Noble Houses Research Articles

The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe, 1325-1520

The Fraternal Society of Knighthood of St George - Hungary 1325/6-c1395? the Order of the Band - Castile-Leon 1330-1474? the Society of St George or Order of the Garter - England 1344/9-present the Company of Our Lady of the Noble House commonly called the Company of the Star - France 1344/52-1364/80? the Company of the Holy Spirit of Right Desire commonly called the Company of the Knot - mainland Sicily (Naples) 1352/3--1362? the Order of the Sword - Cyprus 1347/59-1489? the Order of the Collar from 1518 called the Order of the Annunciation of Our Lady - Savoy, 1364?-present French princely orders founded before 1430 the Enterprise of the Knights of St George - Aragon, 1371/9-1410? the Order of the Ship - mainland Sicily (Naples) 1381-1386? monarchical and quasi-monarchical orders founded in Spain and Europe c1380-1433 the Order of the Golden Fleece - Burgundy and the netherlands 1430/1-present the Order of the Ermine - mainland Sicily (Naples) 1465-1494/1501 the Order of St Michael the Archangel - France 1469-1790 epilogue - developments from 1469 to 1525 conclusion - the monarchical orders of knighthood.

House, culture and development

Generally the word house is associated with a building, a material construction, providing or intended to provide shelter. A large part of anthropological and sociological literature on the house is linked to this meaning. An abundance of descriptions of particular houses and types of houses from all over the world can be found dealing with the lay-out of house and plot, construction materials and techniques, architecture, ornaments and furniture. These studies tend to give an impression of overwhelming variety, which is often strengthened by meticulous atten tion to detail (see for example Oliver 1971, 1975). The classification of this diversity of building structures is probably not feasible, although dimensions for classification have been suggested, such as permanent temporary, differentiated homogeneous and communal noncom munal (Altman and Chemers 1980 : 157-161). The word house, however, is also used in other ways referring to a home (not necessarily related to a particular building), a family (espe cially a noble or illustrious one), a commercial establishment and a legislative body. From this angle the house is considered a focal socio cultural entity with a high degree of intimacy and vital economic and ideological (political, juridical, religious) functions. These functions, however, can also be exercised largely within more public physical and social conditions, for example in court or in the church, separated from the house as a focal and intimate socio-cultural entity. From the viewpoint of the house as an anthropological concept, the literature is quite restricted and most anthropological review works do not even incorporate a concept of house. L?vi-Strauss (1984) coined the concept as it is used in 'noble house', for example. He defines it as a particular type of social structure which is a 'personne morale d?tentrice d'un domaine, qui se perp?tue par transmission de son nom, de sa fortune et de ses titres en ligne r?elle ou fictive, tenue pour l?gitime ? la seule condition que cette continuit? puisse s'exprimer dan le langage de

The Marriage Alliance in the Roman Elite

Elite marriage in Rome in the late Republic and early Empire was con tracted between noble houses of equivalent status, often for immediate political gains. Contrary to views advanced by some scholars, spouses nonetheless enter tained strong expectations of conjugal loyalty and happiness but marriage was relatively fragile. Power was vested in the older generation rather than men as such. A separate matrimonial regime was usually maintained during marriage and dowry was essentially recoverable on divorce or widowhood. Upper class women were therefore relatively independent although they subordinated in dividual preference to corporate interests. Their primary loyalty was to their natal kin but they observed the obligation to redistribute their dowry and patrimony in the following generation to their children, who belonged to the father's lineage.

The Saudi Religious Elite (ULAMA) as Participant in The political System of The kingdom

The Ulema are the power that holds the Sultan and his people together—the medium of control. But they seldom meddle in politics. This premise was expressed by Ameen Rihani, an Arab traveller, in 1928, before either Sultan 'Abd al-'Aziz became king or Najd and its dependencies became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.Was Rihani correct in his conclusion? Is he right today? This article will endeavor to explore the term ulama in the Saudi context in the twentieth century. Later, an attempt will be made to discuss the participation of Saudi ulama in a number of key cases in the history of Saudi Arabia.The house of Saud along with the house of Muhammad b. 'Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of the Unitarian movement, were parties to a unique coalition in the eighteenth century. The coalition embraced the Unitarian movement, or Wahhabiyah, founded in the mid-eighteenth century, and members of the Arab noble house of Saud of Najd.

