons is split into three parts.The first part describes the development of benefit of clergy and sanctuary from the thirteenth century to the beginning of Henry VII's reign.This provides the historical context and intellectual framework within which the common lawyers would approach criminal justice reform under the first two Tudors.The second part deals with Henry VII's reign and the first half of Henry VIII's, charting the development of benefit of clergy and sanctuary in parallel.In this second part, McGlynn weaves together causes clbres relating to benefit of clergy and sanctuary, such as Standish's Case and Stafford's Case, with lesser-known cases that provide more typical examples of how these privileges were utilized during the early Tudor period.Finally, in the third part McGlynn examines the effect that the Reformation had on these reforms.The common lawyers had established a system that relied upon the wealth and power of the bishops and abbots to implement it, so when this wealth and power was eroded, particularly during the period of the dissolution of the monasteries, replacements to these ecclesiastical institutions needed to be created quickly, to little success.An epilogue connects the state of the system in the aftermath of this collapse to our existing understanding of the system in the latesixteenth century.One of the challenges of studying criminal justice in the early Tudor period, and a core reason for why this is the first detailed study of the topic, is that the key records that would tell us this story, the records of gaol delivery, do not survive, disappearing in the 1460s and not appearing again until the late-sixteenth century.To fill this gap in the records, McGlynn uses the records of the court of King's Bench, supplemented by law reports, readings at the Inns of Court, statutes, and bishops' registers, to provide the best possible picture of this criminal justice reform from the records available.McGlynn's thorough search of the King's Bench records held at The National Archives (UK) to find cases relevant to this study is one of the great successes of The King's Felons.The inclusion of image numbers from the Anglo-American Legal Tradition (AALT) website (http://aalt.law.uh.