The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England

Possession of land enabled older people to try to control and plan their later lives in medieval and early modern England. The landless poor in all age groups and at all times found it much harder to patch together a living Their numbers grew in the century of population increase and land shortage which preceded the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century; the steady rise was resumed in the mid-sixteenth century. Since the poor leave fewest records behind, we know even less about them than about the better off in medieval England. But their strategies for survival, driven by necessity, appear to have changed little over the centuries and information about them becomes less scanty over time. The poor of medieval and early modern England, and indeed in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, struggled in an “economy of makeshifts’, that is, they patched together whatever resources they could gather, in ever-shifting combinations: paid work when possible, growing food, use of common rights, help from family, friends, charity, poor relief, debt and begging. The struggle grew harder with advancing age and the components of the economy of each individual shifted gradually from dependence upon work to reliance on the help of others. Some lost the battle. Old people died of neglect and starvation, such as the “old stranger’ found dead of cold and exposure in a cowshed in 1362.

Reviewed by: Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fiction by Orietta Da Rold Megan L. Cook Orietta Da Rold. Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fiction. Cam bridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 270. $99.99 cloth; $44.99 paper; $80.00 e-book. On April 13, 2019, a New York Times headline announced that "Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It's Coming Back." The article recounts how, since the requirement that cursive be taught to American schoolchildren was dropped in 2010, proponents have argued for its reinstatement, citing its use in historical documents and personal correspondence, its utility in note-taking, and its role in the development of cognitive and fine motor skills. These pro-cursive activists have had substantial success; as of 2022, more than twenty US states once again mandate that cursive be taught in elementary schools. The twenty-first-century story of cursive and the widespread adaptation of paper as a writing substrate in late medieval England might at first seem wholly separate phenomena. Yet it is clear that, to understand fully the function and value of either textual technology, one needs to understand the uses to which it is put, the symbolic value accorded it in the broader culture, and the conditions under which it might be accessed. Orietta Da Rold's excellent new study, Paper in Medieval England, demonstrates the [End Page 386] sometimes surprising ways that—much like modern-day cursive writing—paper's place in late medieval textual culture was varied, was situationally specific, and carried a wide range of potential connotations. Importantly, however, Da Rold also troubles the periodizing logic of the Times headline's implication that parchment, quills, and cursive are all equally obsolescent relics of a bygone age. Paper in Medieval England shows how paper sat alongside parchment in the workshops and saddlebags of scribes and merchants, valued for its affordability and portability even if its durability was sometimes questioned. This is not a story of one substrate's triumph over another, but one of affordance and mutual accommodation in ways that may not be immediately apparent without the sort of sustained attention to paper in its cultural context that Da Rold provides here. This attention yields compelling insights: one of Da Rold's most intriguing arguments is that paper and cursive script are mutually enhancing tools of communication. In a culture that increasingly valued quick writing and communication, they together allowed letters and other documents to be written and sent with new speed. This is just one of the ways in which this book sets out to "reject some of the most common mantras in paper history—low cost and low status—to tell more accurately the stories of paper across complex social and cultural scenarios" (21). To do so, Da Rold draws on multiple disciplines: economics, history, paleography, and codicology, as well as literary studies. At the core of her study is the "Mapping Medieval Paper in England" project, which catalogues hundreds of datable paper manuscripts from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. The substantial size of this corpus allows Da Rold to move decisively beyond the focus on a single manuscript or cluster of manuscripts that predominates in studies of early books, and to begin to chart larger patterns and trends in the use of paper in medieval England. The book's first chapter focuses on paper as a technology refined over time and as commodity that moved from Asia into Europe, finally becoming known and adopted for use in England during the thirteenth century. Da Rold shows that, while diplomatic correspondence on paper helped spread knowledge of the material throughout Europe, the most important vector in paper's availability in England was commercial links with Italy, particularly via the wool trade. Drawing on the "Mapping Medieval Paper" dataset to trace the presence of thirteenth-century paper in English archives, Da Rold argues that the most common early uses of paper were financial documents and correspondence, reflecting the basic fact that [End Page 387] "paper was associated with transportation and travel" (47). Instead of being disregarded as ephemeral, paper's...

