The subjects of historical inquiry have never been more diverse. The historical landscape is now full of groups and individuals who only a generation ago might have seemed too insignificant for historical interest, or so ill-documented as to be ‘hidden from history’. Whereas most histories – for leisurely reading as well as for the classroom – have traditionally concentrated on kings and queens, aristocrats and battles, historians are now able to complete the picture: peasants in their communities and alongside their lords, lower clergy alongside monks and bishops, young people among adults and their elders, Welsh as well as English. Most significant, because it touches all areas of life – women alongside men, as wives, daughters, business partners, co-workers and neighbours. With these moves there has been a vast expansion of materials which historians now habitually study. In religious life they seek not only the Latin records of theological and administrative activity, but vernacular texts – in English, Welsh, Anglo-Norman – materials used by wide social groups, and which were often prepared for the purpose of dissemination. The churchwardens’ accounts are as important to historians as the records of church councils, for they allow pictures of local daily life to emerge, as it was experienced by most people. Similarly, historians of the economy and peasant life, the study of which was pioneered by Michael Postan (1899–1981) and Rodney Hilton (1916–2002), now study with relish the records of manorial courts, the accounts of those manors, and embed these studies in a close observation of environment and landscape. In cities, the rhythms of work are now more clearly understood through the study of guild records, many of which have been recently published, and by aligning these with the social and religious group – the fraternity – which so many crafts constructed for the promotion of cooperation, cohesion and mutual help among its members. The built environment has been rediscovered and major surveys have been conducted in Winchester, York and Cheapside in London. Archaeology and economic history, urban history and social history all combine to illuminate lives in which spheres of work and play, religion and family were intimately interlinked.
Material culture – food, clothing, household artefacts, public monuments and buildings – all fitted into the lives of, and were understood by, the men and women I have aimed to understand in this book. Hence there has been much mention of crops and food, spices and ale – and historians are becoming more knowing about their value: nutritional, social and symbolic.
By addressing a wider range of historical subjects, by introducing the daily and mundane (work, marriage, parish life) alongside the extraordinary and awe-inspiring (wars, coronations, depositions), historians have also come to use a wider range of materials, and to question traditional judgements on taste and style. To the art of the court, such as the Wilton Diptych (Plate 11), the sumptuous prayerbooks of princes (The Bedford Hours; Plate 18), have now been added the art of the parish, like the doom scene at Wenhaston (Suffolk), the screen at Welsh Newton (Herefordshire) or the vibrant wall-paintings at Pickering (North Yorkshire). Women’s taste and initiative in patronage are now acknowledged and realized, not only those of queens, but of gentry women and townswomen also.
The following pages list some points of entry into the vast literature on all aspects of late medieval British life. They begin with a thematic offering of some titles for further reading, and then unfold chapter by chapter, covering themes discussed in them. The full list of works from which information has been used in this book is at http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/staff/rubinbiblio.html.
A great deal of recent research and new conception has developed around the political relations within the British Isles, as in Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100–1400, Oxford, new edn, 1995; and R. R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343, Oxford, 2000. Some thought-provoking articles appeared in The British Isles, 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, ed. R. R. Davies, Edinburgh, 1988.
On Wales in our period see R. R. Davies, Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063–1415, Oxford, new edn, 2000; on Ireland Robin Frame, Colonial Ireland, Dublin, 1981 and Art Cosgrove (ed.), A New History of Ireland II. Medieval Ireland 1169–1534, Oxford, 1987; on Scotland A. A. M. Duncan, Scotland: the Making of the Kingdom, Edinburgh. 1978; Ronald Nicholson, Scotland: the Later Middle Ages, Edinburgh, 1974 and Alexander Grant, Independence and Nationhood: Scotland 1306–1469, London, 1984.
For authoritative survey essays on agrarian life see The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. Joan Thirsk and H. P. R. Finberg, Cambridge, 1967–2000; volumes 2 and 3 are most relevant for our period; and on the circulation of money, A New History of the Royal Mint, ed. C. E. Challis, Cambridge, 1992.
A useful survey is offered in J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy 1150–1500, London, second edn, 1985, which is always aware of the European context. Christopher Dyer has done most to explore the interaction of rural and urban life in the interlocking spheres of production, distribution and exchange. In Making a Living in the Middle Ages: the People of Britain 850–1520, New Haven (CN) and London, 2002, he presents the great regional diversity of the British Isles, and the long-term processes by which the interdependence between them developed. In Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c.1200–1520, Cambridge, 1989, he demonstrates that use of markets – for selling and buying – touched the life of most people, and that a wide range of niches of consumption coexisted.
For a survey of shifts in the status of the unfree see R. H. Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England, London, second edn, 1983. For an introduction to rural life and social relations see Phillipp Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England, Basingstoke, 2003. For a series of studies of manors, and surviving sources for manorial studies, with a strong demographic emphasis see Medieval Society and the Manor Court, ed. Zvi Razi and Richard Smith, Oxford, 1996; and on manorial relations in Wales, R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales, 1282–1400, Oxford, 1978. For a selection of translated sources on rural life see The English Manor c.1200–c.1500, trans. and annotated by Mark Bailey, Manchester, 2002. An analysis of the emergent trends of the later part of our period, based on the study of Norfolk, is offered by Jane Whittle, Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk, 1440–1580, Oxford, 2000.
On urban life in a series of well-researched and detailed articles, see The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 1: 600–1540, ed. D. M. Palliser, Cambridge, 2000. The best introductions are Susan Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns, Oxford, 1977; and Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval England: Towns, Commerce and Crafts, 1086–1348, London, 1995.
Unlike Italy, with its large and sophisticated cities, England, and parts of Wales and Ireland, developed early many small towns. This process is studied in R. H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500, Cambridge, 1993; Britnell’s study of Colchester traces the vicissitudes of the economy through a regional study, R. H. Britnell, Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300–1525, Cambridge, 1986. The discussion is extended to other towns in the same author’s ‘Urban demand in the English economy, 1300–1600’, in Trade, Urban Hinterlands and Market Integration, c.1300–1600, ed. James A. Galloway, London, 2000, pp. 1–21. On London’s mercantile life from the vantage point offered by an influential trade group see Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: the Grocers’ Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000–1485, London, 1995.
A useful survey is Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans: an Urban Class in Late Medieval England, Oxford, 1989; and a close look at a single trade, which attracted many women, is offered in Judith Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600, New York and Oxford, 1996. The accounts of the prosperous goldsmiths of London reflect all areas of craft-guild activity: training, discipline, recruitment, price-fixing and sociability: Wardens’ Accounts and Court Minute Books of the Goldsmiths’ Mystery of London, 1334–1446, ed. Lisa Jefferson, Woodbridge, 2003.
A number of local studies have explored the development of neighbourhood through the integrated growth of economic activity, administrative capacity and social institutions which enabled interaction, celebration and bonding. See, for example, Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster: 1200–1540, Oxford, 1989. The mixed roles of religious fraternities in these spheres is well appreciated and demonstrated in Virginia R. Bainbridge, Gilds in the Medieval Countryside: Social and Religious Change in Cambridgeshire, c.1350–1558, Woodbridge, 1996, and David J. F. Crouch, Piety, Fraternity and Power: Religious Guilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire, 1389–1547, Woodbridge, 2000.
R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England, Oxford, 1989, surveys most areas of religious practice and the ideas underlying them. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580, London, 1992, presents the many forms of parochial practice vividly and with rich visual illustration. On sacramental religion and the many ideas and practices which it encouraged, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Cambridge, 1991. A work which presents the variety of attitudes to images in worship is Kathleen Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350–1500, New York and Basingstoke, 2002. For a regional study see Andrew D. Brown, Popular Piety in Late Medieval England: the Diocese of Salisbury, 1250–1550, Oxford, 1995. All forms of parish religion attracted sustained criticism in this period, not least by those who came to be known as Wycliffites or Lollards: see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History, Oxford, 1988.
Our period sees the rise of the greatest family of magnates to the throne; on the Lancastrians the classic study is Simon Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361–1399, Oxford, 1990. On the many-layered social and political map of a single county see Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: a Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499, Cambridge, 1992. For an overview of aristocratic households see Kate Mertes, The English Noble Household, 1250–1600: Good Governance and Politic Rule, Oxford, 1998; and for many interesting insights which arise from the study of their household accounts, C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England, New Haven (CT) and London, 1999.
