Although the gentry played a central role in medieval England, this study is the first sustained exploration of its origins and development between the mid-thirteenth and the mid-fourteenth century. Arguing against views which see the gentry as formed or created earlier, the text investigates as well the relationship between lesser landowners and the Angevin state; the transformation of knighthood; and the role of lesser landowners in society and politics.

Intended to celebrate the 70th birthday of the distinguished historian, Lawrence Stone, these essays owe much to his influence. There are also four appreciations by friends and colleagues from Oxford and Princeton and a little-known autobiographical piece by Lawrence Stone himself.

This book makes an original contribution to the history of the English Revolution and to the meaning of crowd behavior. It recreates one of the most famous episodes, in which crowds from Essex and Suffolk attacked and plundered the houses of the gentry, and sought to "ethnically cleanse" their communities of Catholics. The deeper perspective offered by history shows that this action was not "blind violence": the book deciphers the logic that informed the crowd's behavior, and finds evidence of both the importance--and reach--of puritanism and popular parliamentarianism.

This book discusses the 'marginal' people of late medieval Paris, the large and shifting group of men and women who existed on the margins of conventional organized society.

The articles in this book, reprinted from the journal Past and Present, are all, in different ways, concerned with the ownership of landed property in medieval England and with those who worked the land. Problems debated include those concerning the keeping intact of the great estates of the Anglo-Norman barons in the face of both inheritance claims and of political manipulation by the crown. Other articles show that the difficulties of knights and lesser gentry were no less complex, as social shifts resulted from economic developments as well as from their military role and their...

This book honours the varied and creative career of Joan Thirsk, Fellow of the British Academy and former Reader in Economic History in the University of Oxford. The chapters have been written largely by Dr Thirsk's former research students, and the diversity of themes covered reflects her own diversity of academic interest. The subjects range from landlords and land management to the position of women in early modern England and the origins of the Sheffield cutlery and allied trades. Supplemented with a full bibliography and personal and academic appreciations, this volume will serve as a...

Leader of the Diggers, or True Levellers, whose colony was forced to disband in 1650, Gerrard Winstanley stands out from a century remarkable for its development in political thought as one of the most fecund and original of political writers. An acute and penetrating social critic with a passionate sense of justice, he worked out a collectivist theory which strikingly anticipates nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism. He was the first modern European thinker to write in the vernacular advocating a communist society, and to call upon ordinary people to realize it. Winstanley published a...

The figure of the Byzantine emperor, a ruler who sometimes was also designated a priest, has long fascinated the western imagination. Written by one of the world's leading Byzantine scholars, this classic book studies in detail the imperial union of "two powers," temporal and spiritual, against the broad background of the relationship between church and state and religious and political spheres.

Medieval dynasties relied frequently upon the cult of royal saints for legitimacy, and in the central middle ages most royal dynasties included saints in their family. Within this context, the saints of the Hungarian ruling dynasty constitute a remarkable sequence, and provide a unique example of the late medieval evolution of royal and dynastic sainthood. Building upon a series of case studies from Hungary and central Europe, Gá bor Klaniczay proposes an original new synthesis of the multiple forms and transformations of royal and dynastic sainthood.

Combining the research of recognized young scholars, this book revisits Britain's much-studied "age of reform," before and after the Great Reform Act of 1832. It demonstrates that "reformers" hoped to reform not only parliament, government, the law and the church, but also medicine and the theater, among other entities. While the study focuses primarily on Britain, it also includes essays on Ireland, the Empire and continental Europe. A substantial introduction provides an overview of the period and its historiography.