Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category

Giovanni Villani and the Aetiological Myth of Tuscan Cities

Giovanni Villani and the Aetiological Myth of Tuscan Cities

By Francesco Salvestrini

The Medieval Chronicle II (Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on the Medieval Chronicle), edited by E. Kooper (Amsterdam, 2002)

Introduction: Giovanni Villani was undoubtedly one of the most important Florentine chroniclers of the communal era1 . His lifetime spanned the most dynamic period of Florentine medieval history. From what we can discover about his biography (especially from his chronicle), it is clear that he was very much a typical well-to-do Florentine merchant, and his literary work reflected his “bourgeois” vision of his city’s and world’s history.

Born in Florence no later than 1276, the young Villani formed an association with the Peruzzi company, one of the leading trading and money-lending firms in the Tuscan city at the end of the thirteenth century. In 1300 he became one of the shareholders in this important group, at the same time that he joined the Arte del Cambio (Bankers’ Guild). During the same year he went to Rome for the Jubilee as an agent of his company at the Papal court.

Between 1302 and 1307 he travelled widely in Flanders, where he looked after the interests of his company’s branch office in Bruges. Following a common path for Italian merchants of his day, he served an itinerant apprenticeship in international commerce and banking until, in his early thirties, he had acquired the means to establish himself in his native city and to devote himself to civic affairs. In 1307 he returned to Florence and, between 1316 and 1341, followed a public career during which he served as Prior (a member of the Signoria, the supreme magistracy of republican city government) in 1316, 1321-22 and in 1328.

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3 Sep 2010
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Vultures, Whores, and Hypocrites: Images of Lawyers in Medieval Literature

Vultures, Whores, and Hypocrites: Images of Lawyers in Medieval Literature

By James A. Brundage

Roman Legal Tradition, Vol. 1 (2002)

Introduction: I propose to examine in this paper the faults that medieval writers found with the lawyers they encountered during the high Middle Ages (by which I mean the two centuries between about 1150 and 1350) and to venture some suggestions about the reasons for them.

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1 Sep 2010
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Karlsgrab: The Site and Significance of Charlemagne’s Sepulcher in Aachen

Karlsgrab: The Site and Significance of Charlemagne’s Sepulcher in Aachen

By John F. Moffitt

Quidditas, Vol. 30 (2009)

Abstract: The intention of what follows is to clear up one of the mysteries still surrounding the Charles the Great, now most commonly known by his later appellation “Charlemagne.” Born in 742, the son of King Pepin the Short (ca. 714-768), Charlemagne ruled as king of the Franks after 768; he additionally ruled as Emperor of the West, from 800 until his death in 814. Sources in his time presented him as an emulator and successor of Constantine the Great, and successive Western Emperors presented their own personae as successors of Charlemagne.

In 1165, 350 years after Charlemagne’s death, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa induced his anti-Pope, Paschal III, to canonize Charlemagne as a saint, just as the Eastern Church canonized Constantine. The actual context of Charlemagne’s canonization was, however, rather more political than spiritual.

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1 Sep 2010
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The End of Roman Spain

The End of Roman Spain

By Michael Kulikowski

PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1997

Abstract: ‘The End of Roman Spain’ narrates the history of the last years in which the Iberian peninsula formed part of the Roman empire and argues that the lapse of Roman control came around the year AD 460, much later than the traditional date of 409. The first chapter sets the scene and discusses Spain in the fourth-century. The second, ‘The Defence of Roman Spain’, presents an analysis of the confused sources for the late Roman army in Spain and is linked to an appendix on the ‘ Notitia Dignitatum’ which argues that that document was in origin a single base text, composed at the eastern court around 394.

The third chapter revises the traditional chronology of usurpation and barbarian invasion in Gaul between 405 and 413, in the course of which events Roman authority in Spain was first challenged by barbarian invaders. The fourth chapter traces the history of the peninsula between 425 and 455, examining the effects on Roman control of a barbarian presence in the Spanish provinces. Chapter five looks at the Goths, whose role in the end of Roman Spain is crucial, and argues that their initial settlement in Gaul in 418 was designed by the central imperial authorities to prevent their provincial Roman subjects from supporting further usurpations.

