Aims to study the age of Chaucer and the events that shaped his career, and to show how the age made the poet. It also pays considerable attention to the precise poetic means Chaucer used to produce his effects.

This book gives a picture of the daily and yearly round of the English peasant in the Middle Ages. H. S. Bennett explains the feudal system which linked the poor man to the soil and to the service of his lord and the church in a pattern of customary dues and rights, payments, labours and small privileges. The author gives lively details of the pattern of medieval country life: the influence of the seasons and the state of contemporary knowledge on the work of the fields; the place of religion in everyday life; the workings of feudal justice; popular attitudes to the social structure; the...

The Paston letters have long exercised a tremendous fascination for their capacity to recreate in vivid detail the lives of an ordinary well-to-do fifteenth-century family. H. S. Bennett's classic study recreates beautifully their historical context and offers the additional perspectives provided by the letters of their correspondents: bishops and serving men, prisoners and dukes, priests and ribald companions. Among the intriguing areas of late medieval life which are explored are marriage, women's lives, education, travelling, the law and lawlessness, the clergy and the changing face of the...

A history of books from Caxton to the incorporation of the Stationers' Company.

In this second volume of his classic English Books and Readers, first published in 1965, H. S. Bennett continues the story down to the end of the reign of Elizabeth I.

This third volume of English Books and Readers, first published in 1970, carries the story of the English book trade down to the eve of the Civil War.