For conceptual guidance in approaching the gentry, see Christine Carpenter, ‘Gentry and community in medieval England’, Journal of British Studies 33 (1994), pp. 340–80; and for an example of a single man’s rise to gentry status in royal service, Simon Walker, ‘Sir Richard Adderbury (c.1330–1399) and his kinsmen: the rise and fall of a gentry family’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 34 (1990), pp. 113–40. On the power of powerful local men to disrupt as well as ensure the peace, see Nigel Saul, ‘Conflict and consensus in English local society’, in Politics and Crisis in Fourteenth-century England, ed. John Taylor and Wendy Childs, Stroud, 1990, pp. 38–58.
The most famous of all gentry families are the Pastons of Norfolk, who have left tens of revealing letters which illuminate all areas of life. They have been treated in the trilogy by Colin Richmond: The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge, 1990–2000. The letters are published as The Paston Letters, ed. with notes by Norman Davis, Oxford, 1971; a recent collection offers a unique glance at the female correspondents in The Paston Women: Selected Letters, ed. Diane Watt, Woodbridge, 2004.
War can be studied through its technology, its social impact and its rituals. The classic study of chivalry is Maurice Keen, Chivalry, New Haven (CN), 1984, which draws on wide European comparisons. Rituals of violence regulated some areas of aristocratic involvement, as discussed in Malcolm Vale, ‘Aristocratic violence: trial by battle in the later Middle Ages’, in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper, Woodbridge, 2000, pp. 159–81; but the changing social structure of the armies also affected their ethos, as shown in Maurice Keen, ‘Chivalry, nobility, and the man-at-arms’, in War, Literature and Politics in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of G. W. Coopland, ed. C. T. Allmand, Liverpool, 1976, pp. 32–45. Nicholas Wright, Knights and Peasants: the Hundred Years War in the French Countryside, Woodbridge, 1998, fills an important gap by considering the impact of warfare on the communities which suffered its effects.
On mobilization of forces for the French wars see Andrew Ayton, Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocray under Edward III, Woodbridge, 1994; and on some areas of naval technology, Ian Friel, ‘Oars, sails and guns: the English and war at sea, c.1200–c.1500’, in War at Sea in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. John B. Hattendorf and Richard W. Unger, Woodbridge, 2003, pp. 69–79
The last decade has seen a return to the study of law, and a probing of its political and social contexts. A useful introduction is offered by Alan Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England, London and New York, 1973; and a conceptual frame which links the two is found in G. L. Harriss, ‘Political society and the growth of government in late medieval England’, Past and Present 138 (1993), pp. 28–57. On the jurisprudence which prevailed in the many courts of England and Wales see R. H. Helmholz, The Ius Commune in England: Four Studies, Oxford, 2001; and, on the professionals, E. W. Ives, The Common Lawyers of Pre-Reformation England, Cambridge, 1983.
On the operation of parliament the contemporary text is the Modus tenendi Parliamenti in Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages, ed. Nicholas Pronay and John Taylor, Oxford, 1980, pp. 13–114. On the working of parliament in our period see G. L. Harriss, ‘The formation of Parliament, 1272–1377’, A. L. Brown, ‘Parliament, c.1377–1422’, and A. Myers, ‘Parliament, 1422–1509’, in The English Parliament in the Middle Ages, ed. R. G. Davies and J. H. Denton, Manchester, 1981, pp. 29–60, 109–40, and 141–84.
This term is now used to describe a whole range of ideas and expectations, rituals and procedures, through which people participated in politics. This was politics in the broadest sense: parliament and court, but also local assemblies, negotiations of grievances with manorial lords, comportment in local courts, participation in civic councils and the holding of office. Political culture thus covers a wider area than ‘politics’ has in the past. It aims to engage with the ideas of social groups which wield little official power, and to discover them in materials – visual, poetical, vernacular – since official documentation rarely reflects them. John R. Maddicott’s interesting studies of the long-term political ‘memory’ of Magna Carta is a good example – ‘Magna Carta and the local community, 1215–1259’, Past and Present 102 (1984), pp. 25–65. Another approach was taken by the late Simon Walker in his study of political ‘martyrs’: ‘Political saints in later medieval England’, in The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society, ed. R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard, Fifteenth-Century Series 1, Stroud, 1995, pp. 77–106 and Lesley A. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England, Woodbridge, 2000. The articles in Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter, Woodbridge, 2004, explore the concept of ‘political culture’ in the fifteenth century. For some ideas about queenship, based on the coronation rite, see Joanna L. Laynesmith, ‘Fertility rite or authority ritual? The queen’s coronation in England 1445–87’, in Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Tim Thornton, Stroud, 2000, pp. 52–68.
Historians are currently debating the importance of constitutional ideas in motivating political decisions and informing practices. Some of the issues are raised in Edward Powell, ‘After “After McFarlane”: the poverty of patronage and the case for constitutional history’, in Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Later Medieval History, ed. Dorothy J. Clayton, Richard G. Davies and Peter McNiven, Stroud, 1994, pp. 1–16. On emergent views on contingency, virtue and fortune in determining political affairs – tantamount to a British ‘Machiavellianism’ – with particular emphasis on the fifteenth century, see Paul Strohm, The Language of Politics between Chaucer and Shakespeare, Notre Dame (IN), 2005.
A useful survey of attitudes to different social groups for the later part of our period is Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England, ed. Rosemary Horrox, Cambridge, 1994. For a seminal discussion of family relations in rural communities, see Zvi Razi, ‘Family, land and the village community in later medieval England’, Past and Present 93 (1981), pp. 3–36, and for a more general study of marriage and family life see Peter Fleming, Family and Household in Medieval England, Basingstoke, 2001. On pervasive denigration, and occasional advocacy, of women in public utterance see Women Defamed and Defended: an Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamires with Karen Pratt and C. W. Marx, Oxford, 1992.
Ecclesiastical courts were widely used for adjudication in cases related to marriage and its unmaking, promises of marriage and adultery. The rich sources which survive allow us to encounter ideas transmitted in testimonies of people whose lives are rarely recorded. These sources have been used by Richard Helmholz in Marriage Litigation in Medieval England, London, 1974; and by Goldberg in Women in England c. 1275–1525, trans. and ed. P. J. P. Goldberg, Manchester, 1995. In England, where marriage was usually late, people lived long periods in singlehood, and up to 20 per cent never married; on some of these young and single women see Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540, Manchester, 2003.
It may seem strange to separate women’s work from the section on the economy, but it has been left out of so many authoritative surveys, and often requires unique methodological tools. Eileen Power (1889–1940) led the way in the study of nunneries as working communities, in Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275–1535, Cambridge, 1922, and in her portraits of women in Medieval People, London, 1924, the eleventh edition of which is accompanied by an introductory essay by Richard M. Smith, London, 1986. Good examples of more recent work are the survey by Mavis E. Mate, Women in Medieval English Society, Cambridge, 1999, and Barbara A. Hanawalt, ‘Peasant women’s contribution to the home economy in late medieval England’, in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Bloomington (IN), 1986, pp. 3–19; a dense regional study in P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life-cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c.1300–1520, Oxford, 1992; for a manorial study, Judith M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague, Oxford, 1987; and P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Migration, youth and gender in later medieval England’, in Youth in the Middle Ages, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy, Woodbridge, 2004, pp. 15–19. A volume of essays on widows contains several examples of women acting independently in work and business: Medieval London Widows, 1300–1500, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton, London, 1994. For a wide-ranging collection of documents in translation from all areas of women’s lives see Goldberg, Women in England (above p. 332).
On writing in the British Isles see The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace, Cambridge, 1999. This volume is cast with capacious vision and includes all regions of the Isles, as well as a broad array of genres with attention to local and regional literatures. Our period sees a broadening of the use of English in several spheres. On this process see The Idea of the Vernacular: an Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans, Exeter, 1999. For an anthology of women’s writings see Women’s Writing in Middle English, ed. Alexandra Barratt, London, 1992. On the many types of women’s writing, see Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. Carol M. Meale, Cambridge, second edn, 1993 and The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace, Cambridge, 2003.
