Bridges, Law and Power in Medieval England, 700-1400

Bridges, Law and Power in Medieval England, 700-1400 PDF Author: Alan Cooper
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781846154508
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
From the time of Alfred the Great until beyond the end of the Middle Ages, bridges were vital to the rulers and people of England, but they were expensive and difficult to maintain. Who then was responsible for their upkeep? The answer to this question changes over the centuries, and the way in which it changes reveals much about law and power in medieval England. The development of law concerning the maintenance of bridges did not follow a straightforward line: legal ideas developed by the Anglo-Saxons, which had made the first age of bridge building possible, were rejected by the Normans, and royal lawyers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had to find new solutions to the problem. The fate of famous bridges, especially London Bridge, shows the way in which the spiritual, historical and entrepreneurial imagination was pressed into service to find solutions; the fate of humbler bridges shows the urgency with which this problem was debated across the country. By concentrating on this aspect of practical governance and tracing it through the course of the Middle Ages, much is shown about the limitations of royal power and the creativity of the medieval legal mind. ALAN COOPER is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University.

Bridges, Law and Power in Medieval England, 700-1400

Bridges, Law and Power in Medieval England, 700-1400 PDF Author: Alan Cooper
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781846154508
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the time of Alfred the Great until beyond the end of the Middle Ages, bridges were vital to the rulers and people of England, but they were expensive and difficult to maintain. Who then was responsible for their upkeep? The answer to this question changes over the centuries, and the way in which it changes reveals much about law and power in medieval England. The development of law concerning the maintenance of bridges did not follow a straightforward line: legal ideas developed by the Anglo-Saxons, which had made the first age of bridge building possible, were rejected by the Normans, and royal lawyers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had to find new solutions to the problem. The fate of famous bridges, especially London Bridge, shows the way in which the spiritual, historical and entrepreneurial imagination was pressed into service to find solutions; the fate of humbler bridges shows the urgency with which this problem was debated across the country. By concentrating on this aspect of practical governance and tracing it through the course of the Middle Ages, much is shown about the limitations of royal power and the creativity of the medieval legal mind. ALAN COOPER is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University.

Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England

Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England PDF Author: John Blair
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199217157
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
A study of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman canals and waterways, this book is based on evidence surrounding the nature of water transport in the period. A collection of essays, this study unearths this neglected but important aspect of medieval engineering and economic growth.

An Encyclopaedia of British Bridges

An Encyclopaedia of British Bridges PDF Author: David McFetrich
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1526752964
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 1301

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Book Description
“An already impressive reference work has been made significantly more valuable . . . a well-illustrated alphabetized compendium of notable bridges.” —The Happy Pontist Bridges have a universal appeal as examples of man’s mastery of nature, from picturesque packhorse bridges to great spans stretching across broad estuaries, and the development of the technology that allows ever more audacious constructions is never-ending. Of the million or more bridges throughout Great Britain, David McFetrich has selected those that are significant in terms of their design, construction or location, or of their connections with people or events of history. His definitive book contains 1,600 separate entries for individual bridge sites or related groups of bridges covering more than 2,000 different structures, 165 general entries about different types of bridge and such topics as collapses and failures, and a summary of about 200 record-holding bridges in 50 different categories. The concise text is supported by more than 900 illustrations and diagrams. The result is a fascinating and readily accessible compendium. The Institute of Civil Engineers (ICA) is also on board. “A valuable resource to use . . . if you plan to visit some of these structures while on holiday or are merely planning a day out.” —East Yorkshire Family History Society “Well-written and researched and eminently readable . . . Because of the ubiquity of bridges throughout Great Britain, this volume should have wide appeal.” —NZ Crown Mines “Full of details covering the many bridges around the UK . . . I found it fascinating to see the variety of bridges around Britain, even the ones not railway related.” —Rail Advent

