Thirteenth-Century England Research Articles

Excommunication in Thirteenth-Century England: Communities, Politics and Publicity, by Felicity Hill

<i>Excommunication in Thirteenth-Century England: Communities, Politics and Publicity</i>, by Felicity Hill

New evidence from Shrewsbury on the creation and circulation of music in high-medieval England

ABSTRACTThis article presents new discoveries from a manuscript from the Collegiate Church of St Chad, Shrewsbury, with implications for the circulation of ecclesiastical music, particularly sequences, in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. It begins with a brief examination of the twelfth-century musical contents of the manuscript, which are shown to hold close scribal affinities: in particular, a ‘winged’ neume shape is contextualised by contemporaneous musical inscriptions found in a manuscript probably written at Haughmond Abbey. The remainder of the article considers music, mostly sequences, inscribed in a palimpsest gathering at the back of the St Chad's manuscript in the thirteenth century. Two of these are compared for the first time with their concordances, one concordance newly discovered. Examination of the preservation and record of these musical entries (with discussion of contrafacture and marginalia) sheds light on creative practices of citation and intertextuality, performance traditions, and processes of reading and recording music at St Chad's, ultimately illuminating the role the church played within a creative network across England and northern Europe.

Felicity Hill, Excommunication in Thirteenth–Century England: Communities, Politics, and Publicity

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022., x + 344 stranice, glosarij, 2 apendiksa, i indeks. ISBN: 9780198840367

Violence, Letters, and the Law: Jewish-Christian Interaction and Episcopal Sanction in Thirteenth-Century England

ABSTRACT In June 1278, Richard Gravesend, bishop of Lincoln, sent a letter to King Edward I, begging his aid in punishing fourteen Christians excommunicated for working as servants and nursemaids in Jewish households. Eight years later, Richard Swinfield, bishop of Hereford, wrote to the chancellor of Hereford commanding that he publicly condemn Christian participants in a local Jewish wedding celebration. These letters attest to the hostile legal and political climate for English Jews in the thirteenth century. But they also hint at communal interactions between Jews and Christians that proved more intimate and amicable than statutory records tend to indicate. In this essay, the authors-a historian and literary scholar, respectively-bring their distinct disciplinary perspectives to bear on these letters and their implications for thirteenth-century English communities. Tolan analyses them within the larger context of anti-Jewish legislation in England, while Jahner looks to contemporary literary and cultural productions sponsored by Gravesend and Swinfield and their households. Together, the authors consider the legacy of anti-Jewish violence in England by focusing on the kind of domestic affiliations and arrangements that often escape historiographic notice, even as they prove foundational to the regulation of communal affairs.

Difficult gifts: gifts to and from the popes in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England

ABSTRACT This article explores how gifts, and stories about gifts, to and from the popes were treated and discussed in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. The first part explores the intellectual context in which these stories were written, namely scriptural and classical ideas about the gift that circulated in the period, and the practical challenges faced by the papacy. The second part explores how English clerks and aristocrats utilised these gifts and stories about them. The exchange of gifts, the article argues, presented the papacy and its partners with mutually incompatible practical and ideological pressures. Despite the efforts of skilled actors such as Pope Innocent III, these challenges could only be navigated, never resolved.

Those Things Which Are Written in Romance: Language and Law Teaching in Thirteenth-Century England

Abstract Around 1250, a shift began to occur in texts written on the common law. Where earlier texts on the practices of the king’s courts had mostly been written in Latin, a number of the new texts written after 1250 were written in French. The shift to French initially occurred mostly in the context of texts on counting and pleading, the oral parts of court procedure, which were conducted in French, and one author of the 1280s even suggested that by his time a norm had developed that texts on counting and pleading should be written in French. This article examines the evidence for such a norm and the reasons for the shift to French in the later thirteenth century. It uses texts on counting and pleading to examine how both French and Latin were used in the education of pleaders and concludes that, although a norm probably did exist that the oral parts of procedure should be taught in French, Latin was still being used for a number of different purposes in the education of pleaders.