Storm over the Noblesse

And sure, if there be difference in Nobilitie, as there must needes bee, because the causes bee different; for some are ennobled by their valour and Martiall knowledge, and others by their Offices and prudence in the manage of matters of Estate: I see no reason, but that these last should be holden the more noble Nobilitie, if I may so say: alwayes giving the first place to them that are of Noble houses by Race.

The Discovery of a Market-Garden Orchard at Pompeii: The Garden of the "House of the Ship Europa"

The garden of the House of the Ship Europa, located in the SE part of the city, to the W of the amphitheater, in Region I, insula xv, is one of the large open areas excavated by the University of Maryland during the 1972 season.' The two houses in insula xv2 (Europa at entrance 3, with its shop at 2, and the house at i) appear to be a single property, and have a common open area at their rear, which occupies much of the insula (ill. i). The House of the Ship takes its name from the large graffito of a ship (1.50 x 1.05 m.) labeled Europa (ill. 2), found on the north wall of the peristyle in 1957 during the excavation of this once beautiful and noble house.3 This much studied graffito is so carefully drawn that it could have been made only by an experienced sailor, or by a person who was intimately acquainted with the large merchant ships in use at the time.4 The name Europa probably refers t a sp cific ship.' It is commonly believed t at the graffito reflected he commercial activity of the occupant of the house, which had been converted to such use by the time of the erupt on of Vesuvius, but the exact nature of the com ercial activity is not known. A hearth had been installed in the N portico of the peristyle, and at the time of excavation some dolia were found in the area that had once been a

Athelstan ‘Half King’ and his family

Anglo-Saxon genealogy is full of pitfalls, and it is not to be wondered that no one has followed the pioneer work of W. G. Searle in reconstructing the pedigrees of some of the noble houses. Much of the source material is suspect, or too vaguely worded for precise conclusions as to family relationships. The whole topic bristles with difficulties, yet its importance is fundamental; for this as for other periods, detailed examination of family ties and estates supplies essential background information for anyone seeking to uncover the interests and pressures which helped to formulate national policy.

The Future

Years ago, there was a popular song whose refrain went thus:Che sàrà, sàrà,Whatever will be, will be,The future’s not ours to see,Che sàrà, sàrà.The first line of this refrain is the motto of the noble house to which Bertrand Russell belonged; it serves to express a view of time that has been set forth by Russell in many of his writings, but the view is one widely held long before Russell lived and now held by many people independently of him. We should not be misled by the tautological appearance of the sentence ‘Whatever will be, will be’; in the song it is a way of putting forward a positive thesis, which may fairly be called a philosophical thesis, even though people who hold it are often little practised in systematic philosophical reflection. We may call it the thesis that there is a definite or determinate future. A book may lie open at one page, but it has a definite text from first page to last, irrespective of this; many people think in this way of the book of human history.We should distinguish between the definiteness or determinacy of the future and its being causally determined by the present and past. If there are causes that now exist or have already existed from which the future can issue only in one way, then the future is clearly determinate ; but the converse does not hold. The metaphor of the book may help us again; even if the text of later pages is not determined by the text of earlier pages, there may nevertheless be a completely fixed text on those pages which we have not yet turned over.

