Pagination

600-716 pages

Henry III, Vol. 1 - 716

Henry III, Vol. 2 - 639

Henry II - 630

Edward II - 613

Edward III - 603

500-600 pages

Edward I - 567

Henry IV - 541

William the Conqueror (Bates) - 528

Henry VIII - 526

400-500 pages

Henry I - 498

Elizabeth I - 480 (Pre-publication advice)

Richard II - 467

George III - 451

Henry V - 443

Oliver Cromwell Vol. 2 - 439

William Rufus - 437

Edward IV - 426

The Minority of Henry III - 412

Queen Anne (Yale 2nd edition) - 405

300-400 pages

Richard III (Hicks) - 392

Oliver Cromwell Vol. 1 - 380

William the Conqueror (Douglas) - 376

Philip II of Spain - 375

Henry VI - 358

Mary I - 350

Richard I - 348

King Stephen - 339

George I - 334

(Comprising 298 numbered pages but the author’s text starts at page 15 and counting starts on the 1978 half-title page (Thames & Hudson/Harvard) and the 2001 Foreword (Yale) - so 14 pages are deducted from the total of 298 to be 284 to which we must add 50 pages for the separate footnotes)

Henry the Young King - 326

Æthelred - 325

Henry VII - 322

James I - 321

Eleanor of Aquitaine - 313

To 300 pages

Edward the Confessor (Barlow) - 298

(Comprising 288 pages of text and 10 pages of introduction in preliminary numbers)

King John - 296

(Comprising of 259 pages of text plus 37 pages of separate footnotes)

George II - 296

Richard III (Ross) - 292

(Comprising 229 pages of text and 53 pages of introduction in preliminary numbering)

George IV - 288

James II - 265

(Comprising 242 pages of text plus 23 pages of separate footnotes)

*The Wayland, Methuen and Yale printings are the same.

Edward the Confessor (Licence) - 253

Æthelstan - 250

Matilda - 250

*Matilda has less text than Æthelstan because the font in Matilda is larger than most Yale books, certainly larger than in Æthelstan, and therefore the content is not as extensive for the same number of pages.

Louis the Lion - 247

Cnut - 213

Edward VI - 184

Who doesn’t enjoy reading a league’s table, or standing by railway tracks writing down the numbers of the passing carriages? Feel the need to create lists? Then this is the page for you.

The books that comprise the English Monarchs series, and those associated with it, vary in length from about 200 pages to nearly 800 pages. However, not all are embellished equally with other content between the covers. Some have extensive indexes while others pull up rather short in that department, often in those books published early in the run. Some have prefaces, others not. The extensiveness of bibliographies depends on the wideness of the research (difficult for the Saxon kings) or the quantity of secondary sources. W.L. Warren wrote at the head of the index to his 1961 King John that, “The following list of authorities is not intended to be an exhaustive survey of works bearing upon John’s reign.” In comparison, David Carpenter’s bibliography in the 2020 ‘Henry III’ ran to twenty-seven pages of very small text.

Therefore in an effort to standardise the comparison of the “length” of each book the page numbers below indicate the length of the author’s text, including footnotes (generally sited within the text pages) but without the pages of supporting content such as: index, bibliography, appendices, preface, maps and generally the content in the preliminary pages - those pages given Roman numerals. There are exceptions to this as indicated.

Note that Yale reprints of Methuen books, as far as can be ascertained, have the same pagination, though George I proved to be an interesting comparison, as detailed below. The pagination was determined by a mixture of original Eyre/Methuen books, the Yale reprints and the Yale-published titles from 1997.

Even with these qualifications, some books are enlarged by copious footnotes - see David Carpenter's Henry III or Charles Ross' Edward IV. At least the font size is more or less similar, making comparisons less odious

So to answer the question you are asking - what is the longest book in the series…?

An early cat-alogue, achieved by pawing through the books - one purr day.

Abberville book of hours, 15th Century.