Courts set fashions in art, music, literature and attire; see the rich detail of Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-west Europe, 1270–1380, Oxford, 2001. On patronage of art by women, see Loveday Lewes Gee, Women, Art and Patronage from Henry III to Edward III, 1216–1377, Woodbridge, 2003, and on family patronage Nigel Saul, Death, Art, and Memory in Medieval England: the Cobham Family and their Monuments, 1300–1500, Oxford, 2001.
Excellent descriptions of manuscripts are available for our period in Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts 1285–1385, 2 vols, London, 1986; Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1290–1490, 2 vols, London, 1996; and on stained glass Richard Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages, London, 1993.
William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century, Princeton (NJ), 1996; for a regional study see the work of Ian Kershaw (who was a medieval historian before he became an expert on the Third Reich), Bolton Priory: the Economy of a Northern Monastery, 1286–1325, Oxford, 1973; and for another regional perspective, on the Breck-land, see Mark Bailey, A Marginal Economy? East Anglian Breckland in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1989, Chapter 4. For background on agrarian life see Bruce M. S. Campbell, English Seigneurial Agriculture, 1250–1450, Cambridge, 2000, Chapters 1–5; as well as his ‘Economic rent and intensification of English agriculture, 1086–1350’, in Medieval Farming and Technology: the Impact of Agricultural Change in North-west Europe, ed. Grenville Astill and John Langdon, Leiden, 1997, pp. 225–49. On the aftermath of the Famine see articles in Before the Black Death: Studies in the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century, ed. Bruce M. S. Campbell, Manchester, 1991.
For a masterly conceptual discussion of the matters of Britain and its regions see R. R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343, Oxford, 2000, as well as R. R. Davies, ‘Frontier arrangements in fragmented societies: Ireland and Wales’, in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay, Oxford, 1989, pp. 77–100.
A useful recent textbook is A. D. M. Barrell, Medieval Scotland, Cambridge, 2000, which should be read alongside the more detailed A. A. M. Duncan, Scotland: the Making of a Kingdom, Edinburgh, 1978; and the early section of James Campbell, ‘England, Scotland and the Hundred Years War in the fourteenth century’, in Europe in the Late Middle Ages, ed. J. R. Hale, J. R. L. Highfield and B. Smalley, London, 1965, pp. 184–216. The document which has animated Scottish patriotism and the attention of historians, the Arbroath Declaration, is presented in the pamphlet by A. A. M. Duncan, The Nation of Scots and the Declaration of Arbroath, London, 1970; and, on the long-term impact of the Declaration, Edward J. Cowan, ‘For Freedom Alone’: the Declaration of Arbroath, 1320, East Linton, 2004.
On the Scottish invasion of Ireland see A. A. M. Duncan’s ‘The Scots’ invasion of Ireland, 1315’, in The British Isles 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, ed. R. R. Davies, Edinburgh, 1988, pp. 100–117. On the Irish contribution to the warfare style of Edward II see James Lydon, ‘The hobelar: Irish contribution to mediaeval warfare’, The Irish Sword 2 (1954–6), pp. 12–16; and on inter-ethnic contacts, Katherine Simms, ‘Frontiers in the Irish church – regional and cultural’, Colony and Frontier in Medieval Ireland: Essays Presented to J. F. Lydon, ed. Terry Barry, Robin Frame and Katherine Simms, London, 1995, pp. 176–200.
The King is dead! Long live the King! Times of succession were fraught with hopes and fears, and gave impulse to the writing of oracular and prophetic verse, a traditional British genre. On it see Lesley Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs (above p. 331). The book which places Edward II within the dynastic context, and which is authoritative on war and its finance, is Michael Prestwich, The Three Edwards: War and State in England, 1272–1377, London, 1981. On royal patronage and dynastic self-fashioning see Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power, 1200–1400, New Haven (CN), 1995. For Edward II’s friendship with Piers Gaveston see Pierre Chaplais, Piers Gaveston: Edward II’s Adoptive Brother, Oxford, 1994, and on Edward II’s conflict with the barons see the comprehensive history of the period through a biographical lens, J. R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 1307–1322: a Study in the Reign of Edward II, London, 1970, as well as Michael Prestwich, ‘The Ordinances of 1311 and the politics of the early fourteenth century’, in Politics and Crisis in Thirteenth-century England, ed. John Taylor and Wendy Childs, Gloucester, 1990, pp. 1–18.
On Gascony, and Anglo-French confrontations which preceded the Hundred Years War, see Malcolm Vale, The Origins of the Hundred Years War: the Angevin Legacy, 1250–1340, Oxford, 1996.
For signs of popular discontent see Wendy Childs, ‘“Welcome, my tutor”: Edward II, John of Powderham and the chroniclers, 1318’, in Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to John Taylor, ed. Ian Wood and G. A. Loud, London, 1991, pp. 149–63. A detailed account of Edward’s last few years is offered in Natalie Fryde, The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II, 1321–1326, Cambridge, 1979, and on Edward’s end, Joel Burden, ‘Re-writing a rite of passage: the peculiar funeral of Edward II’, in The Rites of Passage, ed. Nicola F. McDonald and W. M. Ormrod, York, 2004, pp. 13–29.
See Wendy R. Childs, ‘Anglo-Portuguese relations in the fourteenth century’, in The Age of Richard II, ed. James L. Gillespie, Stroud, 1997, pp. 27–49.
A great number of governmental functions developed during these decades, such as the commissions whose documents are edited in The Records of a Commission of Sewers for Wiggenhall 1319–1324, ed. A. E. B. Owen, Norfolk Record Society 48, Norwich, 1981. The system depended on the service of prominent men from the counties who served in their localities and also as impartial brokers in other areas, as, for example, the men described in Edward Miller, ‘A judge of the early fourteenth century and his Cambridgeshire manor’, Recognitions: Essays Presented to Edmund Fryde, ed. Colin Richmond and Isobel Harvey, Aberystwyth, 1996, pp. 125–38.
On instruction, see the Anglo-Norman work of a Franciscan friar in Brian J. Levy, Nine Verse Sermons by Nicholas Bozon: the Art of an Anglo-Norman Poet and Preacher, Oxford, 1981, and for English instruction, The Poems of William of Shoreham ab. 1320 Vicar of Chart-Sutton, ed. M. Konrath, Early English Text Society, ES 86, London, 1902.
On an impressive regional school of religious panel-painting see Christopher Norton, David Park and Paul Binski, Dominican Painting in East Anglia: the Thornham Parva Retable and the Musée de Cluny Frontal, Woodbridge, 1987; on women’s involvement in artistic patronage see Loveday Lewes Gee (above, p. 333). This period also saw the foundation of several early university colleges, on which see Alan B. Cobban, English University Life in the Middle Ages, London, 1999, and Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c.1500, Aldershot, 1988.
For a book of advice for kings, based on classical texts and offered during Edward II’s worst hours, see Adam of Murimuth and Robert of Avesbury, Continuatio chronicarum and De Gestis mirabilibus regis Edwardi tertii, Rolls Series, London, 1889.
A short general survey of the Black Death and its effects in Europe is David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, Cambridge (MA), 1997; a longer one is Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death 1346–1353: the Complete History, Woodbridge, 2004; an older chronological survey is still useful – Philip Ziegler, The Black Death, Harmondsworth, second edn, 1998. A collection of translated sources includes materials from all parts of Europe: The Black Death, trans. and ed. Rosemary Horrox, Manchester, 1994. On attitudes to death see Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, London, 1996.
For the effect on pastoral care see William J. Dohar, The Black Death and Pastoral Leadership in the Diocese of Hereford in the Fourteenth Century, Philadelphia (PA), 1995, and John Aberth, ‘The Black Death in the diocese of Ely: the evidence of the bishop’s register’, Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995), pp. 275–87.
John Hatcher analyses the demographic and economic implications, with useful serial material on wages and prices, in Plague, Populations and the English Economy, 1348–1530, London, 1977. Several thematic local studies offer refining detail: Mavis E. Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death, 1350–1535, Woodbridge, 1998; L. R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex, 1350–1525, Cambridge, 1991.
Administrative responses to the mortality are most evident in the legislation passed through parliament, and above all in the statutes which aimed to fix wages, prices and the terms of service. To the classic study, Bertha Haven Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers during the First Decade after the Black Death, 1349–1359 (Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law 32, New York, 1908), have now been added Christopher Given-Wilson, ‘Service, serfdom and English labour legislation, 1350–1500’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew, Woodbridge, 2000, pp. 21–37 – which is broader in chronological scope and seeks signs of the application of labour legislation over the rural population – and the articles collected in The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-century England, ed. James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg and W. Mark Ormrod, Woodbridge, 2000.