A Note on Aristophanes, Lysistrata 665–70

The possibility that the Greeks used heraldic symbols or blazons was first explored a long time ago. The question has been revived recently by a French scholar in an article entitled ‘Les “blazons” des villes grecques’. It is of wide general interest, and of particular interest to numismatists who are concerned with the curious group of coins of Euboic standard bearing various simple devices (horse, horse protome and hindquarters, wheel, triskeles, beetle, gorgoneion, etc.), sometimes placed within what appears to be the circle of a shield. Various scholars, including C. T. Seltman, ascribed these coins to sixth-century Athens; Seltman's particular contribution to the problem of their identification consisted in the explanation of the diverse anepigraphic types of this group of coins as the ‘heraldic’ devices or blazons of the great gene or noble houses of early Athens. In particular he pointed out that the same devices appeared also in Attic black-figured vases on the shields of deities, heroes, and unidentified hoplites, and proposed the theory that the vase-painters were copying what they saw in the streets of Athens, namely the shield-devices of the men-at-arms of Athens' leading families.

A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage

The opinion that A Midsummer Night's Dream is largely a shimmering fabric of moonlight, with a touch of moonshine ' has become stock among students of Shakespeare. One rephrases habitual insights concerning gossamer and magic whenever one treats of the work. But there is more to the play than a dream. The efforts of historical scholars to place this comedy in the setting of its dramatic tradition, to see it as sui generis, a ' symbolical' or masque-like play As 2 suggest that we ought to revise our romantic preconceptions of its structure and theme. Elizabethan masques usually afforded pleasures more serious than those of moonshine, and A Midsummer Night's Dream is not unlike them in this respect. It was created for the solemn nuptials of a noble house, perhaps for those of the Earl of Derby or the Earl of Essex. For our purposes, the specific families involved matter little. Rather it is important that the significance of the play's symbolism and the raison d'etre of its pageantry can come clear through an examination of the occasion of its presentation. Commensurate with its origins in a court marriage, this drama speaks throughout for a sophisticated Renaissance philosophy of the nature of love in both its rational and irrational

Edward Jenner, F. R .S., 1749 - 1823

EDWARD JENNER was born in the vicarage at Berkeley on the banks of the Severn on 17 May 1749* Fie was the third son of the Rev. Stephen Jenner, M.A., Rector of Rockhampton and Vicar of Berkeley, a clergyman of some means and much landed property in Gloucestershire and Worcester, tutor to a former Earl of Berkeley and a friend of that noble house. Jenner’s mother was the daughter of the Rev. Flenry Head, a member of an old and respectable Berkshire family. His elder brother, also in Holy Orders, looked after the small boy of five when the father died and no doubt encouraged a natural liking for country life and a taste for natural history. Before he was nine young Jenner is said to have made a collection of the nests of the doormouse. He was put to school at Wotton-under-Edge under a Mr Clissold and later was placed in the care of the Rev. Dr Washbourn at Cirencester from whom he received a sound classical education. About this time he became a lifelong friend of Caleb Hillier Parry (1755-1822) who shared his enthusiasm for fossils which abounded in the oolitic formation in that neighbourhood. Parry, too, has achieved fame as an original contributor to medicine, for in the course of a long professional career at Bath he published important studies on angina pectoris and the arterial pulse, and without doubt gave the first complete description of exophthalmic goitre many years before Graves and Basedow, although they are universally given the credit of that discovery. One of Parry’s sons, afterwards Rear-Admiral William Edward Parry, R.N., gained fame as an arctic explorer.

A short account of the recently discovered copy of Edward Hall‘s "Union of the noble houses of Lancaster and York", notable for its manuscript additions

A short account of the recently discovered copy of Edward Hall‘s "Union of the noble houses of Lancaster and York", notable for its manuscript additions

The New Japanese Electoral Law

A new statute for the election of members of the House of Representatives was promulgated in Japan on May 5, 1925, and will be applicable in the next general election. It is Japan's fourth electoral law, the previous ones having been promulgated in 1889, 1900, and 1919, respectively. All three of the earlier laws based the suffrage upon a tax-paying qualification, the first requiring voters to pay fifteen yen in direct national taxes, the second reducing the required tax to a minimum of ten yen, the third decreasing it still further to three yen. The present law abolishes the tax-paying qualification and provides that all males twenty-five years of age and over, who are not otherwise disqualified, and who do not receive “public or private relief or help for a living, on account of poverty,” shall be entitled to exercise the suffrage. In addition to paupers and vagabonds, there continue to be excluded from the franchise active members of the army and navy, certain classes of civilian officials, women, and the heads of noble houses. Priests, religious teachers, primary school teachers, government contractors, and certain classes of students hitherto unenfranchised now gain the suffrage and may become candidates for election. Under the law of 1889 the franchise was exercisable by 450,000 men, and under that of 1900 by 983,000; the act of 1919 increased the electorate to 2,860,000; while the present law raises it to an estimated total of 12,000,000.

