This book examines the fifteenth-century gentry of Leicestershire under five broad headings: as landholders, as members of a social community based on the county, as participants in and leaders of the government of the shire, as members of the wider family unit and, finally, as individuals. Economically assertive, they were also socially cohesive, this cohesion being provided by the shire community. The shire also provided the most important political unit, controlled by an oligarchy of superior gentry families who were relatively independent of outside interference. The basic social unit was...

Based on extensive archival research, this volume examines the early growth of Barcelona in order to understand the causes of the European economic take-off. The city did not at first grow because of overseas trade but because of market-oriented agriculture and tribute from Islamic Spain. Only after a difficult adjustment did the city develop the commercial foundations that would later ensure its prosperity. Barcelona's patriciate rose to prominence during the second stage of growth, also a period dominated by a struggle for power in Catalonia. Here, the family structure of the patriciate...

This history of the English royal manor of Havering, Essex, illustrates life at one extreme of the spectrum of personal and collective freedom during the later Middle Ages, revealing the kinds of patterns which could emerge when medieval people were placed in a setting of unusual independence. As residents of a manor held by the crown, they profited from royal administrative neglect. As tenants of the ancient royal demesne, they had special legal rights and economic privileges. Havering's dominant families controlled the legal and administrative life of their community through the powerful...

The barbarians of the fifth and sixth centuries were long thought to be races, tribes or ethnic groups who toppled the Roman Empire. This book proposes a new view, through a case study of the Goths of Italy between 489 and 554. The author suggests wholly new ways of understanding barbarian groups and the end of the Western Roman Empire. The book also proposes a complete reinterpretation of the evolution of Christian conceptions of community, and of so-called "Germanic" Arianism.

The liturgy of the medieval church has been little studied in its relation to medieval thought and society. It has often been taken for granted that the Latin liturgy was understood by the priest, but to his congregation was only a spectacle of authority. This book begins with the hypothesis that the liturgy was, in some senses, understood by its congregations, and it attempts to discover what this understanding might have been. Through studies of the sermons and writings of Tertullian, Ambrose, Augustine, Bede, Abelard and others, of the practice of infant baptism, and of the art and...

This is a study of landholding and alliance in England in the years 950 to 1086, a period in which the fortunes of lay lords and their families rose and fell dramatically. It was also a period of dizzying tenurial change, in which the fluctuations in landed wealth and alliances shed light on the economic and geographic balance between the monarchy and the aristocracy, and on how this balance helped shape Conquest England. A number of key historical issues are investigated: the impact of Cnut's conquest on England, the quality of Edward the Confessor's kingship, the means by which the Norman...

This book studies the processes by which the pagan Roman Empire was transformed into the Christian Middle Ages. Drawing on the perspectives of social history, archaeology and anthropology, it focuses on the strategies of Bishop Caesarius of Arles (470SH542 AD) to promote Christian values, practices and beliefs among the pagans, Jews and Christians of southern France, and on the resistance provoked by his efforts among the population. This is the first book in English about Caesarius, and the only book to discuss southern Gaul during the sixth century.

This is the first biography of one of the wealthiest and most influential bishops of medieval Europe, who for a period of over thirty years exercised a degree of power over the thirteenth-century Plantagenet court second only to that of the king. The career of Peter des Roches and the activities of his fellow aliens are fundamental to an understanding of the process by which England and France developed as two separate kingdoms. The book also sheds new light on such hotly-debated issues as the role of aliens in English politics, the reception of Magna Carta, the loss of Normandy, and the...

The Stonor letters and papers, like the better known Paston letters, form one of only three surviving archives of gentry correspondence from late medieval England. The Stonor collection provides us with a wealth of otherwise unobtainable detail about the lives and careers of a gentry family, their servants and their friends. This reissue of the classic Kingsford edition (with a new introduction and annotation from Christine Carpenter) will be essential reading for scholars of late medieval England, and for anyone interested in the Wars of the Roses, or life in medieval England generally.

This volume surveys Iberian international trade from the tenth to the fifteenth century, with particular emphasis on commerce in the Muslim period and on changes brought by Christian conquest of much of Muslim Spain in the thirteenth century. From the tenth to the thirteenth century, markets in the Iberian peninsula were closely linked to markets elsewhere in the Islamic world, and a strong east-west Mediterranean trading network linked Cairo with Cordoba. Following routes along the North African coast, Muslim and Jewish merchants carried eastern goods to Muslim Spain, returning eastwards...