Pursuing the Percys: the original owners of the Percy Psalter-Hours

ABSTRACT In 2019 the British Library acquired the Percy Hours, a late thirteenth-century book of hours from York. This acquisition reunited the manuscript with the Percy Psalter, acquired by the Library in 1990. Together they originally formed a single volume psalter-hours. The Percy Psalter-Hours is one of a small number of devotional books for the laity surviving from thirteenth-century England, and probably the only example from York. It provides rare insight into a period of great change in book culture, when devotional books for the laity were growing in popularity and regional workshops for commercial book production were emerging around the country. Despite its significance, the question of the manuscript's original ownership has never been satisfactorily answered. Through analysing the heraldic evidence of the manuscript, this paper proposes a new identification of the intended owners and explores the wider implications for our understanding of the social history of the book.

Hanging Matters: Petty Theft, Sentence of Death, and a Lost Statute of Edward I

This article discusses an important aspect of the law relating to theft in thirteenth-century England, and one of the ways in which that law developed. Central to it is the argument that the treatise The Mirror of Justices and references in court records and reports show that a short statute enacted early in the reign of Edward I, probably in 1278, categorically defined 12d. as the amount, whether in goods or money, at which larceny became a capital felony, incurring judgment of death. As well as setting out the evidence for this hitherto overlooked ordinance, the article also argues that the statute can be associated with some significant developments in the way petty theft was treated subsequently. In particular it had the effect of promoting the development of penal imprisonment, while since the task of valuation was given to trial juries, it further enhanced the leading role of the latter in determining the fates of the men and women whose lives depended on their verdicts.

The Archae System Revisited: The Records of Indebtedness to Medieval Jews

Abstract This article examines on document acknowledging debt to Maruna, a Jewish woman, to John of Kent that was deposited in a chest in Canterbury in 1264. Using this document, the article examines what can be learned about the archae system in thirteenth-century England from the perspective of the documents which were produced there. A series of chests (Lat. pl. archae) were established across England following the introduction of the Articles of the Jewry (1194), which regulated the production, use, and storage of the records generated by Jewish moneylending activities in medieval England. Additionally, the Articles of the Jewry required that more general business transactions, such as the sale and purchase of property, also be recorded at the archae. This paper considers not only the legal and administrative structures which governed the production of such records but also how these systems manifested themselves within the documents which produced at the archae. Finally, it will consider the role that ritual and gender had to play in such transactions and the documents which recorded them.

Reassembling Textile Networks: Treasuries and Re-collecting Practices in Thirteenth-Century England

This essay traces networks created by the movement and use of luxury (often imported) and ceremonial textiles in thirteenth-century England. These networks incorporate humans and objects: a particular cloth interacts with human donors, recipients, and royal officials; with scissors and thread; and with inventories, slips of parchment, and labeled chests. My narrative follows textile networks through largely public and dynamic events of gifting between elite individuals and display in royal ceremonial, in which the materiality of textiles enables them to play diverse roles: worn, walked upon, argued over, cut and divided. At the same time, less obvious but crucial events of documentation and storage are also revealed; these actively worked to sustain textiles’ associations with donors and events. I posit that these various public and private networks of people and things functioned to make the value of the gifted and ceremonial textiles “stick” in the memory of individuals—these networks worked to combat the tendency of all historical connections to be forgotten, the tendency of all things to fall apart. Methods informed by actor-network theory (ANT) are recommended as a way to more clearly delineate the processes by which collected objects function within acts of remembering. Parallels regarding the movement and use of luxury and ceremonial textiles in Islamic and Byzantine contexts are introduced when relevant.

