Where the Middle Ages Begin
The differences in the imposition of serfdom led to different economic and political effects for the peasantry in Europe. In Western Europe, wages rose, grain prices fell, and the consumption of meat, dairy products, and beer increased. More and more peasants moved into a widening “middle class” that could afford to buy manufactured goods.
Nineteenth-century romanticism had a special interest in both the medieval world and primitive, untainted rural culture. As the nineteenth century progressed and turned into the early twentieth, the Danes fell more and more under the nostalgic spell, tending to look upon the Icelanders through increasingly romantic and patronizing eyes
Standards of hygiene in the Middle Ages appeared high enough to prevent diseases as medieval Europeans, contrary to popular beliefs, bathed quite often. However, contact with domestic animals, which were frequently kept in the part of the house reserved for human activity, exposed people to animal-related diseases passed to humans via insects.
Records of Italian bankers partially covered over fifty years later by traditional English crests
An economist is indeed tempted to think of Ragusa as the “Adriatic Tiger “ of yesteryear, an early example of a small open economy with strong fundamentals, and to hypothesize further that, in analogy to the current consensus about what it takes to minimize the impact of external crises, these strengths also allowed Ragusa to mitigate the effects of the many external shocks and financial crises in Medieval Europe.
The basic problem with the ‘hop’ thesis is that the Flemish evidence for the relative shift from wine to beer consumption comes too late. My primary sources are the annual revenues from sales of excise tax- farms on wine and beer consumption recorded in the treasurers’ accounts of two towns: Bruges and Aalst.
Traditionally the European marriage pattern(EMP) is considered as one of the key elements in the demographic history of Early Modern Europe, preparing Europe for the transition towards the Industrial Era. But recently, mediaevalists have also tried to claim its origins…
The central hypothesis advanced in the present study is that the cultural virtues emphasized by Weber had a pre-Reformation origin in the religious Order of the Cistercians, a Catholic order which spread across Europe as of the 11th century, and that this monastic order served to stimulate growth during the second millennium by encouraging cultural change in local populations.
The German Hanse, whose rise and decline spanned almost four centuries, was a rather unique institution in late medieval Europe.
Although small by European standards medieval towns in Ireland produced waste in the form of human sewage and effluent from urban-based industries such as tanning. This was usually disposed of in the surrounding countryside or put into rivers.
We provide evidence from the Parisian tailles levied between 1292 and 1313 and other historical records that indicates that these royal taxes were collected from the Free City of Paris at a remarkably low cost, without violence and with limited recourse to legal action against tax evaders.
As I have shown elsewhere, the county of Holland underwent a structural change in the second half of the fourteenth century, when economically the emphasis shifted from agriculture to trade and industry and demographically from the country to the towns. The institutions however did not change.
In my study, the town in late medieval Bulgaria is conceptualized as an explanandum, not as an explanans, as part of the social and economic environment rather than some distinctive entity.
Pursuing the question of economic development and its spatial articulation with reference to the two most important German cities and their hinterlands during the transition from the middle ages to the early modern period is a double-edged venture.
There are many reasons for holding that the 31 burhs listed in the Burghal Hidage constituted a system in its fullest sense. One of the most telling of these is that the burghal territories of these burhs – the areas assigned to them for their upkeep – form a spatial jigsaw whose individual elements interlock with each other within the shires or their precursors.
We suggested that the discovery of three raw glass furnaces at the site strengthens the assumption that the city was a major center for the making of both primary and secondary glass in the sixth and seventh centuries.
Therefore, this essay will deal not only with the structures of Jewish communal organisation proper, but also with the question of its emergence and development in the context of its non-Jewish environment.
This chapter will be concerned with the archaeological and theoretical interpretation of York’s medieval guildhalls.
The opinion of historians on the social and economic role played by guilds in late medieval and early modern cities has changed considerably throughout the last century.
The studies that have been carried out to date on the tenth and eleventh-century Jewish community are rather few, in contrast to research done on the community in the twelfth century and thereafter, where documentary and archaeological sources abound.
Florence’s impact on the commercial revolution of late medieval and early Renaissance Europe was unique in several ways. A landlocked republic, by all appearances it would seem to have been at a geographical disadvantage compared to major port cities
such as Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, which participated in trade by both land and sea, across the Mediterranean and the Levant.
The focus of the research will be on evidence relating to London, Norwich, Great Yarmouth, Colchester, Exeter, Bristol, Leicester, Nottingham and York during the period 1250-1500.
Lineage was the first form of social alliance, for blood was a guaranteed and undeniable bond. This alliance would then extend to non-kin but based on the same idea of unquestionable loyalty to the noble head.
In his influential study on political factions in medieval Europe, Jacques Heers demonstrated the importance of factionalism in the political life of the middle ages, at the level of cities and regions as well as at the ‘national’ level.
During this period, the role of the landed aristocracy was changing. With the creation of a professional standing army, in which soldiers were paid a wage, and the use of foreign mercenaries (think of the Swiss Guard), the traditional military function of the nobility receded.
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