Rancor & Reconciliation in Medieval England

Rancor & Reconciliation in Medieval England PDF Author: Paul R. Hyams
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801439964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Duels and bloodfeuds have long been regarded as essentially Continental phenomena, counter to the staid and orderly British ways of settling differences. In this surprising work of social and legal history, Paul R. Hyams reveals a post-Conquest England not all that different from the realms across the Channel. Drawing on a wide range of texts and the long history of argument about these texts, Hyams shatters the myth of English exceptionalism, the notion that while feud and vengeance prevailed in the lands of the Franks, England had advanced beyond such anarchic barbarism by the time of the Conquest and forged a centralized political and legal system. This book provides support for the notion that feud and vengeance flourished in England long beyond the Conquest, and that this fact obliges us to reconsider the genealogies of both common law and the English monarchy.Moving back and forth between a broad overview of 300 years of legal history and the details of specific disputes, Hyams attends to the demands of individuals who believed that they had been aggrieved and sought remedy. He shows how individuals perceived particular acts of violence and responded to them. These reactions, in turn, sparked central efforts to manage disputes and thereby establish law and order. Respectable litigation, however, never eclipsed the danger of direct action, often violent and physical.

Rancor & Reconciliation in Medieval England

Rancor & Reconciliation in Medieval England PDF Author: Paul R. Hyams
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801439964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Duels and bloodfeuds have long been regarded as essentially Continental phenomena, counter to the staid and orderly British ways of settling differences. In this surprising work of social and legal history, Paul R. Hyams reveals a post-Conquest England not all that different from the realms across the Channel. Drawing on a wide range of texts and the long history of argument about these texts, Hyams shatters the myth of English exceptionalism, the notion that while feud and vengeance prevailed in the lands of the Franks, England had advanced beyond such anarchic barbarism by the time of the Conquest and forged a centralized political and legal system. This book provides support for the notion that feud and vengeance flourished in England long beyond the Conquest, and that this fact obliges us to reconsider the genealogies of both common law and the English monarchy.Moving back and forth between a broad overview of 300 years of legal history and the details of specific disputes, Hyams attends to the demands of individuals who believed that they had been aggrieved and sought remedy. He shows how individuals perceived particular acts of violence and responded to them. These reactions, in turn, sparked central efforts to manage disputes and thereby establish law and order. Respectable litigation, however, never eclipsed the danger of direct action, often violent and physical.

Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500

Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500 PDF Author: Karl Shoemaker
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823232689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Sanctuary law has not received very much scholarly attention. According to the prevailing explanation among earlier generations of legal historians, sanctuary was an impediment to effective criminal law and social control but was made necessary by rampant violence and weak political order in the medieval world. Contrary to the conclusions of the relatively scant literature on the topic, Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500 argues that the practice of sanctuary was not simply an instrumental device intended as a response to weak and splintered medieval political authority. Nor can sanctuary laws be explained as simple ameliorative responses to harsh medieval punishments and the specter of uncontrolled blood-feuds. --

Excommunication in Thirteenth-Century England

Excommunication in Thirteenth-Century England PDF Author: Felicity Hill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198840365
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
Excommunication was the medieval churchâs most severe sanction, used against people at all levels of society. It was a spiritual, social, and legal penalty. Excommunication in Thirteenth-Century England offers a fresh perspective on medieval excommunication by taking a multi-dimensional approach to discussion of the sanction. Using England as a case study, Felicity Hill analyzes the intentions behind excommunication; how it was perceived and received, at both national and local level; the effects it had upon individuals and society. The study is structured thematically to argue that our understanding of excommunication should be shaped by how it was received within the community as well as the intentions of canon law and clerics. Challenging past assumptions about the inefficacy of excommunication, Hill argues that the sanction remained a useful weapon for the clerical elite: bringing into dialogue a wide range of source material allows âeffectivenessâ to be judged within a broader context. The complexity of political communication and action are revealed through public, conflicting, accepted and rejected excommunications. Excommunication could be manipulated to great effect in political conflicts and was an important means by which political events were communicated down the social strata of medieval society. Through its exploration of excommunication, the book reveals much about medieval cursing, pastoral care, fears about the afterlife, social ostracism, shame and reputation, and mass communication.

Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages

Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages PDF Author: Linda Clark
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781843832706
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The most crucial issues in current research are debated in the latest volume in the series. The essays collected here provide fresh insight into a range of important topics across the period. They discuss religion([both orthodox, as revealed by the lives of anchoresses living in Norwich, and heretical, as practised by lollards living in Coventry); politics (exploring the motivations of individuals seeking election to parliament, and how the way Cade's Rebellion was recorded by contemporaries affected its subsequent perception); law (whether it may be deduced from manorial court rolls that lawyers were employed by peasants, and an examination of the process of peace-making in feuds on the Scottish border); national, ethnic and political identity in the British Isles; social ranking and chivalry (in particular knighthood in Scotland); and verse (a consideration of the poem Lydgate addressed to Thomas Chaucer, and the occasion of its composition). Contributors: JACKSON W. ARMSTRONG, JACQUELYN FERNHOLTZ, TONY GOODMAN, DAVID GRUMMITT, CAROLE HILL, MAUREEN JURKOWSKI, JENNI NUTTALL, SIMON PAYLING, ANDREA RUDDICK, KATIE STEVENSON, MATTHEW TOMPKINS

