Looking in detail at 14th-century Gloucestershire, the author examines the role of the gentry in their communities, government, military service, and the economy.

Richard II is one of the most enigmatic of English kings. Shakespeare depicted him as a tragic figure, an irresponsible, cruel monarch who nevertheless rose in stature as the substance of power slipped from him. By later writers he has been variously portrayed as a half-crazed autocrat or a conventional ruler whose principal errors were the mismanagement of his nobility and disregard for the political conventions of his age. This book--the first full-length biography of Richard in more than fifty years--offers a radical reinterpretation of the king.
Nigel Saul paints a picture of Richard...

The fourteenth century is one of the most turbulent and compelling periods of English history, reflected in the vitality of the current scholarship devoted to it. This new series provides a forum for the most recent research into the political, social, and ecclesiastical history of the century, and complements earlier series from Boydell & Brewer, Anglo-Norman Studies and Thirteenth Century England, which taken together offer a complete overview of debate on the middle ages. The substantial and significant studies in this volume have a particular focus on political history, including...

This book illuminates the world of medieval gentry families through examination of the magnificent brasses and monuments of the Cobham family. Nigel Saul's compelling study provides a window onto the social and religious culture of the middle ages and offers a new paradigm for the study of medieval church monuments.

Lordship and Faith takes as its subject the many hundreds of parish churches built in England in the Middle Ages by the gentry, the knights and esquires, and the lords of country manors. Nigel Saul uses lordly engagement with the parish church as a way of opening up the piety and sociability of the gentry, focusing on the gentry as founders and builders of churches, worshippers in them, holders of church advowsons, and patrons and sponsors of parish communities. Saul also looks at how the gentry's interest in the parish church sat alongside their patronage of the monks and friars,...