That the book Henry I has had a long and complicated history is no secret. As C.Warren Hollister’s friend and colleague Jeffrey Burton Russell explained in his preface to the book, it was over forty years ago that Hollister first contracted to write the volume for what was then the University of California’s English Monarchs series. Hollister was, before 1965, occupied with writing a series of three books and five articles expanding upon the subject of his 1960 dissertation, ‘The Military Organization of England under the First Three Norman Kings’. Always intending to return to the great project, he was diverted in the mid-1960s into writing the first edition of Medieval Europe: A Short History, which, when it appeared, launched his reputation as a textbook writer. Hollister participated in the writing or editing of eleven separate textbooks, sourcebooks, and readers between the first edition of Medieval Europe in 1964 and the posthumous appearance in 2000 of The West Transformed: A History of Western Civilization, which he cowrote with Gale Stokes and J. Sears McGee. Hollister’s graduate students knew the textbooks both as a recruiting tool and a source of Warren’s unique brand of ‘royal patronage’. A number of them first became interested in studying with Hollister after reading Medieval Europe or The Making of England, deciding that they wanted to study with someone who might be able to teach them to write in such a clear and lively style. I am not the only student who survived for a summer from the proceeds of a graduate research assistantship spent indexing an updated edition of one of Hollister’s books. But, lucrative textbook projects aside, it is clear from Hollister’s article production over the years that Henry I and the career-capping monograph were never far from his mind.

In addition to the distraction of the academic projects he took on, Hollister’s progress on the Henry I project was twice halted by personal tragedies that influenced his ability to work at all. The first was the sudden death of his oldest son, Charles Warren Hollister III, who was killed in a 1973 car crash following his first semester at Princeton University. The obvious resonances of the sudden loss of Charlie with Henry I’s sudden loss of William Adelin were never lost on Hollister.