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…
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.
The legend was clearly not the only work of popular culture in what I propose as the long fifteenth century, but it does serve as a very useful representation for examining the growth of Englishness.
While there is no doubt that the second war began in 1332 there is more uncertainty as to when it ended. Unlike the first war, there was no peace treaty between Scotland and England bringing the armed conflict to an end.
BOOK REVIEW: A Triple Knot by Emma Campion I had the pleasure of reading another Emma Campion (Candace Robb) novel recently. Campion, who has written extensively about Alice Perrers, the royal mistress of King Edward III, in her hit, The King’s Mistress, is back on the shelves with a new book released this month entitled: A Triple Knot. This […]
The period historians call the Hundred Years War, stretching from 1337-1453, brought about a number of changes to England and France.
Historians have always been somewhat puzzled at the alliance of two such men as John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster and third son of Edward III, and John Wyclif, controversialist and reformer.
By early August, Edward received news that forty Castilian ships had gathered at Sluys and there were plans to attack England.
Popular critical opinion favors reading the pilgrim Knyght of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales as the representative of the idealized chivalric knight; however, the pilgrim Knyght bears the hallmark of the early professional soldier that began to evolve as early as the eleventh century.
When I first started writing this blog, I wanted to tell a medieval love story. It is the story of the dashing Black Prince of Wales, and his Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent.
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.
Edward the Black Prince died in the palace of Westminster, after years of debilitating illness, on Trinity Sunday, 8 June 1376. There has been little or no discussion by historians of why the prince should have chosen Canterbury for burial, when Westminster abbey was already well-established as the royal mausoleum, or any discussion at all of another matter to which the prince gave attention in his very last days, namely the grant of a charter of disaffor- estation to the community of Wirral in his earldom and county of Chester.
These two young people met and became friends. This was an extraordinary beginning to a royal marriage.
The 1336 military campaign season witnessed the last major attempt by Edward III to subjugate Scotland. The 1336 campaigns also involved the largest number of invasions during the period of intensive English involvement in Scotland between 1332 and 1338.
Over the course of the fourteenth century, a new image of kingship emerged; a strong king was one who led his subjects on and off the battlefield, and balanced royal authority with guidance from Parliament.
This is an analysis of the loyalties and political rivalries of the army of David II of Scotland at the battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346 where that king was apparently deserted by some of his subjects and led off to eleven years’ captivity in England.
It has become commonplace in modern textbooks to base any brief account of the Hundred Years War on the contention that the chief cause was the dynastic dispute over the French throne between Edward III and Philip of Valois.
The register of Walter Stapeldon, Bishop of Exeter, contains a delightful description of a daughter of the Count of Hainault, dated 1319, which has long been thought to refer to Philippa.
This thesis deals with the events of the Anglo-Scottish wars of the 1330s and the English military machine that allowed Edward III to win numerous successes against the Scots yet was unable to secure a permanent conquest of any portion of Scotland save Berwick-upon Tweed.
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.
In an act of both piety and remembrance, his widow, Dame Joan, ordered that his body should be buried within the great Priory church at nearby Walsingham and, above the tomb, there should be a chapel created in dedication to the mother of the Blessed Virgin, Saint Anne.
Modern assumptions about medieval justice still tend to see this process of amelioration as merely occasional and exceptional: mercy needed to be applied only where special circumstances made it inappropriate to apply the full rigours of the law. This, however, is seriously to misunderstand both the purpose and the pervasiveness of mercy in the operation of medieval justice.
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