For a concise treatment of the wars in France see Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c.1300–c.1450, Cambridge, revised edn, 2001. On spying, see John R. Alban and Christopher T. Allmand, ‘Spies and spying in the fourteenth century’, in War, Literature and Politics in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of G. W. Coopland, ed. C. T. Allmand, Liverpool, 1976, pp. 73–101; on the consequence for the conquered population, see Nicholas Wright, Knights and Peasants (above, p. 330). For the most celebrated account of chivalric performance, see the Life of the Black Prince by the Herald of Sir John Chandos, ed. Mildred K. Pope and Eleanor C. Lodge, Oxford, 1910, and on chivalric culture more widely, Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and its Context 1270–1350, Woodbridge, 1982. On the institution of political patronage within the ethos of chivalry created by Edward III, the crown and political relations, see Hugh E. L. Collins, The Order of the Garter, 1348–1461: Chivalry and Politics in Late Medieval England, Oxford, 2000.
On French coronation treatises which refer tellingly to the English claim, see Carra Ferguson O’Meara, Monarchy and Consent: the Coronation Book of Charles V of France, London, 2001.
To support the efforts in Scotland and in France, a fiscal as well as a military bureaucracy developed on the foundations set up by Edward I, on which see Michael Prestwich, War, Politics and Finance under Edward I, Aldershot, 1991. War and finance in this period are studied by Gerald Harriss in King, Parliament and Public Finance in Medieval England to c.1369, Oxford, 1975; for a long-term view of fiscal developments, see W. Mark Ormrod, ‘England in the Middle Ages’, in The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c.1200–1815, Oxford, 1999, pp. 19–52.
Patronage in the service of political stability is analysed in several articles by James Bothwell: ‘Edward III and the “new nobility”: largesse and limitation in fourteenth-century England’, English Historical Review 112 (1997), pp. 1111–40; and ‘“Until he receive the equivalent in land and rent”: the use of annuities as endowment patronage in the reign of Edward III’, Historical Research 70 (1997), pp. 146–69. Parliament was the venue for deliberation over taxation, and its working is surveyed in John R. Maddicott, ‘Parliament and the constituencies, 1272–1372’, in The English Parliament in the Middle Ages, ed. R. G. Davies and J. H. Denton, Manchester, 1981, pp. 61–87. On the arrangements for representation of the clergy in parliamentary deliberation, see Jeffrey H. Denton and John P. Dooley, Representatives of the Lower Clergy in Parliament, 1295–1340, Woodbridge, 1987. Edward III’s last parliament, one which called for root and branch reform, has come to be known as the ‘Good Parliament’, and is studied minutely in George Holmes, The Good Parliament, Oxford, 1975.
This period experienced an intensification of religious instruction, and the production of several manuals for the clergy, as well as for the use of lay people. Archbishop Thoresby of York disseminated a guidebook for lay people: The Lay Folk’s Catechism, ed. T. F. Simmons and H. E. Nolloth, Early English Text Society 118, London, 1901. A guide to penance for the laity was offered by Dan Michel c.1340 in Ayenbite of Inwit, 2 vols, Early English Text Society 278, Oxford, 1979. For the activities of another bishop see the Register of William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich 1344–1355, ed. Phyllis E. Pobst, Canterbury and York Society, 84 and 90, 1996–2000.
Church courts interacted with people even in small towns and villages, for which see the evidence in Lower Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction in Late-medieval England: the Courts of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln, 1336–1349, and the Deanery of Wisbech, 1458–1484, ed. L. R. Poos, Records of Social and Economic History New Ser. 32, Oxford, 2001. There was also creative writing in an emergent mystical style, like the English devotional prose of Richard Rolle (c.1290–1349), which was widely known and appreciated; see Claire Elizabeth McIlroy, The English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle, Woodbridge, 2004.
An interesting commentator on the period is Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester, in his Latin sermons delivered to a variety of religious and learned forums. He excoriates sin and corruption with a great deal of comment directed at contemporary sources of abuse and discomfort: The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester, 1373–1389, ed. M. A. Devlin, Camden Society Third Series, 85 and 86, London, 1954.
On diversification of the economy in the decades after the Black Death, Mark Bailey, A Marginal Economy? (above, p. 334) and L. R. Poos, A Rural Society (above, p. 337) offer interesting regional vantage points. New industries developed, like fishing, which was studied in Richard C. Hoffmann’s articles, ‘Economic development and aquatic ecosystems in medieval Europe’, in American Historical Review 10 (1996), pp. 630–69, and ‘Medieval fishing’, in Working with Water in Medieval Europe: Technology and Resource-use, ed. Paolo Squatriti, Leiden, 2000, pp. 331–93.
The long-term effects of the Black Death and the subsequent plagues (1361, 1369, 1371) took the form of a general rise in the standard of living of workers, and this took shape in the more varied diets and larger portions of meat, fish and ale in them. London was a large consumer, and a research project at the Centre for Metropolitan History has revealed the patterns of its needs, and the manner in which these were met. The project resulted in several publications, such as James A. Galloway, Derek Keene and Margaret Murphy, ‘Fuelling the city: production and distribution of firewood and fuel in London’s region, 1290–1400’, Economic History Review 49 (1996), pp. 447–72, and James A. Galloway, ‘Driven by drink? Ale consumption and the agrarian economy of the London region, c.1300–1400’, in Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal, London, 1998, pp. 87–100.
London’s population had been depleted but it was still large and demanding. The ‘biography’ of the city is offered in Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People 1200–1500, Oxford, 2004, which expertly explores the intertwined spheres of trade and politics. Paul Strohm brings to light several episodes in the life of London during these decades in his collection Hochon’s Arrow: the Social Imagination of Fourteenth-century Texts, Princeton (NJ), 1992, especially ‘Hochon’s arrow’ and ‘The textual environment of Chaucer’s “Lak of Stedfastnesse” ’, pp. 11–31 and 57–74. London was the chosen seat of foreign traders, whose work is interestingly described in Helen Bradley, ‘The Datini factors in London, 1380–1410’, in Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Later Medieval History, ed. Dorothy J. Clayton, Richard G. Davies and Peter McNiven, Stroud, 1994, pp. 55–79; also Derek Pearsall, ‘Strangers in fourteenth-century London’, in The Stranger in Medieval Society, ed. F. R. P. Akehurst and Stephanie Cain Van d’Elden, Medieval Cultures 12, Minneapolis (MN), 1997, pp. 46–62.
The quintessential London poets are Geoffrey Chaucer – on whom see the historical and literary discussion of Paul Strohm in Social Chaucer, Cambridge (MS), 1989 – and the poet of Cornhill, William Langland, who wrote Piers Plowman, a dream poem which survives in five versions, and which captures the moral and social unrest of the 1360s and 1370s, and which is available in Piers Plowman, Harmondsworth, 1959.
The most recent biography of Richard II is Nigel Saul’s Richard II, London and New Haven (CT), 1997. For accounts of his deposition a wide range of sources is offered by Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400: the Reign of Richard II, trans. and ed. Christopher Given-Wilson, Manchester, 1993. Richard II was the target of criticism from the moment of his succession, a boy unfit to rule, and guided by his elders in a royal council. This image of infantile wilfulness stuck to Richard for life, sometimes strangely attached to complaints about his ‘tyranny’. Christopher Fletcher analyses some of these images in the political language of the period in ‘Ideas of manhood and the practice of politics: the case of Richard II’, Past and Present (2005). At Richard’s side was his formidable uncle, John of Gaunt, with whom the king maintained a variable relationship of trust and suspicion. On Gaunt, see Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt: the Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-century Europe, Harlow, 1992.
Within a decade of Richard’s accession a concerted opposition was mounted against his government by magnates who came to be known as ‘Appellants’, and for a while in 1387 England was in a state of civil war; see Anthony Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy: the Lords Appellant under Richard II, London, 1971. The next stage of overt political confrontation opened in 1397; on modes of address in these final years of the reign see Nigel Saul, ‘Richard II and the vocabulary of kingship’, English Historical Review 110 (1995), pp. 854–77.