The Churches and the Prevailing Social Sentiment

Churches in the great religions have been allies of all ancient governments and most modern ones. The Emperor of Japan was believed to have, and in the popular mind still has, intimate relations with the heavenly powers. He used to be held in a seclusion suitable for this peculiar relationship to Deity. The Emperor of China for thousands of years under various dynasties was a high priest, whose offerings and prayers were peculiarly acceptable to Deity, and frequently procured for his people good seedtimes and good harvests, although he sometimes failed to avert pestilences, droughts, floods, and famines. The Indian castes are family clans and trades-unions with strong religious sanctions. The Koran contains the foundations of civil law as well as of ecclesiastical, and the Sultan claims succession to the religious as well as to the civil authority of the Caliphs. Under the feudal system there was a chaplain in every great noble's house, and the king ruled “by the grace of God,” and by the same grace transmitted his office to his son. Both Napoleon the Great and Napoleon the Little claimed as Emperor the support of the Church; but Napoleon the Third never seemed to see the extraordinary pathos in the formula he used so much, “By the grace of God and the national will Emperor of the French.” The French Revolution tried to divorce civil government from religion, but failed to do so. National established churches supported by the state exist all over Europe, although their tenure is frail in several European countries. The American Republic has carried into practice complete religious toleration and complete separation of church and state; but every now and then some one proposes to bridge the gap between church and state by a phrase such as “Vox populi, vox Dei,” or to “recognize” the Divine Immanence by inserting the word God in the Constitution.

On the Rise and Suppression of the Templars in Yorkshire

[As this paper is about to be published in extenso by the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, before whom it was originally read, only an abstract of it is here given.] The object of this paper being the local not the general history of the order of Templars, I shall not enter into the circumstances of its foundation, but confine myself to its extension in Yorkshire, with especial reference to the neighbourhood of the place in which we are assembled. In this county they had been enriched by grants from several noble houses—De Brus, Mowbray, de Ros, and Lacy. Their lands in the North Riding they had derived chiefly from the two first, those in the West from the two last. Robert de Ros, the second lord, brother-in-law to Walter Espec, the founder of Rievaulx Abbey, gave them Ribston, Hunsingore, Cattal, and Walsford. The De Lacy’s, lords of the Honour of Pontefract, whose possessions extended not only through many parts of England, but to Wales and Ireland, were great benefactors to the order. From them they derived the church of Kellington, Whitkirk, Skelton, and Newhusum, now Temple Newsome. William and Roger de Hastings gave them the lands of Hurst, near Snaith, which still retain the name of Temple Hurst, and some interesting remains of the house and chapel. England was divided under the Templars into a number of Balliae, Eborascire being one of them; and in places where their possessions were important they had preceptors, i.e ., receivers of their rents and ...

XII. A brief Summary of the Wardrobe Accounts of the tenth, eleventh, and fourteenth years of King Edward the Second, contained in a Letter addressed by Thomas Stapleton, Esq. F.S.A. to John Gage, Esq. F.R.S., Director

Having lately had an opportunity of carefully perusing the Account-book of the Comptroller of the Wardrobe for the fourteenth year of King Edward the Second, now in the possession of Mr. Joseph Hunton of Richmond, in Yorkshire, I have been induced to compare it with similar Account-books, for the tenth and eleventh years of the same King's reign, amongst the manuscripts in the library of the Society; and to abstract from them such entries as fix the date of transactions embodied in the narratives of chroniclers, supply the omissions of the genealogists of our royal and noble houses, or are curious as illustrating ancient customs and manners.