Reviewed by: Love, Marriage, and Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader and: Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook Mathew Kuefler Love, Marriage, and Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader. Edited by Jacqueline Murray . [Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures, 7.] (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview. 2001. Pp. xiv, 524. $29.95 paperback.) Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook. Edited by Conor McCarthy . (New York: Routledge. 2004. Pp. xii, 292. $24.95 paperback.) Two sourcebooks with very similar titles have appeared in the last few years. The first is part of a Broadview Press series of thematic medieval sourcebooks. The second is part of Routledge's growing number of history sourcebooks. Both Murray's and McCarthy's additions to these lists would be useful in medieval history courses on the related subjects, or in more general courses on the [End Page 743] history of sexuality. Nonetheless, the two books approach their subjects in curiously different ways. Murray's book is organized thematically. She begins with a chapter on "Foundations and Influences," providing examples of the biblical, Roman, and Germanic antecedents to the Middle Ages. Her next chapter, "Love and Its Dangers," notes the various medieval debates about the emotion. The third chapter, "Marriage and the Church," reviews theological writings and ecclesiastical regulations, followed by a fourth, "Marriage Ceremonies, Rituals, and Customs," that includes liturgies and legends specifically on weddings. Her fifth and sixth chapters, "Husbands and Wives" and "Marriage and Family," relate the vicissitudes of that relationship, as ideals and realities, respectively. The seventh, "Childbirth," compares religious and medical writings on that subject, and the eighth, "Parents and Children," continues with ideals and realities of the lives of children. The ninth and last chapter, "Beyond Christendom," samples Jewish and Muslim writings from medieval Europe, as an explicit contrast with what has come before. Within each chapter, sources are organized chronologically. McCarthy's book is also organized both thematically (as parts) and chronologically (as chapters). He begins with "Ecclesiastical Sources," including chapters on "The Church Fathers," "Anglo-Saxon England," "Theology and Canon Law," and "Canon Law and Actual Practice." His part two, "Legal Sources," contains chapters on Anglo-Saxon and Norman law. The title of part three, "Letters, Chronicles, Biography, Conduct Books," indicates its various chapters, although "Saints' Lives and Female Religious Writings" takes the place of biography. Part four, "Literary Sources," divides its chapters according to Old English, Latin, Old French, and Middle English literatures. Part five, finally, "Medical Sources," consists of two chapters, one on women's health and the other on love. Two things should be immediately apparent. First is that Murray has organized her book according to topics, while McCarthy has used genres to structure his book. The advantages and disadvantages of both approaches are clear. Murray's groupings allow her to bring together and contrast ecclesiastical and medical authorities on childbirth, for example, noting their different concerns. McCarthy's organization, in contrast, allows him to show the changing interests and emphases of patristic, early medieval, and canonists' writings on sex and marriage. The second major difference between the two is their geographical range. Murray's book includes sources from Iceland to Egypt, while McCarthy's restricts his to writings from England or that circulated there, although he admits that he adds some outside examples "to illustrate an aspect of medieval life for which I know of no English source" (p. 23), such as the record of a hermaphrodite from Colmar and glosses on the Viaticum of Constantine the African on lovesickness. The advantages of Murray's decision over that of McCarthy's will be clear to readers from outside of England. She writes: "During the Middle Ages, western Europe was a remarkably homogeneous culture. Despite regional [End Page 744] identities, a myriad of jurisdictions, shifting boundaries, and internal political tensions, Europe nevertheless was Christendom, united by religion and distinct from non-Christians" (p. 469). McCarthy's decision is a bit more difficult to defend. He writes: "There is no such place as 'medieval England,' politically or geographically speaking.... Nor is there any such place as 'medieval England' linguistically speaking" (p. 23). Yet he offers no compelling reason to counterbalance...

Despite an unprecedented level of interest in the interaction between law and literature over the past two decades, readers have had no accessible introduction to this rich engagement in medieval and early Tudor England. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature addresses this need by combining an authoritative guide through the bewildering maze of medieval law with concise examples illustrating how the law infiltrated literary texts during this period. Foundational chapters written by leading specialists in legal history prepare readers to be guided by noted literary scholars through unexpected conversations with the law found in numerous medieval texts, including major works by Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and Malory. Part I contains detailed introductions to legal concepts, practices and institutions in medieval England, and Part II covers medieval texts and authors whose verse and prose can be understood as engaging with the law.