By 1397 Richard II had created a safe haven for his court in Cheshire and Wales, as shown in R. R. Davies, ‘Richard II and the principality of Chester 1397–9’, in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. F. R. H. du Boulay and Caroline Barron, London, 1971, pp. 256–79.
Richard II’s court attracted comment from home and abroad, high and low. Philippe de Mezières, French soldier and diplomat, wrote a Letter to Richard II in which he advocated peace with France and a vision of future political harmony, which would allow both nations to engage in crusading. Comment about Richard at home never came in stranger form than the petition presented in 1397, which brazenly listed governmental abuse and recommended reform; see Alison McHardy, ‘Haxey’s case, 1397: the petition and its presenter re-considered’, in The Age of Richard II, ed. James L. Gillespie, Stroud, 1997, pp. 93–114.
Ultimately, Richard II was deposed through the challenge and determination of Henry of Derby, who returned from exile in France to demand his inheritance, the Duchy of Lancaster – by force. He was a veteran of warfare in eastern Europe, and had strong connections to other European noble houses, as shown in F. R. H. du Boulay, ‘Henry of Derby’s expedition to Prussia 1390–1 and 1392’, in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, London, 1971, pp. 153–72. Chronicles of the Revolution (above, p. 340) tells the stories of these momentous years.
Richard’s court was renowned for its patronage of art and poetry. Indeed, the term ‘Ricardian’ has been used by scholars to describe the explosion of vernacular poetry which was informed by a deep awareness of continental work, of which Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower are the main examples; see J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain Poet, London, 1992. On French poetry and music in English aristocratic households and the court, see Ardis Butterfield, ‘French culture and the Ricardian court’, in Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J. A. Burrow, ed. Alastair J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse and Thorlac Turville-Petre, Oxford, 1997, pp. 82–120. On the flourishing of Welsh poetry in a variety of genres and metres see D. Simon Evans, Medieval Religious Literature, Writers of Wales, Cardiff, 1986. Richard’s court attracted the work of skilled writers and artists. The most famous artefact produced in and for it is the Wilton Diptych, the restoration of which has created a new burst of interest, exemplified in Dillian Gordon, The Wilton Diptych, London, 1993.
Richard II’s reign saw early challenges in the form of the convergent regional political movements which arose in East Anglia and Kent, and which have come to be known as the Peasants’ Revolt. The sources have been collected and translated by R. B. Dobson in The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, London, second edn, 1983; for seminal articles on the uprising, see The English Rising of 1381, ed. T. H. Aston, Oxford, 1981. A number of literary scholars have discussed the surviving political invective, and the conditions which allowed our sources to survive, for example Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381, Berkeley (CA), 1994 and Paul Strohm, ‘“A revelle!”: chronicle evidence and the rebel voice’, in Hochon’s Arrow (above, p. 340), pp. 33–56. Regional studies which track the aftermath of the events have also added depth and variation to the movement, studies such as Herbert Eiden, ‘Norfolk, 1382: a sequel to the Peasants’ Revolt’, English Historical Review 114 (1999), pp. 370–77, and Andrew Prescott, ‘London in the Peasants’ Revolt: a portrait gallery’, London Journal 7 (1981), pp. 125–43. Political activism and polemic were also displayed in less spectacular ways, but were noticeable none the less on the public buildings of London – in bills and images defaming public figures – and are studied in Wendy Scase, ‘“Strange and wonderful bills”: bill-casting and political discourse in late medieval England’, New Medieval Literatures 2 (1998), pp. 225–47.
The social unrest which coalesced into these political movements was linked by contemporaries and by historians to the level and shape of taxation in the 1370s, particularly the poll tax, imposed from 1377. On this type of taxation, see Caroline M. Barron, ‘The fourteenth century poll tax returns for Worcester’, Midland History 14 (1989), pp. 1–29. The rebels were animated by popular expectations of the king as a fount of justice. On the social context of the common law see Paul Brand, ‘The making of the Common Law’, and ‘The early history of the legal profession in the lordship of Ireland’ in Courtroom and Classroom: the Education of Lawyers in England Prior to 1400, London and Rio Grande, 1992, pp. 57–75 and 21–56.
Another challenging area which demanded a public official response was the figure of John Wyclif and the teaching of his Oxford theology, together with the related dissenting positions which spread through preaching and writing in the vernacular. On his life and times see Wyclif in his Times, ed. Anthony Kenny, Oxford, 1986; and on the world of writing which claimed his views as inspiration, and incorporated other critiques, see Anne Hudson’s many articles, such as those collected in Lollards and their Books, London, 1985, as well as her The Premature Reformation (above, p. 329). The social context of religious debate is given in articles in the collection Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond, Stroud, 1997.
The complaints habitually voiced by or imputed to dissenters and heretics touched upon the value of the many common practices of religious life – particularly those which heightened or ‘spiced up’ routine parish worship: the cults of saints’ relics, prayers to sacred images, pilgrimages to shrines, dramatic preaching. The life of parishes and dioceses continued to unfold in thousands of acts of administration, appointment of priests, provision of spaces and trappings, and ritual, recorded in churchwardens’ accounts and in bishops’ registers.
On dynastic change and the difficulties of establishing rule, see Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422, London, 1998. The first decade of the fifteenth century saw a great deal of turmoil and experimentation which reshaped the politics of the British Isles. The sense of insecurity, distrust and suspicion which arises from so many sources is well captured in Simon Walker, ‘Rumour, sedition and popular protest in the reign of Henry IV’, Past and Present 166 (2000), pp. 31–65. The greatest challenge of them all was the Welsh revolt, studied with elegance and wisdom in R. R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, Oxford, 1995. Other challenges arose from magnates, whose aspirations are studied in Alastair Dunn, The Politics of Magnate Power in England and Wales, 1389–1413, Oxford, 2003; and some astute comments on the development of this group over the long term are offered in J. A. Tuck, ‘The emergence of a northern nobility 1250–1400’, in Northern History 22 (1986), pp. 1–17. On the rising in Yorkshire which led to the execution of Archbishop Scrope, see the detailed source analysis in Simon Walker, ‘The Yorkshire risings of 1405: texts and contexts’, in Henry IV: the Establishment of the Regime, 1399–1406, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Douglas Biggs, Woodbridge, 2003, pp. 161–84.
Parliament had been the forum in which Richard II was deposed, it gave the new king Henry IV his crown, and also aimed to determine the remit of his powers. On Henry IV’s title, see Gaillard Lapsley, ‘The parliamentary title of Henry IV’, English Historical Review 49 (1934), pp. 577–606; and on a confrontation between king and parliament, A. J. Pollard, ‘The Lancastrian experiment revisited: Henry IV, Sir John Tiptoft and the parliament of 1406’, Parliamentary History 14 (1995), pp. 103–19.
One of the areas in which royal authority aimed to assert itself was in the persecution of heresy. A remarkable working relationship developed between Henry IV and Archbishop Thomas Arundel; his biography offers crucial insights into the chemistry between these men: Margaret Aston, Thomas Arundel: a Study of Church Life in the Reign of Richard II, Oxford, 1967. One of the initiatives against perceived heterodoxy was the publication of the Constitutions of 1407 and then 1409, which defined areas and modes of religious instruction and debate; on these see Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and cultural change in late-medieval England: vernacular theology, the Oxford translation debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum 70 (1995), pp. 822–64. Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: the Burning of John Badby, Woodbridge, 1987, examines the whole reign through the engagement with religious dissent. The burning of Badby was witnessed by the Prince of Wales, who as king was no less committed to orthodoxy; see Jeremy Catto, ‘Religious change under Henry V’, in Henry V: the Practice of Kingship, ed. G. L. Harriss, Oxford, 1985, pp. 97–115. The labelling and in some cases persecution of suspected heretics took several forms, and resulted in stereotypes like those studied in Derek Pearsall, ‘“Lunatyk Lollares” in Piers Plowman ’, in Religion in the Poetry and Drama of the Late Middle Ages in England, ed. Piero Botani and Anna Torti, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 163–78. Yet Wycliffite and dissenting writing continued to explore familiar genres and formats; some examples are available in The Piers Plowman Tradition: a Critical Edition of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, Richard the Redeless, Mum and Sothsegger, and the Crowned King, ed. Helen Barr, London, 1993. It was easy to fail official standards of orthodoxy not only by open critique but through excessive conventional piety. A remarkable character was Margery Kempe of King’s Lynn, who dictated her autobiography in English, and in it recounted the transformation of her life from mother and wife in a prosperous mercantile family, to a perpetual pilgrim, visionary, and absorbed enthusiast for religious experiences in Europe and the Near East: The Book of Margery Kempe: Annotated Edition, ed. Barry Windeatt, Woodbridge, 2004.