The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits

The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits PDF Author: James L. Smith
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 194744736X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
What strange transactions take place in the mobile spaces between loci? How does the flow of forces between fixed points enliven texts, suggest new connections, and map out the dizzying motion of myriad interactions? The essays in this volume were first presented at the 2014 New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland where a meeting of minds in a shared intermediate space initiated dialogue from diverse perspectives and wended its way through the invisible spaces between concrete categories, objects, and entities. The resulting volume asks a core question: what can we learn by tarrying at the nexus points and hubs through which things move in and out of texts, attempting to trace not the things themselves or their supposedly stable significations, but rather their forms of emergence and retreat, of disorder and disequilibrium? The answer is complex and intermediate, for we ourselves are emerging and retreating within our own systems of transit and experiencing our own disequilibrium. Scholarship, like transit, is never complete and yet never congeals into inertia. Through the manifold explorations of the dynamic transit, transports, scapes, and flows found within literary-and Chaucerian-thought-worlds, new vistas of motion and motivation emerge. Following John Urry's mobile sociology, the volume advances the notion that we can no longer view either social worlds or textual worlds as uniform surfaces upon which one can trace or write a history of the horizontal movements of humans and human mentalities; rather, everything is in constant motion: objects, images, information/ideas, and mobility is thus also vertical, involving human and non-human actants. The essays in this volume consider, then, how medieval literary texts in Chaucer's period rewarp time and space by the means of sophisticated transit and transport structures, which might be traced within specific works but also across works, such as in text networks. Motive entities within literature twist and turn, interact and collide, and destabilise predictable trajectories with unpredictable vigor. TABLE OF CONTENTS // James L. Smith, "Introduction: Transport, Scape, Flow: Medieval Transit Systems" - Christopher Roman, "Bios in The Prik of Conscience: The Apophatic Body and the Sensuous Soul" - Jennie Friedrich, "Concordia discors: The Traveling Heart as Foreign Object in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde" - Robert Stanton, "Whan I schal passyn hens: Moving With/In The Book of Margery Kempe" - Carolynn Van Dyke, "Animal Vehicles: Mobility beyond Metaphor" - Sarah Breckenridge Wright, "Building Bridges to Canterbury" - Thomas R. Schneider, "Chaucer's Physics: Motion in The House of Fame"

The Bridges of Medieval England

The Bridges of Medieval England PDF Author: David Harrison
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191556793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Medieval bridges are startling achievements of design and engineering comparable with the great cathedrals of the period, and are also proof of the great importance of road transport in the middle ages and of the size and sophistication of the medieval economy. David Harrison rewrites their history from early Anglo-Saxon England right up to the Industrial Revolution, providing new insights into many aspects of the subject. Looking at the role of bridges in the creation of a new road system, which was significantly different from its Roman predecessor and which largely survived until the twentieth century, he examines their design. Often built in the most difficult circumstances: broad flood plains, deep tidal waters, and steep upland valleys, they withstood all but the most catastrophic floods. He also investigates the immense efforts put into their construction and upkeep, ranging from the mobilization of large work forces by the old English state to the role of resident hermits and the charitable donations which produced bridge trusts with huge incomes. The evidence presented in The Bridges of Medieval England shows that the network of bridges, which had been in place since the thirteenth century, was capable of serving the needs of the economy on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. This has profound implications for our understanding of pre-industrial society, challenging accepted accounts of the development of medieval trade and communications, and bringing to the fore the continuities from the late Anglo-Saxon period to the eighteenth century. This book is essential reading for those interested in architecture, engineering, transport, and economics, and any historian sceptical about the achievements of medieval England.

The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540

The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 PDF Author: Graeme J. White
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441181474
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
The landscape of medieval England was the product of a multitude of hands. While the power to shape the landscape inevitably lay with the Crown, the nobility and the religious houses, this study also highlights the contribution of the peasantry in the layout of rural settlements and ridge-and-furrow field works, and the funding of parish churches by ordinary townsfolk. The importance of population trends is emphasised as a major factor in shaping the medieval landscape: the rising curve of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries imposing growing pressures on resources, and the devastating impact of the Black Death leading to radical decline in the fourteenth century. Opening with a broad-ranging analysis of political and economic trends in medieval England, the book progresses thematically to assess the impact of farming, rural settlement, towns, the Church, and fortification using many original case studies. The concluding chapter charts the end of the medieval landscape with the dissolution of the monasteries, the replacement of castles by country houses, the ongoing enclosure of fields, and the growth of towns.