1. Markets from Ancient Babylonia to the Modern World. An Introduction R.J. van der Spek, Bas van Leeuwen and J.L. van Zanden Part I: Methodology 2. Market performance in early economies: concepts and empirics: With an application to Babylon.P. Foldvari and B. van Leeuwen, 3. Analysis of Historical Time Series with Messy Features:: The Case of Commodity Prices in Babylonia Lennart Hoogerheide and S.J. Koopman 4. Market performance and welfare: why price instability hurts K.G. Persson, Part II: Market Performance in Babylonia and the Mediterranean in Antiquity 5. Market Performance and Market Integration in Babylonia in the 'Long Sixth Century' BC Michael Jursa 6. Prices and related data from Northern Babylonia in the Late Achaemenid and Early Hellenistic periods, ca. 480-300 BC J. Hackl and R. Pirngruber 7. Climate, war and economic development: the case of second-century BC Babylon J.A.M. Huijs, R. Pirngruber and B. van Leeuwen 8. Mediterranean grain prices in classical antiquity Sitta von Reden and Dominic Rathbone 9. Soldiers and booze, the rise and decline of a Roman market economy in north-western Europe Eltjo Buringh and Maarten Bosker Part III: Market Performance From the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century 10. Price volatility and markets in late medieval and early modern Europe Victoria Bateman 11. Markets and Price Fluctuations in England and Ireland, 1785-1913 L. Kennedy and Peter Solar 12. Market integration in China, AD 960 - 1644 Liu Guanglin 13. The organization and scope of grain markets in Qing China (1644-1911) Carol H. Shiue IV: Money and Markets 14. Circulation of Coins and Economic History in Syria and Mesopotamia in the sixth to first centuries BC Frederique Duyrat 15. A frog's eye view of the Roman market: the Batavian case. J.G. Aarts 16. The circulation of money and the behaviour of prices in Medieval and early modern England Nick Mayhew 17. Money supply and the price mechanism: the interaction of money, prices and wages in Beijing in the long 19th century Peng Kaixiang Part V: Long-Term Patterns 18. Risk aversion and storage in autarkic societies: from Babylonian times until the era of globalization B. van Leeuwen and P. Foldvari 19. Growing silver and changing prices: the development of the money stock in ancient Babylonia and medieval England R.J. van der Spek, B. van Leeuwen and P. Foldvari 20. Long-run patterns in market performance in the Near East, the Mediterranean and Europe from Antiquity to c. AD 1800 B. van Leeuwen, P. Foldvari and J.L. van Zanden VI: Conclusion 21. Markets from Babylon to Belfast. Some concluding remarks R.J. van der Spek, B. van Leeuwen, J.L. van Zanden

