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Discussion of display through a range of artefacts and in a variety of contexts: family and lineage, social distinction and aspiration, ceremony and social bonding, and the expression of power and authority.
This book tells one part of the long history of the institution of marriage. Questions concerning the formation and annulment of marriage came under the exclusive jurisdiction of the church courts during the Middle Ages. Drawing on unpublished records of these courts, Professor Helmholz describes the practical side of matrimonial jurisdiction and relates it to his outline of the formal law of marriage. He investigates the nature of the cases heard, the procedure used, the people involved and changes over the period covered, all of which add to what is known about marriage and legal practice in medieval England. The concluding assessment of canonical jurisdiction over marriage suggests that the application of the law was more successful than is usually thought.
This book offers the reader an entirely fresh view of England's Middle Ages. It argues that the long Roman occupation was an unmitigated disaster for the native population because so little was done to raise the output of farming once a sophisticated Mediterranean society was settled in its midst. The Anglo-Saxons, having cleared the land of most of their British predecessors, then set about revolutionising farming technology. This enormously increased the area available for the growing of food, and hence the size of the population. There was more land under the plough in Domesday England than in late Victorian times. The Black Death then revealed how big the population had by then become. Initially plague removed between a third and a half of the population we can trace on records. But there were many more families to feed than we can trace in records. We can tell that that was so because farm output was not much affected by the Black Death's first strike. Apparently farmers, at first, were able to recruit as many replacements for lost labour as they required. Nor did devastating plague check the waging of the French war which was very soon resumed with its customary ferocity. In the end, the Black Death succeeded in cutting the population down to size; and this had the beneficial effect of removing want, and the ill-health that want generates, from the lives of those who survived. Paradoxically this infused new life into those who survived. The wool export trade dwindled irrevocably; it was replaced by a prodigious export of dyed woollen cloth. The farmers produced so much grain in this plague-ridden period that famine, once endemic, became unusual. Indeed, general standards of living probably rose to levels not again achieved until the late nineteenth century.
AMENDED ENTRY. Previously announced on ISBN 0415002788, weekly list no. 48, dated 2nd December, 1994
The history of medieval women has been transformed in recent years through the expansion of evidence and the application of innovative and provocative methodologies. The author draws on these research results to emphasize the resilience and achievements of medieval women, whilst recognizing the misogynistic constraints embedded in the structures of medieval society.
The late Middle Ages (c.1200-1500) was an age of transition. The major events of this period - the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, the rise of Parliament, the depositions of five English kings between 1327 and 1483 - are examined in detail in this book.
Oxbow says: This fascinating study of how people understood and used their senses in the late medieval period draws on evidence from a range of literary texts, documents and records, as well as material culture and architectural sources.
A survey of attitudes to marriage as represented in medieval legal and literary texts.
This book provides a comprehensive historical treatment of the Latin liturgy in medieval England. Richard Pfaff constructs a history of the worship carried out in churches - cathedral, monastic, or parish - primarily through the surviving manuscripts of service books, and sets this within the context of the wider political, ecclesiastical, and cultural history of the period. The main focus is on the mass and daily office, treated both chronologically and by type, the liturgies of each religious order and each secular 'use' being studied individually. Furthermore, hagiographical and historiographical themes - respectively, which saints are prominent in a given witness and how the labors of scholars over the last century and a half have both furthered and, in some cases, impeded our understandings - are explored throughout. The book thus provides both a narrative account and a reference tool of permanent value.
The articles in this book, reprinted from the journal Past and Present, are all, in different ways, concerned with the ownership of landed property in medieval England and with those who worked the land. Problems debated include those concerning the keeping intact of the great estates of the Anglo-Norman barons in the face of both inheritance claims and of political manipulation by the crown. Other articles show that the difficulties of knights and lesser gentry were no less complex, as social shifts resulted from economic developments as well as from their military role and their relationships with their overlords. The essays are of as much importance for those interested in the history of politics as to those concerned with the economy and society of medieval England.