Where the Middle Ages Begin
Tours. They can be great, or they can be cringeworthy and rife with misinformation. A great tour guide knows how to add a flourish or two to a story to keep the audience engaged and the history interesting. A bad tour guide invents things and hopes there isn’t a historian in the audience dismayed by the falsehoods they’re spreading to unwitting listeners…
Magna Carta just celebrated its 800th birthday this past Monday. In honour of this incredible milestone, King’s College London, and the Magna Carta Project, hosted a 3 day conference dedicated to this historic document.
Historians have tended to give more weight to sources such as governmental and legal records than to chronicles, not least because so many survive. They open up areas of history impossible to access through chronicles alone, and they also provide a much more precise and detailed political narrative.
Three fantastic papers on Prosopography from #KZOO2015.
This paper, concentrating on the above mentioned monarchs, will argue that marital fidelity, whilst no means encouraged as a form of acceptable behaviour, was rarely used to criticise the kings of England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and played little part in perceptions of their rule.
Kathryn Warner, author of Edward II: The Unconventional King, takes a look at the English king’s three sons and two daughters.
John Barbour’s Bruce, composed in the mid 1370s, is the first long poem in the Scots vernacular. It contains twenty books, the first thirteen of which trace the Wars of Liberty from their origins until triumph at the Battle of Bannockburn. At this point the Irish ‘matter’ enters the poem.
The widow of Thomas, earl of Lancaster, Alice found herself in a precarious position after her husband’s execution for treason in 1322.
This thesis examines government administrative action that can be described as ‘management’, in the context of the logistics of mobilizing royal armies during the reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III.
The article focuses on the representation of deviant sexual behavior in 14th-century English poetry and other chronicles. The portrayal of King of England Richard II as a rebellious youth, which is interpreted as perverse and lacking manliness, and the propaganda needed to offset this perception are discussed. Historical information is given about the political culture and power of the church. The murder of Edward II after being accused of sodomy by the Bishop of Hereford is mentioned.
In the following discussion, I will explore some hitherto unexamined links between the Confessio Amantis and one of these legal texts, the Nova Statuta Angliae or New Statutes of England, which circulated among professional and non-professional readers in the 1380s and 1390s and which Richard II received in a manuscript now in Cambridge: St. John’s College MS A.7.
New research has revealed a letter written in 1310 by Robert Bruce to King Edward II, presenting historians with fresh information about a pivotal time in the Wars of Scottish Independence.
Edward I was a hard act to follow. By 1295, he had subdued Wales. He promulgated what Michael Prestwich calls a “majestic set of statutes” that led to his being called the English Justinian. Though his relationships with the nobility were sometimes stormy, there was no doubt who was in charge. The same would not be said about his son.
Although historians generally agree that Edward II’s reign was a complete failure, and that the king himself was rather inept, debate has centered on the specific causes for his downfall.
Were medieval kings like other men? A century’s work on the sacrality of kingship has tended to stress how kings differed from their fellow adult males, even fellow nobles.
Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica is almost unique amongst medieval English chronicles in having been written by a knight, and it is therefore surprising that so little work has been done on it; this thesis attempts to remedy that omission.
In England, the role played on the continent by the castellanies would appear to have been performed by the county castle and the sheriff, a post that remained firmly under the king’s control in all but a few counties. Instead, a more subtle link between the castle community and political power will have to be found. It will be searched for in the appointment of constables to royal castles, and in grants of ownership of castles, royal or forfeited. It may be found in the building activity that was so common in this period, or in the marriage alliances that created many of the great castle owning estates.
The purpose of this research is to determine the effect various medieval arrows have on various medieval armour types. The time period that I tested is around 1400, the time of the English longbow.
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