Kingship and Consent in Anglo-Saxon England, 871–978

Kingship and Consent in Anglo-Saxon England, 871–978 PDF Author: Levi Roach
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107657202
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This engaging study focuses on the role of assemblies in later Anglo-Saxon politics, challenging and nuancing existing models of the late Anglo-Saxon state. Its ten chapters investigate both traditional constitutional aspects of assemblies - who attended these events, where and when they met, and what business they conducted - and the symbolic and representational nature of these gatherings. Levi Roach takes into account important recent work on continental rulership, and argues that assemblies were not a check on kingship in these years, but rather an essential feature of it. In particular, the author highlights the role of symbolic communication at assemblies, arguing that ritual and demonstration were as important in English politics as they were elsewhere in Europe. Far from being exceptional, the methods of rulership employed by English kings look very much like those witnessed elsewhere on the continent, where assemblies and ritual formed an essential part of the political order.

Domesday

Domesday PDF Author: Sally Harvey
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191648558
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Domesday: Book of Judgement provides a unique study of the extraordinary eleventh-century survey, the Domesday Book. Sally Harvey depicts the Domesday Book as the written evidence of a potentially insecure conquest successfully transforming itself, by a combination of administrative insight and military might, into a permanent establishment. William I used the Domesday Inquiry to contain the new establishment and consolidate their landholding revolution within a strict fiscal and tenurial framework, with checks and balances to prevent the king's followers from taking more powers and assets than they had been allocated. In this way, the survey served as a conciliatory gesture between the conquerors and the conquered, as William I came to realise that, faced with the threat to his rule from the Danes, he needed England's native populations more than they needed him. Yes, the overlying theme of the Domesday Book is Judgment: every class of society had reason to regard the Survey's methodical and often pitiless proceedings as both a literal and a metaphorical day of account. In this volume, Sally Harvey considers the Anglo-Saxon background and the architects of the survey: the bishops, royal clerks, sheriffs, jurors, and landholders who contributed to Domesday's content and scope. She also discusses at length the core information in the Survey: coinage, revenues from landholding, fiscal concessions, and taxation, as well as some central tenurial issues. She draws the conclusion that the record, whilst consolidating William's position as king of the English, also laid the foundations for the twelfth-century treasury and exchequer. The volume newly argues that the Domesday survey also became an inquest into individual sheriffs and officials, thereby laying a foundation for reinterpreting the size of towns in England.

Christian Compassion

Christian Compassion PDF Author: Monty L. Lynn
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725251167
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Although not always unswervingly, from antiquity until today, Christians have engaged in charity. As settings changed, compassion evolved, laying in place an ongoing mosaic of Christian ideas and institutions surrounding care. From the antique and medieval to the modern and contemporary, each age offers unique actors and insights into how compassion is viewed and achieved. We consider repeating motifs and novel appearances in the arc of Christian compassion which enlighten and inspire. Encountered on the journey are the formation and sacrifice of ancient Christians; an emphasis on virtues taught through sparing and sharing; the nascent social welfare of the Byzantine church; the sacralization and mobilization of a medieval church; innovative ideas from reformers who advance the role of the state; and modern movements in justice, peace, humanitarianism, mutual aid, and community development.

This Ancient Road

This Ancient Road PDF Author: Andrew Hudson
Publisher: eBook Partnership
ISBN: 191231729X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Roads shape our society and are shaped by it: they are a slice through history, a slice through landscape, and a slice through life. They are the most basic part of the transport network, used daily by most people, but their fascinating stories are largely ignored. This is the tale of one such road - the Holyhead Road - that runs through the heart and history of Britain. This road dates back to Roman times and has a rich history of battles and pilgrimages, trade and exploration. In the last two centuries its importance has waxed and waned, from the great days of the coaching trade, through decline with the advent of the railways, to coming back to life with the invention of the motor car. This Ancient Road is a truly fascinating journey through time. Nostalgic, informative, quirky and charming Andrew Hudson brings history to life in this marvellous debut.