Trinitarian Hagiography in Late Medieval England: Rewriting St Robert of Knaresborough in Latin Verse

The Order of the Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives (or Trinitarian Order) is one of the least studied continental religious groups to have expanded into thirteenth-century England. This article examines shifting notions of Trinitarian redemption in late medieval England through the prism of the order's writing about Yorkshire hermit St Robert of Knaresborough (d. 1218). Against the Weberian theory of the routinization of charisma, it demonstrates that Robert's inspirational sanctity was never bound too rigidly by his Trinitarian hagiographers, who rather co-opted his unstable charisma in distinct yet complementary ways to facilitate institutional reinvention and spiritual flourishing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The limits of strong government: attempts to control criminality in thirteenth-century England*

Abstract This article examines how far centrally-directed structures of peacekeeping influenced communal reactions to criminality in thirteenth-century England, and the extent to which developments in the systems and procedures of criminal justice manifested into tighter control over law and order. It challenges claims for the importance of the frankpledge system, offering an alternative means upon which the central government came to rely for the maintenance of law and order. Nevertheless, it also complicates the matter by demonstrating that the mechanisms designed to bring crime more firmly under the state’s control did not necessarily result in greater central control over criminality, let alone reduce local autonomy over criminal justice practices and procedures.

Spiders Behaving Badly in the Middle English Physiologus, the Bestiaire Attributed to Pierre de Beauvais and Odo of Cheriton\u2019s Fables

Two remarkably similar depictions of spiders survive in Middle English and French sources from the middle of the thirteenth century. Both of these vernacular versions of the Physiologus deviate so wildly from their sources when it comes to describing these creatures that their editors have declared these passages to be entirely original. And yet, the spiders who survive in the Middle English Physiologus and the long version of the Bestiaire attributed to Pierre de Beauvais perform such similar work that their originality may be called into question. The Physiologus’ and Bestiaire’s descriptions of spiders’ violent hunting methods were likely informed by the burgeoning of natural history writing that accompanied the recovery of Aristotle’s History of Animals, but for these texts’ allegorical interpretations I argue that we should look to Odo of Cheriton’s Latin fables from earlier in the thirteenth century. There is an explicit link between Odo’s fables and the Middle English Physiologus and implicit connections with the French Bestiaire. Together, these analogues demonstrate a small but coherent tradition of emphasizing the diabolical violence of spiders in the multilingual environment of thirteenth-century England and France.

The Annals of Dunstable Priory: From Living Memory to Written Record in a Thirteenth-Century Textual Community

This paper begins by reviewing the evidence for the authorship of The Annals of Dunstable Priory following the recent publication of the first English translation of the text. Having established the polyvocal authorship of the annals, it goes on to argue for the ways in which the text represents the views and opinions of the textual community responsible for its production. In particular, it examines the multiple layers of the religious community’s identity and its place within the wider world of thirteenth-century England. The investigation reveals how the concern for recording the rights, privileges, and memories of the priory and township reflect broader trends in the thirteenth century, including an increased reliance on the written word and administrative processes.

William H. Campbell. The Landscape of Pastoral Care in Thirteenth-Century England.

William H. Campbell. The Landscape of Pastoral Care in Thirteenth-Century England.

The Landscape of Pastoral Care in Thirteenth-Century England, by William H. Campbell

For many years, scholars of the medieval English church and of medieval religion more broadly have viewed the thirteenth century as a crucial period. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, bringing together many of the new developments already occurring in theology, canon law and lay religious practice, sought (among other things) to improve the education of the clergy and the pastoral care of the laity, with rulings on clerical education and confession. In the wake of this a series of bishops, friars and scholars with a ‘reforming’ agenda sought to regulate the behaviour and education of the clergy and thereby improve the pastoral care offered to lay people. Various aspects of this ‘reform’ movement have attracted much study in recent years: scholars working on preaching and on pastoral manuals, which were written to educate clergy and friars in hearing confessions and conducting pastoral care, have been especially active. Prior to...

