A Social History of England, 900–1200

A Social History of England, 900–1200 PDF Author: Julia Crick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139500856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
The years between 900 and 1200 saw transformative social change in Europe, including the creation of extensive town-dwelling populations and the proliferation of feudalised elites and bureaucratic monarchies. In England these developments were complicated and accelerated by repeated episodes of invasion, migration and changes of regime. In this book, scholars from disciplines including history, archaeology and literature reflect on the major trends which shaped English society in these years of transition and select key themes which encapsulate the period. The authors explore the landscape of England, its mineral wealth, its towns and rural life, the health, behaviour and obligations of its inhabitants, patterns of spiritual and intellectual life and the polyglot nature of its population and culture. What emerges is an insight into the complexity, diversity and richness of this formative period of English history.

A Social History of England, 900–1200

A Social History of England, 900–1200 PDF Author: Julia Crick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139500856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471

Get Book Here

Book Description
The years between 900 and 1200 saw transformative social change in Europe, including the creation of extensive town-dwelling populations and the proliferation of feudalised elites and bureaucratic monarchies. In England these developments were complicated and accelerated by repeated episodes of invasion, migration and changes of regime. In this book, scholars from disciplines including history, archaeology and literature reflect on the major trends which shaped English society in these years of transition and select key themes which encapsulate the period. The authors explore the landscape of England, its mineral wealth, its towns and rural life, the health, behaviour and obligations of its inhabitants, patterns of spiritual and intellectual life and the polyglot nature of its population and culture. What emerges is an insight into the complexity, diversity and richness of this formative period of English history.

A Social History of England

A Social History of England PDF Author: Asa Briggs
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140136067
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Ranging widely over time and place, Asa Briggs highlights continuities and changes in society in England from prehistory to the present day. Literature, art and politics are investigated as aspects and gauges of human experience, research in related disciplines is discussed and changes in historical interpretations explained. The author also offers his own, personal, view of social history.

The English and Their History

The English and Their History PDF Author: Robert Tombs
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101873361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1106

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Book Description
Named a Book of the Year by the Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, The Times, Spectator, and The Economist The English first materialized as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. From the armed Saxon bands that descended onto Roman-controlled Britain in the fifth century to the travails of the Eurozone plaguing the prime-ministership of today's multicultural England, acclaimed historian Robert Tombs presents a momentous and challenging history of a people who have a claim to be the oldest nation in existence. Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship, Tombs sheds light on the strength and resilience of English governance, the deep patterns of division among the people who have populated the British Isles, the persistent capacity of the English to come together in the face of danger, and not the least the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it and yet been shaped by it. Momentous and definitive, The English and Their History is the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century.

Forging the Kingdom

Forging the Kingdom PDF Author: Judith A. Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521193591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A study of English society and political culture that casts new light on the significance of the Norman Conquest.

A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century

A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century PDF Author: Mark Faulkner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009033093
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century offers a new narrative of what happened to English language writing in the long twelfth century, the period that saw the end of the Old English tradition and the beginning of Middle English writing. It discusses numerous neglected or unknown texts, focusing particularly on documents, chronicles and sermons. To tell the story of this pivotal period, it adopts approaches from both literary criticism and historical linguistics, finding a synthesis for them in a twenty-first century philology. It develops new methodologies for addressing major questions about twelfth-century texts, including when they were written, how they were read and their relationship to earlier works. Essential reading for anyone interested in what happened to English after the Norman Conquest, this study lays the groundwork for the coming decade's work on transitional English.

The Natural History of Blenheim’s High Park

The Natural History of Blenheim’s High Park PDF Author: Aljos Farjon
Publisher: Pelagic Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1784274313
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 619

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Book Description
High Park, at Blenheim in Oxfordshire UK, is a SSSI of great significance for its numerous ancient oaks and the organisms associated with these trees. This book gives a detailed, lavishly illustrated and thoroughly researched description of the biodiversity and natural history of what is by several measures the most significant site for ancient oaks in Europe. It draws together the expertise of more 60 specialists, and reports on the results of in-depth surveys of High Park. Chapters cover different groups, including: flora (including bryophytes), fungi, lichens, molluscs, arachnids, flies, hymenoptera, butterflies, moths, beetles – with a special focus on saproxylic species, bugs, reptiles and amphibians, birds and mammals. Despite their undoubted importance, very few sites with ancient oaks in England, the most important European country for these magnificent trees, have seen a comprehensive published account, adding to the value of this study. Several of the contributing authors describe their survey techniques in some detail, some of which are not widely known. Records are analysed in the various chapters and often compared with data from other similar sites. Overall, the book gives encouraging evidence of the great biodiversity still to be found in England, and should help to stimulate similar efforts to uncover the biodiversity and describe the natural history of ancient parkland and woodland, so that conservation of these sites can be based on firm scientific data.