Reviewed by: Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present Lawrence Besserman Miriamne Ara Krummel. Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xix, 243. $85.00. Long in gestation, this study has more strengths than weaknesses. The principal strength of Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England is that it surveys an impressive variety of texts and images from the twelfth century through the fifteenth and illuminates the theme of Jewish otherness in medieval England and the theme of the “Other” in medieval Christian Europe in general. Using postcolonial insights (via the work of Foucault, Homi Bhabha, and others), Miriamne Krummel starts out by linking the mimicry and displacement of Judaism in a contemporary anti-Judaic cartoon with the same ambivalent movement of mimicry and displacement in medieval anti-Judaic supersessionism. Setting the stage, Krummel writes: “Reading Jewishness through the intersection of imaginative and archival works enables me to see that English Jews were not at all absent from medieval English society as was commonly believed—a belief that is ever losing currency among contemporary medievalists” (8). This is promising, but in fact Krummel’s “spectral” Jews receive most of the attention. To be sure, the Rolls are helpfully scanned for the “presence” of absent Jews in place-names that refer to “superseded” Jewish ownership. But for Krummel (following Biddick, Fradenburg, Kruger, and others), Jews are either “absent” or “erased,” or present mainly in archival memory. Fortunately, Krummel also sees past the specters and adduces evidence of actual Jews present after the 1290 expulsion, citing records in the Patent Rolls that prove that “the English land [sic] and its Court [End Page 416] probably welcomed Jews so long as the King desired their presence” (12). Acknowledging that England was not entirely Judenrein or “Jew-clean” after 1290, Krummel’s thesis is that “neither the 1290 Expulsion nor scriptural typology completely prevented living Jewishness from appearing on the medieval English landscape” (14). How could that happen? Their lands had been expropriated, their presence outlawed—Where was “living Jewishness” to be found? Krummel suggests answers to these questions that will enliven the scholarly conversation. In Chapter 1, Krummel explicates Edward I’s Statute of Jewry (1275) and the “racialist impulses in eight thirteenth-century English pictorials [i.e., manuscript illustrations] and one fourteenth-century doodle” (23). As previous scholars have noted, these and similar images and statutes all coincide in defining Jews as bestial, the quintessential, less-than-human “Other.” Krummel’s contribution is to introduce a postmodern perspective on these familiar anti-Semitic stereotypes by way of theories of agency, the body, the gaze, the panopticon, hybridity, and essentialism. Chapter 2 treats the liturgical poetry (Heb. piyyutim) of Meir, son of Elijah of Norwich (fl. c. 1290), focusing especially on Meir’s “Put a Curse on My Enemy.” This text reflects Meir’s “attempt to reclaim agency and to become a witness to his own experiences” (63). Catastrophes call up memories of earlier catastrophes. As Krummel says, “[r]e-seeing and re-membering the 1290 English Expulsion of the Jews through the enormity of the twentieth-century Holocaust are not so much myopic as they are inevitable” (65). Juxtaposing these two Jewish traumatic events may indeed “complicate our understanding of both periods,” but the awkwardly expressed claim that it does so “by giving us a glimpse of a medieval Jews’ [sic] internalization of invisibility and trauma in Meir’s piyyut” (66) falls flat. In this chapter, page after page repeats large portions of Krummel’s 2009 article on Meir of Norwich, partially revised but often cited word for word, and not listed in the bibliography (see Miriamne Ara Krummel, “Meir b. Elijah of Norwich and the Margins of Memory,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 27.4 [2009]: 1–23). In Chapter 3, on Mandeville’s Travels and the “postcolonial moment” (Tomasch), Krummel provides a sensitive reading of a uniquely intriguing text, “in which Jewishness appears only as deeply buried within the Caspian Mountains” (69). Throughout his travelogue, Mandeville [End Page 417] expresses, as Krummel shrewdly says, “a simultaneous fascination with and a repulsion to difference” (69). If this chapter errs on the...

Reviewed by: Writing Regional Identities in Medieval England: From the "Gesta Herwardi" to "Richard Coer de Lyon by Emily Dolmans Robert Rouse Emily Dolmans. Writing Regional Identities in Medieval England: From the "Gesta Herwardi" to "Richard Coer de Lyon". Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. xiv, 235. $95.00 cloth; $29.95 e-book. Scholarship on the articulation of English identity during the medieval period has been somewhat of a boom industry over the past twenty-five years. To a large extent initiated by the publication of Thorlac Turville-Petre's England the Nation in 1996, the subfield has borne forth a rich variety of monographs, articles, and conferences examining the development of Englishness, in its manifold theorized forms, from the arrival of the Early English through to the end of the Middle Ages. Many of these studies have sought to understand these nascent forms of English group identity (the concept of nation is problematic in a medieval context) by examining the way in which identity coalesces around the center, most often in the form of the elite community of the realm, the communitas regni. Emily Dolmans's much-needed 2020 study, Writing Regional Identities in Medieval England: From the "Gesta Herwardi" to "Richard Coer de Lyon," provides a timely nuancing of such a centralized model of identity, arguing convincingly that much medieval Englishness is determinedly local and regional in nature. Judiciously ranging across a wide span of multilingual literature set within, and on the borders of, medieval England, Dolmans's book makes a convincing case for a renewed examination of the myriad ways in which Englishness is imagined across a variety of locales during this period. The book comprises a framing introduction and five chapters, each of which forms a case study of a particular regional form or mode of English identity. The introduction, "These Englands: Regional Identities and Cultural Contacts," highlights two key aspects central to Dolmans's argument. First is the plural nature of the identity formations to be examined. Each construction of English identity performed in these texts is different, sometimes in nature, sometimes in degree, reminding us of the communal [End Page 395] fiction that lies at the heart of any sense of group identity. The many different Englands examined in Dolmans's book stand testament to the enduring value and importance of such an idea, while simultaneously reminding us of the inherent plurality of an idea repeatedly reimagined and redeployed in different geographical and political contexts. Second, the reader is reminded of the importance of the not-English in any formulation of English identity. As theorists of identity have reminded us for many decades, much of the heavy lifting of identity politics is performed by imagined and real cultural others. Here we find the Welsh, the French (in the guise of the Norman/Angevin kings), and the non-Christian others of the romance East examined for their role in the identity politics of the medieval English. Dolmans begins with the post-Conquest English identity crisis as articulated in the twelfth-century Gesta Herwardi. In this reading, the island cathedral city of Ely looms large, read here as an identity locus for the regional poetics of the text. A gesturing here toward a fractal kaleidoscope of local responses to the social and political upheaval of the Conquest reminds us of the fragile nature of the late pre-Conquest English state, a realm where regional identities were still palpable, as evident in the spatial politics of poems such as The Battle of Maldon. A retreat to long-held identity politics of the local is a natural strategy in the face of regnal displacement. After discussing Hereward, Dolmans moves us east to Lincolnshire, into the world of Gaimar's regional history, the Estoire des Engleis. Gaimar, writing in the deeply multicultural legacy of the east of England, weaves together narratives from Danish, English, and continental histories to create a sense of regional cultural identity that is simultaneously safely nostalgic and progressively integrative. The March of Wales has a history of complex and ever-changing landscapes of identity, as work in recent years by scholars such as Lindy Brady and Daniel Helbert has reminded us. Dolmans...