Disputing Strategies in Medieval Scandinavia

Disputing Strategies in Medieval Scandinavia PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900422159X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
In Scandinavia the study of disputes is still a relatively new topic: The papers offered here discuss how conflicts were handled in Scandinavian societies in the Middle Ages before the emergence of strong centralized states. What strategies did people use to contest power, property, rights, honour, and other kinds of material or symbolic assets? Seven essays by Scandinavian scholars are supplemented by contributions from Stephen White, John Hudson and Gerd Althoff, to provide a new baseline for discussing both the strategies pursued in the political game and those used to settle local disputes. Using practice and process as key analytical concepts, these authors explore formal law and litigation in conjunction with non-formal legal proceedings such as out-of-court mediation, rituals, emotional posturing, and feuding. Their insights place the Northern medieval world in a European context of dispute studies. With introductory sections on social structure, sources materials, and the historiography of Scandinavian dispute studies. Contributors are Gerd Althoff, Catharina Andersson, Kim Esmark, Lars Ivar Hansen, Lars Hermanson, John Hudson, Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Hans Jacob Orning, Helle Vogt and Stephen D. White.

The Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland

The Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland PDF Author: Lindy Brady
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009225650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The inhabitants of early medieval Britain and Ireland shared the knowledge that the region held four peoples and the awareness that they must have originally come from 'elsewhere'. The Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland studies these peoples' origin stories, an important genre that has shaped national identity and collective history from the early medieval period to the present day. These multilingual texts share many common features that repay their study as a genre, but have previously been isolated as four disparate traditions and used to argue for the long roots of current nationalisms. Yet they were not written or read in isolation during the medieval period. Individual narratives were in constant development, written and rewritten to respond to other texts. This book argues that insular origin legends developed together to flesh out the history of the insular region as a whole.

The Secular Clergy in England, 1066-1216

The Secular Clergy in England, 1066-1216 PDF Author: Hugh M. Thomas
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198702566
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
The secular clergy - priests and other clerics outside of monastic orders - were among the most influential and powerful groups in European society during the central Middle Ages. The secular clergy got their title from the Latin word for world, saeculum, and secular clerics kept the Church running in the world beyond the cloister wall, with responsibility for the bulk of pastoral care and ecclesiastical administration. This gave them enormous religious influence, although they were considered too worldly by many contemporary moralists - trying, for instance, to oppose the elimination of clerical marriage and concubinage. Although their worldliness created many tensions, it also gave the secular clergy much worldly influence. Contemporaries treated elite secular clerics as equivalent to knights, and some were as wealthy as minor barons. Secular clerics had a huge role in the rise of royal bureaucracy, one of the key historical developments of the period. They were instrumental to the intellectual and cultural flowering of the twelfth century, the rise of the schools, the creation of the book trade, and the invention of universities. They performed music, produced literature in a variety of genres and languages, and patronized art and architecture. Indeed, this volume argues that they contributed more than any other group to the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Yet the secular clergy as a group have received almost no attention from scholars, unlike monks, nuns, or secular nobles. In The Secular Clergy in England, 1066-1216, Hugh Thomas aims to correct this deficiency through a major study of the secular clergy below the level of bishop in England from 1066 to 1216.

King Alfred's Book of Laws

King Alfred's Book of Laws PDF Author: Todd Preston
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786491043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
During the early Middle Ages, King Alfred (reigned 871-99) gained fame as the ruler who brought learning back to England after decades of Viking invasion. Although analysis of Alfred's canon typically focuses on his religious and philosophical texts, his relatively overlooked law code, or Domboc, reveals much about his rule, and how he was perceived in subsequent centuries. Joining major voices in the fields of early English law and literature, this exploration of King Alfred's influential text traces its evolution from its 9th century origins to reappearances in the 11th, 12th, and 16th centuries. Alfred's use of the vernacular and representation of secular practices, this work contends, made the Domboc an ideal text for establishing a particularly "English" national identity.

Royal Rage and the Construction of Anglo-Norman Authority, c. 1000-1250

Royal Rage and the Construction of Anglo-Norman Authority, c. 1000-1250 PDF Author: Kate McGrath
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030112233
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
This book explores how eleventh- and twelfth-century Anglo-Norman ecclesiastical authors attributed anger to kings in the exercise of their duties, and how such attributions related to larger expansions of royal authority. It argues that ecclesiastical writers used their works to legitimize certain displays of royal anger, often resulting in violence, while at the same time deploying a shared emotional language that also allowed them to condemn other types of displays. These texts are particularly concerned about displays of anger in regard to suppressing revolt, ensuring justice, protecting honor, and respecting the status of kingship. In all of these areas, the role of ecclesiastical and lay counsel forms an important limit on the growth and expansion of royal prerogatives.

York

York PDF Author: Sarah Rees Jones
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191651575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
York was one of the most important cities in medieval England. This original study traces the development of the city from the Norman Conquest to the Black Death. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries are a neglected period in the history of English towns, and this study argues that the period was absolutely fundamental to the development of urban society and that up to now we have misunderstood the reasons for the development of York and its significance within our history because of that neglect. Medieval York argues that the first Norman kings attempted to turn the city into a true northern capital of their new kingdom and had a much more significant impact on the development of the city than has previously been realised. Nevertheless the influence of York Minster, within whose shadow the town had originally developed, remained strong and was instrumental in the emergence of a strong and literate civic communal government in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Many of the earlier Norman initiatives withered as the citizens developed their own institutions of government and social welfare. The primary sources used are records of property ownership and administration, especially charters, and combines these with archaeological evidence from the last thirty years. Much of the emphasis of the book is therefore on the topographical development of the city and the changing social and economic structures associated with property ownership and occupation.