Chapter six, finally, examines the careers of the last two emperors to take an interest in Spain, showing how they maintained their authority in the peninsula by using the Goths as their instruments. It argues that after Majorian left the peninsula in 460, having failed to mount a campaign against the Vandals in Africa, Roman Spain ended, because the structure of imperial office-holding in Spain disappeared.

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1 Sep 2010
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Politics and the feud in late mediaeval Scotland

Politics and the feud in late mediaeval Scotland

By Stephen Boardman

PhD Dissertation, University of St Andrews, 1990

Abstract: From the mid-fifteenth century onwards, the Scottish aristocratic community made increasing use of formal bonds of lordship, service and friendship. The first section of this thesis examines the relationship between formal bonding and the pursuit of feud and tenurial disputes.

Written witnessed, bonds, particularly bonds of mutual friendship or defence, seem to have acquired a specific and, partly, symbolic role in the amicable arbitration of feud outwith formal courts of law. The bond was employed as a pledge for the good behaviour of previously hostile parties towards one another, guaranteeing the material terms of any settlement between them, and bolstering the newly-established state of non-aggression. Bonds used in this context were not primarily, designed to initiate long-term social and political cooperation between the contracting parties. The proliferation of bonds of friendship used in this way during the fifteenth century may perhaps be linked to the demands of royal courts for documentary evidence of amicable settlement.

Bonds of maintenance, and bonds of manrent or retinue, were also used extensively in the settlement of feud, and in consolidating strained, or new, tenurial relationships. Bonds of service given in return for grants of lands, were often connected to attempts to keep the tenure of disputed lands highly conditional, and were typically linked to liferent and/or reversionary grants. The linking of tenure with formal bonds of service also occurred in areas, and periods, where the granter of land had cause to seek assurances of political loyalty and support which were more binding than the oaths and ceremonies associated with routine acts of feudal conveyancing. The general pattern suggests that, although all bonds of service appear to offer undefined open-ended service, the tenurial and political context in which these bonds were given did, on many occasions, define and limit the way in which maintenance or service was to be discharged. Bonds of all types were also used to obtain immediate political or military support in specific disputes.

The remainder of the thesis deals with the interaction between local feud and ‘national’ politics. An analysis of the rebellion of Prince James (later James IV) against his father, James III, during 1488, indicates that many individual noblemen and prelates committed themselves to the rebellion in pursuit of local feuds and ambitions. After James III’s death at Sauchieburn, the ascendancy of Prince James’ supporters within their own localities was confirmed by individual acts of royal patronage and by parliamentary legislation, a process which generated more feuds. The behaviour of the new regime, and its persecution of men who had remained loyal to James III during 1488, resulted in a major rebellion during 1489. The rebellion was eventually ended by negotiation, and by the new regime making several important concession to rebel demands. Apparently incomprehensible changes of allegiance by major noblemen during the period 1487-9 can be shown to have been perfectly consistent in terms of the smaller disputes in which they were directly involved. An examination of the political career of James, Earl of Buchan suggests that violence remained a viable political tool for the fifteenth century nobility at both the local and national level, and, indeed, that the division between local and national politics was, in many cases, non-existent.

The final three chapters exhibit the effect of changes in royal policy and patronage in generating violence and feud within the localities, and the part this could play in provoking direct opposition to the crown. The importance of these tensions may have grown during the course of the fifteenth century as the amount of land, and the number of offices, under direct royal control grew through the forfeiture of several major landowning families and the annexation of their estates to the royal patrimony.

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1 Sep 2010
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A Layered Landscape: How the Family Sagas Mapped Medieval Iceland

A Layered Landscape: How the Family Sagas Mapped Medieval Iceland

By Carol Hoggart

Limina, Vol.16 (2010)

The Icelandic Family Sagas – Old-Norse prose narratives written during the 1200s – inscribe in retrospect a process by which the unknown terrain of late ninth-century settlement Iceland is ‘mapped’ through association with human story. Space begs history: family sagas locate past deeds in a present landscape. At the most evident level, sagas explain how places received their names by reference to the people who had lived there. Another layer of meaning is created by the movement of stories and journeys over this named geography.