REVIEWS that women lack rhetorical ability. Further, she like Puttenham defines covertness and dissemblance as politic strengths as well as feminine spheres of operation. Private, coterie circulation thus came to be privileged as ‘‘not the opposite of public circulation, but rather a strategy that anticipated and even promoted such circulation’’ (p. 188). Yet Elizabeth ’s writing lost favor in later centuries, aligning her with other women writers whose perpetual fading away and recovery marks the boundaries of tradition and enhances the luster of its central figures. Lost Property is an admirable project in several respects. It moves across the unfortunate gaps that specializations have constructed between the medieval and early modern periods, between history and literature , and between intellectual and material culture. Its chronological and disciplinary capaciousness are impressive. The arguments are clearly in view throughout, and specific texts by women writers receive valuable close readings. Specialists may object to an occasional claim—for example , that English literature before Chaucer was ‘‘prenational’’ (p. 6)— but the book as a whole demonstrates for specialists in all the fields it touches that undertaking an inclusive account of women’s writing over three centuries can yield substantial rewards. Susan Crane Rutgers University D. A. Trotter, ed. Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain. Cambridge : D. S. Brewer, 2000. Pp. x, 237. $63.00. Though its main audience will be historical linguists and sociolinguists specializing in medieval English, this excellent collection of essays is essential reading for Chaucerians and for anyone else who wishes to understand the diverse linguistic and literary culture of later medieval England. The volume consists of thirteen papers out of the twenty that were given at an international colloquium at the University of WalesAberystwyth in September 1997. The picture of a multilingual society that emerges is new and exciting. Not entirely new, of course, for students of medieval English literature have long been familiar with ample evidence testifying to the interpenetration of English, French, and Latin in later medieval English literary texts. Macaronic literary texts are dis435 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:33 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER cussed in some detail in only one of the essays in the volume (that of Herbert Schendl), but the collection as a whole contains much that is relevant for students of medieval English literature, macaronic and otherwise . The essays are without exception up-to-date and in some cases also highly innovative in their approach to the major languages of late medieval Britain. Taken together, they demonstrate in illuminating detail how Latin, French, English, and Welsh were used for various liturgical , governmental, legal, literary, and everyday purposes. The volume contains the following essays: Llino Beverly Smith, ‘‘The Welsh and English Languages in Late-Medieval Wales’’; Begoña Crespo, ‘‘Historical Background of Multilingualism and Its Impact on English’’; Andres M. Kristol, ‘‘L’Intellectuel ‘anglo-normand’ face à la pluralité des langues: le témoignage implicite du MS Oxford, Magdalen Lat. 188’’; Michael Richter, ‘‘Collecting Miracles Along the AngloWelsh Border in the Early Fourteenth Century’’; Paul Brand, ‘‘The Languages of the Law in Later Medieval England’’; Herbert Schendl, ‘‘Linguistic Aspects of Code-Switching in Medieval English Texts’’; Luis Iglesias-Rábade, ‘‘French Phrasal Power in Late Middle English: Some Evidence Concerning the Verb nime(n)/take(n)’’; Tony Hunt, ‘‘Code-Switching in Medical Texts’’; Laura Wright, ‘‘Bills, Accounts, Inventories: Everyday Trilingual Activities in the Business World of Later Medieval England’’; Frankwalt Möhren, ‘‘Onefold Lexicography for a Manifold Problem?’’; Edmund Weiner, ‘‘Medieval Multiculturalism and the Revision of the OED’’; Lisa Jefferson, ‘‘The Language and Vocabulary of the Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century Records of the Goldsmiths’ Company’’; and William Rothwell, ‘‘Aspects of Lexical and Morphosyntactical Mixing in the Languages of Medieval England .’’ A brief account of four representative essays in the volume follows. Herbert Schendl’s ‘‘Linguistic Aspects of Code-Switching in Medieval English Texts’’ is one of the two articles in the collection that deals with literary texts (see also Rothwell, below). Schendl’s discussion of macaronic poetry (lyrics, Piers Plowman, and drama) and macaronic sermons addresses questions such as the difference between ‘‘code switching ’’ (CS) and borrowing. He analyzes evidence for possible constraints on switches, and he presents a chart...