Comorbid coal: Fýlð and desaise from thirteenth-century England to contemporary Appalachia

This study unites disparate historical, poetic, encyclopedic, and filmic sources by their shared project to situate coal on a continuum of forces ranging from life-ending to life-sustaining: on one hand, filth and disease; on the other, energy and employment. When burned sea coal gained popularity as a fuel source in thirteenth-century England, it catalyzed a stream of opposition to its pollution. Chroniclers, poets, encyclopedists, and physicians in medieval and early modern England and France identified its danger to humans as an agent of and metaphor for disease, race, and socio-economic position. These notions of coal as a trans-corporeal link between humanity and the environment in turn illuminate its identification of disease, racial alterity, and socio-economic exploitation in Barbara Kopple’s (1976) documentary, Harlan County, USA. Kopple presents a neomedieval view of coal as the quintessential ecological other, one which makes and unmakes bodies, communities, and environments.

Monastic Preaching to the Laity in Thirteenth-Century England

ABSTRACTThe accepted narrative concerning monastic preaching to the English laity suggests that it happened occasionally in the twelfth century and then disappeared until the fourteenth century when monks and canons regular, belatedly following the friars’ example, began to preach again. This paper calls that narrative into question. Records of episcopal administration and surviving sermon books of monastic provenance, including manuscripts from Worcester and Durham cathedrals, provide evidence for pastoral care of the laity and popular preaching by cloistered religious in thirteenth-century England. This would indicate that some monks and canons were contributors and not mere bystanders to the pastoral revolution that shaped later medieval lay religion. In addition to providing evidence, the article points towards previously neglected sources where more is likely to be found.

The Life of Saint Clement: A Translation of La Vie de seint Clement The Life of the Seven Sleepers, The Life of St. Josaphaz and The Little Debate

Book Review| October 01 2018 The Life of Saint Clement: A Translation of La Vie de seint ClementThe Life of the Seven Sleepers, The Life of St. Josaphaz and The Little Debate The Life of Saint Clement: A Translation of La Vie de seint Clement. Translated by Daron Burrows. The French of England Translation Series, 10. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Texts and Studies, 488. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016. Pp. xii + 270. $65.The Works of Chardri: Three Poems in the French of Thirteenth-Century England: The Life of the Seven Sleepers, The Life of St. Josaphaz and The Little Debate. Translated by Neil Cartlidge. The French of England Translation Series, 9. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Texts and Studies, 462. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2015. Pp. xvi + 164. $54. Duncan Robertson Duncan Robertson Augusta University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Journal of English and Germanic Philology (2018) 117 (4): 549–553. https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.117.4.0549 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Duncan Robertson; The Life of Saint Clement: A Translation of La Vie de seint ClementThe Life of the Seven Sleepers, The Life of St. Josaphaz and The Little Debate. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 1 October 2018; 117 (4): 549–553. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.117.4.0549 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressThe Journal of English and Germanic Philology Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

“Do not kill them, lest my people forget”: Changes in Attitudes Towards Jews in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England

This essay supports Paul Hyams’ thesis that while attitudes toward Jews over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries certainly cooled, they did so less dramatically or inevitably than the 1290 expulsion might suggest if imagined as a culmination of policy. Chronicled hostility, alongside which the Jewish ‘blood libel’ myth developed as justification, appears to have increased with perceived Jewish economic status. Their status after their impoverishment decreased as royal policy perpetuated longstanding social divisions that largely originated from neither religious nor economic cleavages, only cultural ones. The treatment of the Jews in the period may simultaneously be understood as one of English identity consolidation in the post-Conquest period, as Jews first coexisted with Anglo-Saxons after the Norman invasion. Since economic reasoning alone does not explain the treatment of the Jews in the latter half of the thirteenth century, this essay also examines instances of anti-Jewish violence and successive Plantagenet king’s policies targeting the Jews and understands them as indicators or constructions of religious and national alterity.