One way in which the new dynasty aimed to bolster its image and win hearts was through poetry which celebrated national achievements. Already in the late years of Henry IV the poet Thomas Hoccleve, Clerk of the Privy Seal, wrote for the Prince of Wales a poem in the genre of Mirrors for Princes, his Regiment of Princes, in English. Hoccleve continued to comment when the prince became Henry V, as in his Remonstrance against Oldcastle, which chastised the eponymous knight-turned-dissenter. See Nicholas Perkins, Hocc-leve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint, Cambridge, 2001; on bureaucracy and writing see Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England, University Park (PA), 2001. The most authoritative biography of Henry V is C. T. Allmand, Henry V: the Practice of Kingship, ed. G. L. Harriss, Oxford, 1985, and, for an almost contemporary view, see The Deeds of Henry V (Gesta Henrici Quinti), trans. and ed. Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell, Oxford, 1975.
The provision of law and administration, together with effective collection of taxes and recruitment to the royal armies, were the preconditions of successful invasion, conquest and maintenance of French lands. On the efforts invested in enforcement of the rule of law at home see Edward Powell, Kingship, Law and Society: Criminal Justice in the Reign of Henry V, Oxford, 1989.
An event which touched only a few thousand men from England and Wales far across the channel became one of the most celebrated moments of British history, remembered in monument, song and film: the Battle of Agincourt. One of the most moving accounts is John Keegan’s The Face of Battle: a Study of Agincourt (France), Waterloo and Somme, London, 1976. On the defence and management of Normandy the authority is C. T. Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 1415–1450: the History of a Mediaeval Occupation, Oxford, 1983. Many interesting aspects of life in towns and garrisons arise from the essays in Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War, ed. Anne Curry and Michael Hughes, Woodbridge, 1994, and, more recently, Anne Curry, ‘Isolated or integrated? The English soldier in Lancastrian Normandy’, in Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe, ed. Sarah Rees Jones, Richard Marks and A. J. Minnis, York, 2000, pp. 191–210.
The economy of these decades was characterized by many different trends, and saw the persistence of diversification of manorial production and a growing array of services and goods on sale. On management of the economy see David Stone, ‘The productivity of sheep in late medieval England’, Agricultural History Review, 5 (2003), pp. 1–22, and Andrew K. G. Jones, ‘Bedfordshire: the fifteenth century’, in The Peasant Land Market in Medieval England, ed. P. D. A. Harvey, Oxford, 1984, pp. 178–251.
A number of studies explore the aristocratic and gentry households based on the minute detail of household accounts – for example, ffiona Swabey, ‘The household of Alice de Bryene, 1412–14’, in Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal, London, 1998, pp. 133–44; and Christopher Woolgar, ‘Fasts and feast: conspicuous consumption and the diet of the nobility in the fifteenth century’, in Revolution and Consumption in Medieval England, ed. Michael Hicks, Woodbridge, 2001, pp. 7–25.
For biographies of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou, see Ralph A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI, second edn, Stroud, 1998, and Helen E. Maurer, Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England, Woodbridge, 2003. For a subtle and authoritative analysis of the politics of the reign, see John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship, Cambridge, 1996. The major political figures of the king’s minority were Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, John Duke of Bedford, and Henry Cardinal Beaufort. On Gloucester’s bibliophilia and involvement in contemporary Italian letters see Susanne Saygin, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390–1447) and the Italian Humanists, Leiden, 2000; on Bedford’s European network of patronage and collection see Jenny Stratford, The Bedford Inventories: the Worldly Goods of John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France (1389–1435), Oxford, 1993; on Beaufort, see G. L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort: a Study in Lancastrian Ascendancy and Decline, Oxford, 1988.
The political, military and cultural legacy of Henry V’s years continued to occupy the talent, resources and administrative efforts of the state. The court continued to produce poetry and pronouncements in support of these, and around particularly challenging moments of state: John Lydgate led here as a poet ‘laureate’, for whom see Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate, London, 1970. On ‘propaganda’ see J. A. Doig, ‘Propaganda, public opinion and the siege of Calais in 1436’, in Crown, Government and People in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Rowena E. Archer, Stroud, 1995, pp. 79–106.
The king was surrounded by several proactive administrators, such as Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, who continued to invigilate over persecution of heresy and reform of the clergy: E. F. Jacob, Henry Chichele and the Ecclesiastical Politics of his Age, London, 1952. The legal emphasis in ecclesiastical formation is evident in this period, with a growing number of bishops with legal, rather than theological, training, and with an interest in legal thought. University became the training ground for future high-level administrators, in institutions like All Souls College, which was founded in 1438 as a memorial to the dead in the French wars, but became a powerhouse for training future bishops and high-ranking administrators. See Jeremy Catto, ‘The world of Henry Chichele and the foundation of All Souls’, in Unarmed Soldiery: Studies in the Early History of All Souls College, Oxford, 1996, pp. 1–13.
Henry VI’s own taste and preferences were expressed in the interlocked spheres of education and religion. His foundation at Eton (1440) was a feeder school for King’s College, Cambridge (founded 1441), in which cadres of royal servants were to be formed. On educational thinking and initiatives in this period, see Virginia Davis, William Waynflete, Bishop and Educationalist, Woodbridge, 1993. Henry VI favoured a group of scholars/teachers from these institutions who became his confidants and confessors, one of whom, John Blacman, ultimately even wrote a hagiographical account of the king’s life. The circle is discussed in detail and with sympathy by Roger Lovatt, ‘John Blacman: biographer of Henry VI’, in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Oxford, 1981, pp. 415–44.
The patronage of royals and other magnates and the support lent by academic colleges brought to England books, scholars and scholarship which had for a generation or two become the staple of Tuscan schools. Humphrey Duke of Gloucester was an important motivator, and much of his library reached Oxford University. For some examples, see David Rundle, ‘Two unnoticed manuscripts from the collection of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester’, Bodleian Library Record 16 (1988), pp. 211–24 and pp. 299–313; see also Susanne Saygin, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (above, p. 345).
Vernacular writing also addressed the matter of politics with vigour; leading administrators and soldiers debated the complex choices which faced government, as John Fastolf did in his report on France: Malcolm Vale, ‘Sir John Fastolf’s “report” of 1435: a new interpretation reconsidered’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 17 (1973), pp. 78–84. A similar case was the programme for national renewal based on economic and political reorientation, which was put forward in The Libelle of Englysche Polycye, ed. G. Warner, Oxford, 1926. A great deal of writing on the making of politics and on the nature of social obligation within the ruling elite, was produced, in poetry or tracts such as the Book of Noblesse by William Worcester, or the advice offered by a member of the landed gentry to his son, Peter Idley’s Instructions to his Son, ed. Charlotte d’Evelyn, Boston and London, 1935; or from mother to daughter, as in Felicity Riddy, ‘Mother knows best: reading social change in a courtesy text’, Speculum 71 (1996), pp. 66–86. For an archive of documents collected by a London grocer alert to London and national politics, see the edition in The Politics of Fifteenth-century England: John Vale’s Book, ed. Margaret L. Kekewich, Stroud, 1995.
To the political challenges at home and abroad were added the pressures of a period of slump, which was experienced in most regions between the 1430s and the 1450s. On the economic crisis of the mid-century, useful articles are John Hatcher, ‘The great slump of the mid-fifteenth century’, in Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller, ed. Richard Britnell and John Hatcher, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 237–72; Edmund Fryde, ‘Economic depression in England in the second and third quarters of the fifteenth century: effective resistances of tenants to landlords as one of its consequences. Defiances and rent strikes’, in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper, Woodbridge, 2000, pp. 215–26; and Mavis Mate, ‘The economic and social roots of medieval popular rebellion: Sussex in 1450–1451’, Economic History Review 45 (1992), pp. 661–76. On the trends in serfdom see Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Bondmen under the Tudors’, in Law and Government under the Tudors. Essays Presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge on the Occasion of his Retirement, ed. Claire Cross, David Loades and J. J. Scarisbrick, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 91–109.