Furthermore, the saga landscape thus constructed is shown to have continuing relevance: the sagas link past and present, with physical evidence of saga action still evident in thirteenth- or even twentieth-century Iceland. Yet family sagas do not claim that all responsibility for this construction of landscape lay with the early settlers. The land too is shown to have had agency, so choosing its people and history.

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31 Aug 2010
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‘She was ravished against her will, what so ever she say’: Female Consent in Rape and Ravishment in late-medieval England

‘She was ravished against her will, what so ever she say’: Female Consent in Rape and Ravishment in late-medieval England

By Emma Hawkes

Limina, Vol. 1 (1995)

Introduction: In July 1452 John Paston I wrote to Richard Southwell informing him of he Jane Boys ravishment case. He urged Southwell to support the prosecution’s claims that she had been abducted. Paston did this despite Boys’ own denial that she had been taken against her will – Paston dismissed her point of view by saying she had ’saide untrewly of her-selff’. Boys’ own motivations and actions were constructed by Paston as peripheral to the truly important question of whether Southwell would support the case or not. Paston’s attitudes and assumptions should be fitted into the framework of knowledge abVertout female consent in both rape and ravishment in late-medieval statute and case law.

Very little distinction was made between rape and ravishment in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although rape (forcible coition) and ravishment (abduction without necessarily implying forcible coition) are seen as two very different offences in the twentieth century, medieval legal records generally blurred the two crimes together. This process can be seen in the the language which was used to describe the two. Although the 1285 statute of Westminster II attempted to fix the term to be used for a ravishment (rapuit et abduxit), a variety of terms continued to be used (abstulit, cepit et abduxit). Confusingly, rape was also known by the term rapuit throughout this period. As rape and ravishment were associated in the late-medieval period and since both were predominantly offences against women, the two will be studied together in this article.

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31 Aug 2010
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The expansion of a European feudal monarchy during the 13th Century: the Catalan-Aragonese Crown and the consequences of the conquest of the kingdoms of Majorca and Valencia

The expansion of a European feudal monarchy during the 13th Century: the Catalan-Aragonese Crown and the consequences of the conquest of the kingdoms of Majorca and Valencia

By Enric Guinot

Catalan Historical Review, Vol.2:2 (2009)

Abstract: In the middle of the 13th century the Crown of Aragon conquered by military means the Muslim Mediterranean Coast of the Iberian Peninsula, incorporating it into the European feudal world; this resulted in the destruction of the Andalusí state and part of its society as well as in a redistribution of towns, villages, houses and lands among Christians. The historiography of some years ago emphasized the role of trade and urban burgesses in these new societies, but present opinion is more related to a long expansion of feudal society as well as the creation in Majorca and Valencia of a colonial society. Logically, the consequences of this process had also an effect in Catalonia and Aragon where the movement had its origins, and its effects can be verified on the re-settlers’ migrations, the changes in agrarian structures due to the redistribution, the expansion of commercial towns, and the political changes that resulted from the participation of the urban patrician class in the new power structures: townships and parliaments.

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30 Aug 2010
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William Wallace’s Invasion of Northern England in 1297

William Wallace’s Invasion of Northern England in 1297

By C.J. McNamee

Northern History v.26 (1990)

Introduction: In the winter of 1297 William Wallace, fresh from his victory over the English at Stirling Bridge, presided over a ferocious and prolonged devastation of northern England. There had been raiding in the previous year when the Anglo-Scottish war had first opened, but nothing on this scale. Something of the extent of the destruction, and its impact on life in the region is conveyed by a contemporary chronicler:

At that time the praise of God ceased in all the monasteries and churches of the whole province from Newcastle
to Carlisle. All the monks, canons regular and the rest of the priests and ministers of the Lord, together with
almost the whole of the people fled from the face of the Scot.