The Archaeology of the 11th Century

The Archaeology of the 11th Century PDF Author: Dawn M Hadley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315312921
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The Archaeology of the 11th Century explores this formative period of English history and in particular the impact of the Conquest of England by the Normans. The volume examines how the Normans contributed to local culture, religion and society through a range of topics including food culture, funerary practices, the development of castles and their impact, and how both urban and rural life evolved during the eleventh century. Through its nuanced approach to the complex relationships and regional identities which characterized the period, this collection stimulates renewed debate and challenges some of the long-standing myths surrounding the Conquest.

The Narrow Corridor

The Narrow Corridor PDF Author: Daron Acemoglu
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224404
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
From the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics and the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail "Why is it so difficult to develop and sustain liberal democracy? The best recent work on this subject comes from a remarkable pair of scholars, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. In their latest book, The Narrow Corridor, they have answered this question with great insight." —Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued that countries rise and fall based not on culture, geography, or chance, but on the power of their institutions. In their new book, they build a new theory about liberty and how to achieve it, drawing a wealth of evidence from both current affairs and disparate threads of world history. Liberty is hardly the "natural" order of things. In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak and human freedom has been quashed by force or by customs and norms. Either states have been too weak to protect individuals from these threats, or states have been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate and precarious balance is struck between state and society. There is a Western myth that political liberty is a durable construct, arrived at by a process of "enlightenment." This static view is a fantasy, the authors argue. In reality, the corridor to liberty is narrow and stays open only via a fundamental and incessant struggle between state and society: The authors look to the American Civil Rights Movement, Europe’s early and recent history, the Zapotec civilization circa 500 BCE, and Lagos’s efforts to uproot corruption and institute government accountability to illustrate what it takes to get and stay in the corridor. But they also examine Chinese imperial history, colonialism in the Pacific, India’s caste system, Saudi Arabia’s suffocating cage of norms, and the “Paper Leviathan” of many Latin American and African nations to show how countries can drift away from it, and explain the feedback loops that make liberty harder to achieve. Today we are in the midst of a time of wrenching destabilization. We need liberty more than ever, and yet the corridor to liberty is becoming narrower and more treacherous. The danger on the horizon is not "just" the loss of our political freedom, however grim that is in itself; it is also the disintegration of the prosperity and safety that critically depend on liberty. The opposite of the corridor of liberty is the road to ruin.

The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature

The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature PDF Author: Clare A. Lees
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131617509X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 910

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Book Description
Informed by multicultural, multidisciplinary perspectives, The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature offers a new exploration of the earliest writing in Britain and Ireland, from the end of the Roman Empire to the mid-twelfth century. Beginning with an account of writing itself, as well as of scripts and manuscript art, subsequent chapters examine the earliest texts from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and the tremendous breadth of Anglo-Latin literature. Chapters on English learning and literature in the ninth century and the later formation of English poetry and prose also convey the profound cultural confidence of the period. Providing a discussion of essential texts, including Beowulf and the writings of Bede, this History captures the sheer inventiveness and vitality of early medieval literary culture through topics as diverse as the literature of English law, liturgical and devotional writing, the workings of science and the history of women's writing.

Danes in Wessex

Danes in Wessex PDF Author: Ryan Lavelle
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1782979328
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
There have been many studies of the Scandinavians in Britain, but this is the first collection of essays to be devoted solely to their engagement with Wessex. New work on the early Middle Ages, not least the excavations of mass graves associated with the Viking Age in Dorset and Oxford, drew attention to the gaps in our understanding of the wider impact of Scandinavians in areas of Britain not traditionally associated with them. Here, a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to the problems of their study is presented. While there may not have been the same degree of impact, discernible particularly in place-names and archaeology, as in those areas of Britain which had substantial influxes of Scandinavian settlers, Wessex was a major theater of the Viking wars in the reigns of Alfred and Æthelred Unræd. Two major topics, the Viking wars and the Danish landowning elite, figure strongly in this collection but are shown not to be the sole reasons for the presence of Danes, or items associated with them, in Wessex. Multidisciplinary approaches evoke Vikings and Danes not just through the written record, but through their impact on real and imaginary landscapes and via the objects they owned or produced. The papers raise wider questions too, such as when did aggressive Vikings morph into more acceptable Danes, and what issues of identity were there for natives and incomers in a province whose founders were believed to have also come from North Sea areas, if not from parts of Denmark itself? Readers can continue for themselves aspects of these broader debates that will be stimulated by this fascinating and significant series of studies by both established scholars and new researchers.