The decline in income affected landowners of modest estates, members of the parish gentry. See the issues arising from the need to secure inheritance and engage in protracted litigation, often led by widows, in The Amburgh Papers. The Brokholes Inheritance in Warwickshire, Hertfordshire and Essex c.1417–c.1453. Chetham’s Manuscript Mun. E6 10 (4), ed. Christine Carpenter, Woodbridge, 1998. Magnates were still able to make grand gestures of social obligation and for the well-being of their souls, such as the foundation by the Earl and Countess of Suffolk of God’s House at Ewelme studied in John A. A. Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme: Life, Devotion and Architecture in a Fifteenth-century Almshouse, Aldershot, 2001. On the lifestyle of a comfortable clerical household, see the evidence in A Small Household of the XVth Century, Being the Account Book of Munden’s Chantry, Bridport, ed. Kathleen L. Wood-Legh, Manchester, 1956.
The parish remained an important focus for local experience and social activity. In areas which benefited from the still buoyant wool trade some magnificent buildings were erected. Urban parishes in particular accumulated books which sometimes circulated as libraries: John Shinners, ‘Parish libraries in medieval England’, in A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, ed. Jacqueline Brown and William P. Stoneman, Notre Dame (IN), 1997, pp. 207–30; and Wendy Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and John Colop’s “common profit” books: aspects of book ownership and circulation in fifteenth-century London’, Medium Aevum 61 (1992), pp. 261–74. On participation in parish enterprises see Katherine French, ‘Parochial fundraising in late medieval Somerset’, in The Parish in English Life 1400–1600, ed. Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs and Beat A. Kumin, Manchester, 1997, pp. 115–32; Clive Burgess, ‘London parishioners in times of change: St Andrew Hubbard, Eastcheap, c.1450–1570’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002), pp. 38–63.
Towns attempted to enhance their competitive advantages: see J. J. Kermode, Medieval Merchants: York, Beverley and Hull in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1998. They attempted to control disruptive behaviour, often through coercive regulation: see David R. Carr, ‘From pollution to prostitution: supervising the citizens of fifteenth-century Salisbury’, Southern History 19 (1997), pp. 24–41; Jessica Freeman, ‘Middlesex in the fifteenth century’, in Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval England, ed. Michael Hicks, Woodbridge, 2001, pp. 89–103; and on brothels, see Ruth Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England, New York, 1996. On the tensions surrounding ethnic identity in northern towns, see Cynthia J. Neville, ‘Local sentiment and the “national” enemy in northern England in the later Middle Ages’, Journal of British Studies 35 (1996), pp. 419–37, and Judy Ann Ford, ‘The assimilation of foreigners in the lay parish community: the case of Sandwich’, in The Parish in English Life 1400–1600, ed. French, Gibbs, and Kumin (see above), pp. 203–16.
London politics saw pressure for greater inclusion from middling crafts, as discussed in Caroline Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages (above, p. 339). Mercantile well-being and military hegemony were so closely linked that London merchants were involved in politics more than ever before, and developed instruments for record and reference, such as the Chronicles of London discussed in Mary-Rose McLaren, The London Chronicles of the Fifteenth Century: a Revolution in English Writing, Woodbridge, 2002.
Mid-century saw great activity in the translation into English of the lives of martyrs, and especially of female martyrs for female patrons. The most important resulting collection was Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary S. Sarjeantson, Early English Text Society 206, London, 1938. On this work see A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The transmission and audience of Osbern Bockenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen’, in Late Medieval Religious Texts and their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, Cambridge, 1994. On the interest in female martyrs, attributed to women’s choices, see Eamon Duffy, ‘Holy maydens, holy wyfes: the cult of women saints in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England’, in Studies in Church History 27 (1990), pp. 175–96.
By the late 1440s the crown was bankrupt (G. L. Harriss, ‘Marmaduke Lumley and the Exchequer crisis of 1446–1449’, in Aspects of Late Medieval Government and Society: Essays Presented to J. R. Lander, ed. John G. Rowe, Toronto, 1986, pp. 143–78) and was ceding land in France; the royal project was in tatters. The political challenges to the king took several forms: popular movements on London, such as the Cade Rebellion (I. M. W. Harvey, Cade’s Rebellion of 1450, Oxford, 1991); and for the challenges from Richard Duke of York, who demanded greater say and was ultimately named Henry VI’s heir, see Michael A. Hicks, ‘From megaphone to microscope: the correspondence of Richard Duke of York with Henry VI in 1450 revisited’, Journal of Medieval History 25 (1999), pp. 243–56; and Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Richard, Duke of York, and the royal household in Wales, 1449–50’, Welsh History Review 8 (1976), pp. 14–25.
The years 1449 and 1450 saw a purge of royal officials and courtiers, such as the Duke of Suffolk and Bishop Adam Moleyns. For the effect of such instability in the counties, see Helen Castor, ‘“Walter Blount has gone to serve traytours”: the sack of Elvaston and the politics of the northern Midlands in 1454’, Midland History 19 (1994), pp. 21–39.
The political dramas of the reigns of Edward IV saw the contest between a crowned king – Henry VI – and a ruler who had seized the throne, been crowned and ruled during the 1460s while Henry VI was alive, in exile. Not surprisingly, Lancastrian partisans believed that this reality could be overturned, and were led in this hope by Margaret of Anjou from France, and a court of able, albeit impoverished exiles around her. For the political formations, see Christine Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c.1437–1509, Cambridge, 1997. On the human price, Joel T. Rosenthal, ‘Other victims: peeresses as war widows, 1450–1500’, in Upon my Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe, ed. Louise Mirrer, Ann Arbor (MI), 1992, pp. 131–52.
French, Lancastrian and Yorkist writers were involved in a war of words during the years of waiting. The language of politics is discussed in the introduction to Four English Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jean-Philippe Genet, Camden fourth series 18, London, 1977, and in Jean-Philippe Genet, ‘New politics or new language? The words of politics in Yorkist and Tudor England’, in The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. Benjamin Thompson, Thrupp, 1998, pp. 23–64. On polemical writing from France see Craig Taylor, ‘Sir John Fortescue and the French polemical treatises of the Hundred Years War’, English Historical Review 114 (1999), pp. 112–29, and on Fortescue see also Strohm, The Language of Politics, Chapter 2 (above, p. 332). For a biography of Edward IV see Charles Ross, Edward IV, London, 1974.
Lancastrian attempts to re-establish rule succeeded for a while in 1469–71, when Henry VI was nominal king, and Edward IV was in exile in Flanders. On Edward’s host in Flanders and the cultural contact which developed alongside the political, see Malcolm Vale, ‘An Anglo-Burgundian nobleman and art patron: Louis de Bruges, Lord of La Gruthuyse and Earl of Winchester’, in England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul, Stroud, 1995, pp. 115–31. Edward returned triumphantly in spring 1471, a story told by a member of his entourage in The Arrivall of Edward IV, on which see illuminating comments in Wendy Scase, ‘Writing the “poetics of spectacle”: political epiphanies in The Arrivall of Edward IV and some contemporary Lancastrian and Yorkist texts’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson and Nicolette Zeeman, Oxford, 2002, pp. 172–84. For a survey of the politics of the second stage see Anthony Goodman, New Monarchy: England 1471–1534, Oxford, 1988.
The first decade of Edward IV’s rule saw the re-establishment of domestic administration and a certain buoyancy in trade, and above all required fewer exactions than the 1440s and 1450s. Prominent parish and county gentry settled down to rebuild estates, often buying a great deal of land, like the Townshends, the Sulyards and the Pastons, studied respectively in C. E. Moreton, The Towns-hends and Their World: Gentry, Law, and Land in Norfolk c. 1450–1551, Oxford, 1992; Colin Richmond, The Paston Family (above, p. 330) and Colin Richmond, ‘The Sulyard papers: the rewards of a small family archive’, in England in the Fifteenth Century. Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams, Woodbridge, 1987, pp. 199–228.