Modern narratives have tended to describe the invasion only in general terms, for in two respects the episode has been overshadowed. Historians of England have tended to concentrate on the prolonged phase of Scottish raiding which lasted from 1311 to 1322, historians of Scotland to focus on the importance of the Wallace invasion in the interpretation of the critical situation north of the border. This paper takes a closer look at the invasion of 1297, and the findings have significance both for our understanding of the state of affairs in contemporary Scotland, and for the parallels drawn between Wallace’s invasion and the raids of Robert Bruce and his supporters in the early fourteenth century.

The evidence which allows a reconstruction of the Wallace invasion falls into three main categories. Of the narrative sources, the near-contemporary Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough is much to be preferred. It can be supplemented in places by the Lanercost chronicle, the Scalachronica of Sir Thomas Gray composed circa 1362, Peter Langtoft’s rhyming chronicle, and the works of the Scottish writer John of Fordun. Blind Harry’s Wallace is, however, of little value, as it imputes to Wallace much of the itinerary of Bruce’s invasion of Yorkshire in 1322. Secondly, in the register of John Halton, Bishop of Carlisle, exists a schedule of reductions of parish valuations in the diocese of Carlisle for the triennial tenth of 1301, tax allowances granted in view of the destruction inflicted by the Scots. Thirdly, financial accounts of northern manors then in the King’s hand are preserved on the Pipe Roll. Fortunately, a relatively large number of properties were in this condition at the time of the invasion, most of them recently escheated from cross-Border landowners who sided with the Scots in 1296. These accounts contain details of damage inflicted by the Scots and, occasionally, the dates when it occurred.

The invasion of his own realm marked the nadir of Edward I’s attempts to control Scotland; attempts which until then had met with remarkable success. In 1296 Edward had overrun Scotland in a matter of months. He had taken prisoner King John Balliol and many of the nobles, occupied all the major castles, and imposed on the country sheriffs and custodians of his own choosing, most of them English. He had established his own government based at Berwick-on-Tweed, acting in his name as feudal overlord of Scotland. Edward departed for Flanders on 22 August 1297, confident that the situation in Scotland was well in hand. Not until September did it become apparent that the real struggle for Scotland was beginning, and about to spill over into England; but already in May 1297 the English occupation was menaced by three risings: Andrew Murray led a rising with widespread popular support north of the Forth; another was led by Sir William Douglas, James the Stewart of Scotland, Sir Alexander de Lindsay and Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow, in the south-west of Scotland; and William Wallace became active at around the same time, when he killed the Sheriff of Lanark and chased the English Justiciar from Scone.

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30 Aug 2010
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Excavations at Caherconnell Cashel, the Burren, Co. Clare: implications for cashel chronology and Gaelic settlement

Excavations at Caherconnell Cashel, the Burren, Co. Clare: implications for cashel chronology and Gaelic settlement

By Michelle Comber and Graham Hull

Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 110C (2010)

Abstract: Caherconnell Cashel is one of several hundred stone ring-forts distributed across the Burren, Co. Clare. Unlike the majority of these smaller sites, Caherconnell measures over 40m in diameter, and is enclosed by 3m-high walls in a good state of preservation. The cashel’s location along a natural routeway, evidence for continued use of the immediate area for settlement over a long period, and excavated remains all point to the elevated status of this site. A series of radiocarbon dates place activity at Caherconnell between the tenth and early seventeenth centuries AD, thereby providing new evidence for the dating of such cashels, continuity of occupation and some indication of how wealthy Gaelic families lived in the medieval period.

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See also: North Clare dig unravels medieval mystery

One of the mysteries of medieval Ireland is on the verge of being solved thanks to the latest in a series of excavations to take place at Caherconnell Stone Fort in Carron. Early results from a dig which concluded this week-end indicate that important local families continued to live in cashel type dwellings in Clare, long after they became unfashionable in other parts of the country…read the full article from The Clare People

See also: Caherconnell Archaeological Field School

30 Aug 2010
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