The long transition from a natural state to a liberal economic order

<i>Karl Tamburr,</i> The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England<i>The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England</i>. Karl Tamburr. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007. Pp. xii+211.

Contents: Preface Introduction: the origins and growth of English towns. Local Communities: Town and village formation in medieval England The English parish in perspective. Archaeology and Topography: The archaeology of British towns 1066-1530 Town defences in medieval England and Wales. Towns and Power: Towns and the English state, 1066-1500 Towns and the Crown in England: the counties and the county towns. Late Medieval Society: The role of minorities and immigrants in English medieval towns Urban society Civic mentality and the environment in Tudor York A regional capital as magnet: immigrants to York, 1477-1566. Urban Decline?: A crisis in English towns? The case of York, 1460-1640 Urban decay revisited. Index.

Realism and Power in Mark Twain's

Book Review| February 01 2010 Review: Cooking and Dining in Medieval England, by Peter Brears Cooking and Dining in Medieval England, Peter Brears. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2008. 557 pp. Illustrations. ££30 (boards). Michael Hobbs Michael Hobbs London Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Gastronomica (2010) 10 (1): 156–157. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.156 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Hobbs; Review: Cooking and Dining in Medieval England, by Peter Brears. Gastronomica 1 February 2010; 10 (1): 156–157. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2010.10.1.156 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentGastronomica Search This content is only available via PDF. ©© 2010 The Regents of the University of California. All Rights Reserved.2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This chapter is an investigation of the nature of political society in later medieval England, though the angle from which it approaches it is notably oblique. Its starting point is an attempt to investigate the nature and significance of the religious sanction enjoyed by the political order through an examination of the changes in the definitions of sanctity that occurred within this period. Later medieval England was unusually rich in one further group of candidates for sanctity, the 'political' saints. The chapter discusses principal representatives of this group, who will receive more detailed attention in this paper, are well known: Simon de Montfort, Thomas of Lancaster, Edward II, Richard Scrope, archbishop of York, Henry VI. Political saints were no different from the other saints venerated in later medieval England in being valued 'not primarily as exemplars or soulfriends, but as powerful helpers and healers in time of need'.

Elevated levels of non-accidental fractures in different populations, regions, and time periods are considered an indicator for violence within a population. Whilst soldiers from a mass grave contribute unambiguously to the bioarchaeological evidence for the presence of warfare in medieval England, we aim to further analyse the absence of temporal variation in the general population-wide fracture distribution pattern. A detailed study, consisting only of clearly dated and aged male individuals was conducted to investigate the impact of prolonged warfare and general instability by means of blunt force fracture distribution patterns in early (AD 1066-1100), middle (AD 1100-1380) and late (AD 1380-1558) medieval England. Statistically significant differences were only observed between the 26-35 years age group of the middle period (AD 1100-1380) vs the 18-25 year age group of the late period (AD 1380-1558). The latter included many individuals from Towton, North Yorkshire, and therefore battle-related injuries are reflected in the pattern. The former presented inconclusive causal effects, none of them could be reliably linked to warfare. It was concluded that aside from the inclusion of battle-related graves no evidence for the impact of prolonged warfare and economic instability could be observed in medieval England.