Religious institutions similarly benefited from the stability and economic recovery and mounted projects of expansion and building. Norwich Cathedral was able to begin to rebuild and redecorate practically on the morrow of the fire which struck it in 1468. Parish gentry and substantial tenants contributed to the adornment of churches, as shown in many instances in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars, London and New Haven, CT, 1992 and in Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Renaissance England, Cambridge, 2003, as well as, for London society, in Clive Burgess, ‘London parishioners in times of change’ (above, p. 348). London ecclesiastical courts were busy with cases of marriage litigation, defamation, and sometimes heresy, as analysed in Richard M. Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation, Cambridge (MS), 1981. Continental forms of piety were not unknown, such as the devotion to the Name of Jesus and to the Five Wounds, as well as the cult of St Anne; these were incorporated into the elaborate devotional routines of the privileged (such as Lady Margaret Beaufort), but were most frequently adopted in more modest forms in parishes. On these new devotions and related new feasts, see Richard W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Late Medieval England, Oxford, 1970. These politically troubled times also saw women from landed families, in their widowhood, choosing to remain unmarried in a consecrated religious lifestyle; they came to be known as ‘vowesses’, and are discussed in Pat H. Cullum, ‘Vowesses and female lay piety in the province of York, 1300–1530’, Northern History 32 (1996), pp. 21–41, and Mary Erler, ‘English vowed women at the end of the Middle Ages’, Mediaeval Studies 57 (1995), pp. 155–203.
English and Welsh parishes were much-adorned, colourful places, a reality which is hard to envisage within the spaces currently in modern, Protestant use. On images in the parish see Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art (above, p. 329); for a regional type, the octagonal font, and its meanings, see Ann E. Nichols, Seeable Signs: the Iconography of the Seven Sacraments, 1350–1544, Woodbridge, 1994, and Judy Ann Ford, ‘Art and identity in the parish communities of late medieval England’, Studies in Church History 28 (1992), pp. 225–37, as well as Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety, Chapter 2 (above, p. 350) Music enters into more common use in urban churches in these decades, inspired by the practices of religious houses and noble households. This emerges clearly from the pioneering work summarized in Clive Burgess and Andrew Wathey, ‘Mapping the soundscape: church music in English towns 1450–1500’, Early Music History 19 (2000), pp. 1–46. Collective enterprises produced elaborate cycles of biblical drama in cities, and brought plays to the rural areas too. The distinctive type of biblical cycle associated in England with the summer feast of Corpus Christi has been evocatively studied in V. A. Kolve, The Play called Corpus Christi, London, 1966. On social relations and religious understanding of late medieval drama, see Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays, Chicago and London, 2001; and on parish drama, A. F. Johnston, ‘“What revels are in hand?”: dramatic activities sponsored by the parishes of the Thames valley’, in English Parish Drama, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Hüsken, Amsterdam, 1996, pp. 95–104. Parish games emerge as a subject of collective village organization but also as a subject for criticism, like the game of ‘camp-ball’, described by David Dymond in ‘A lost social institution: the camping close’, Rural History 1 (1990), pp. 165–92.
The parish became an important site for the provision of basic education in reading and writing. Parish clerks often used rooms around the church as schoolrooms. On education for members of the social elite, see Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: the Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy 1066–1530, London, 1984; for some teaching matter from the period see Nicholas Orme, ‘A grammatical miscellany of 1427–1465 from Bristol and Wiltshire’, Traditio 38 (1982), pp 301–26; for provision in the province of York, J. Hoepner Moran Cruz, ‘Education, economy, and clerical mobility in late medieval northern England’, in Universities and Schooling in Medieval Society, ed. W J. Courtenay and Jürgen Miethke, Leiden, 2000, pp. 182–207; for teaching to girls at home, Patricia Cullum and Jeremy Goldberg, ‘How Margaret Blackburn taught her daughters: reading devotional instruction in a Book of Hours’, in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Rosalynn Voaden, Arlyn Diamond, Ann Hutchison, Carol Meale and Lesley Johnson, Turnhout, 2000, pp. 217–36; and for girls’ training at work, Caroline M. Barron, ‘The education and training of girls in fifteenth-century London’, in Courts, Counties and the Capital in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Diana E. S. Dunn, The Fifteenth Century, Series 4, Stroud, 1996, pp. 139–53. On childhood experiences more generally, see Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children, London, 2001.
Print reached England from the Low Countries, and through the master printer William Caxton, who set up his shop in Westminster. The impact of print was felt in the shape and price of prayer and service books, for which an enormous market existed. On the first decades of print, see the early chapters of David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order 1450–1830, Cambridge, 2004; on the illuminations of such early books see Kathleen L. Scott, The Master Caxton and his Patrons, Cambridge, 1976.
Edward IV invested effort in securing the peace which underpinned trade. These decades see the completion of the long-term trend towards the primacy of cloth exports. For interesting evidence on control of training within textile guilds, see Indentures of Weavers’ Apprentices in York, 1450–1505, ed. Heather Swanson and Philip Stell, York, 2000. Great landlords and religious institutions were still buoyant consumers of diverse luxury goods (see, on food consumption, Christopher Woolgar, ‘Fasts and feast: conspicuous consumption and the diet of the nobility in the fifteenth century’, in Revolution and Consumption in Medieval England, ed. Michael Hicks, Woodbridge, 2001, pp. 7–25), although the mid-century had seen in all, and especially among the more modest landholders, a cut in expenditure. Such choices are discussed in Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, ‘Durham Cathedral Priory’s consumption of imported goods: wine and spices, 1464–1520’, in Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval England, ed. Michael Hicks, Woodbridge, 2001, pp. 141–58. By this stage Portuguese navigators and merchants were settled on the west coast of Africa, and new horizons for British shipping became apparent. ‘Rutters’, route-books for sea-captains, survive from this period; see D. W. Waters, The Rutters of the Sea: the Sailing Directions of Pierre Garcie. A Study of the First English and French Printed Sailing Directions, New Haven (CT), 1967.
Legal services were required for securing title to land, purchase of land by rich merchants, or to secure the loans which underpinned trade, and lawyers were familiar members in households of magnates and gentry in towns, and even lent their services to more modest communities and individuals. On profit and social advancement through legal work, see Mark Beilby, ‘The profits of expertise: the rise of the civil lawyers and chancery equity’, in Profit, Piety and the Professions in Later Medieval England, ed. Michael Hicks, Gloucester, 1990, pp. 72–90. Landlords aimed to secure their legal rights over serfs by drawing up genealogies of servile families: see L. R. Poos, ‘Peasant “biographies” from medieval England’, in Medieval Lives and the Historian: Studies in Medieval Prosopography, ed. Niethard Bulst and Jean-Philippe Genêt, Kalamazoo (MI), 1986, pp. 201–14.
Political strife did not end with the defeat of the Lancastrians in 1471, for within the Yorkist family discontent and competition developed between Edward IV’s brothers, and between them and the queen and her kin. All this came to a head at the king’s death in 1483. On relations between the brothers, see Christine Carpenter, ‘The Duke of Clarence and the Midlands: a study in the interplay of local and national politics’, Midland History 11 (1986), pp. 23–48, as well as Christine Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses, Chapters 8–9 (above, p. 349). On Yorkist endeavours for the richly documented and closely planned event of the reburial of Richard Duke of York, see The Reburial of Richard, Duke of York, 21–30 July 1476, ed. Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs with P. W. Hammond, London, 1996.
The literature on Richard III’s reign is vast; on his court and administration see Rosemary Horrox, Richard III: a Study of Service, Cambridge, 1989; for interesting documentation on his notorious coronation see The Coronation of Richard III: the Extant Documents, ed. Anne F. Sutton and P. W. Hammond, Gloucester, 1983. Richard III collected a great number of history books and prayer books, some of which are discussed and edited in The Hours of Richard III, ed. Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, Stroud, 1990. Richard’s ascent to the throne was followed by a rebellion led by the Duke of Buckingham, on which see Louise Gill, Richard III and Buckingham’s Rebellion, Stroud, 1999.
On 1485 see Michael Bennett, The Battle of Bosworth, new edn, Stroud, 2000; and on the new dynasty see Michael K. Jones and Malcolm Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, Cambridge, 1992; on political ideas see John Watts, ‘“A new ffundacion of is Crowne”: monarchy in the age of Henry VII’, in The Reign of Henry VII: Proceedings of the 1993 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Benjamin Thompson, Stamford, 1995, pp. 31–53.