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This book traces the development of a group of anonymous, vernacular, annalistic chronicles—‘the Anglo-Saxon chronicles’—from their genesis at the court of King Alfred to their end at the Fenland monastery of Peterborough. It reconsiders them in the light of wider European scholarship on the politics of history-writing. It covers all surviving manuscript chronicles, with detailed attention being paid to palaeography, layout, and content, and identifies key lost texts. It is concerned with production, scribe-authors, patrons, and audiences. The centuries these chronicles cover were critical to the making of England and saw its conquest by Scandinavians and Normans. They have long been part of the English national story. The book considers the impact of this on their study and editing. It stresses their multiplicity, whilst identifying a tradition of writing vernacular history. It sees that tradition as an expression of the ideology of a southern elite engaged in the conquest and assimilation of old kingdoms north of the Thames, Trent, and Humber. The book connects many chronicles to bishops and especially to archbishops of York and Canterbury. Vernacular chronicling is seen, not as propaganda, but as engaged history-writing closely connected to the court, whose networks and personnel were central to the production of chronicles and their continuation. The disappearance of the English-speaking elite after the Norman Conquest had profound impacts on them, repositioning their authors in relation to the court and royal power, and ultimately resulting in the end of the tradition of vernacular chronicling.

This book is the first to investigate how Anglo‐Saxon society dealt with social outcasts. The study begins in the period immediately following Roman rule and ends in the century following the Norman Conquest. This period, the 5th to 11th centuries, witnessed the conversion to Christianity, the emergence of the late Saxon state, and the development of the landscape of Domesday Book. While the study of early Anglo‐Saxon cemeteries and churchyards of the Christian period is well established, a substantial body of excavated and documented evidence for human burial in a range of other contexts has remained neglected until now. This book thus reveals for the first time a nuanced and varied approach to burial rites in Anglo‐Saxon England, particularly relating to individuals cast out from mainstream society. Although impressive written evidence survives, archaeology is uniquely placed to investigate the earliest period of post‐Roman society, the 5th to 7th centuries, where documents are lacking and to provide an independent assessment of documented situations in the later part of the period. The landscape setting of unusual human burials provides insights into the chronology of territorial arrangements and how features such as boundaries and pre‐existing monuments, such as barrows and linear earthworks, were perceived by the Anglo‐Saxons. Overall, the book argues that modes of outcast burial show a clear pattern of development from the pre‐Christian centuries, where deviant burials are found only in community cemeteries, to a situation whereby locally determined rites, such as crossroads burial, existed alongside formal measures imposed from the 7th century ad in the context of kingdom formation.

Farming was the basis of the wealth that made England worth invading, twice, in the eleventh century. This book uses a wide range of evidence to investigate how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food and other agricultural products that sustained English economy, society and culture before the Norman Conquest. Part one draws on written and pictorial sources, archaeology, place-names and the history of the English language to discover what crops and livestock people raised, and what tools and techniques were used to produce them. In part two, a series of landscape studies explores how these could have been combined into working agricultural regimes in different parts of the country, using place-names, maps and the landscape itself. A picture emerges of an agriculture that changed from an essentially prehistoric state in the sub-Roman period to what was recognisably the beginning of a tradition that only ended with the Second World War. Anglo-Saxon farming was not only sustainable, because it had to be, but infinitely adaptable, to different soils and geology, and to a climate changing as unpredictably as it is today.

It has long been assumed that England lay outside the Western European tradition of castle-building until after the Norman Conquest of 1066. It is now becoming apparent that Anglo-Saxon lords were constructing free-standing towers at their residences all across England during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Initially these towers were exclusively of timber, and quite modest in scale. There followed the ‘tower-nave’ churches, towers with only a tiny chapel located inside, which appear to have had a dual function as buildings of elite worship and symbols of secular power and authority. This book gathers together the evidence for these remarkable buildings, many of which still stand incorporated into the fabric of Norman and later parish churches and castles. It traces their origin in monasteries, where kings and bishops drew upon Continental European practice to construct centrally planned, tower-like chapels for private worship and burial, and to mark gates and important entrances, particularly within the context of the tenth-century Monastic Reform. Adopted by the secular aristocracy to adorn their own manorial sites, many of the known examples would have provided strategic advantage as watchtowers over roads, rivers, and beacon systems, and acted as focal points for the mustering of troops. The tower-nave form persisted into early Norman England, where it may have influenced a variety of high-status building types. The aim of this book is to establish the tower-nave as an important Anglo-Saxon building type, and to explore the social, architectural, and landscape contexts in which they operated.

Association in a guild or fraternity was an extremely common experience in medieval Europe. This book asks why so many people wished to belong to these highly miscellaneous groups (only rarely confined to a single craft), whose social diversity was of their essence. It finds a partial answer in the challenging material circumstances of the later Middle Ages, but a fuller one in contemporary debates surrounding the identity and fulfilment of the individual, and the problematic question of his or her relationship to a larger society. These debates are contextualized in a longer history which continues to be pertinent today. Unlike previous studies, the book’s focus is not on the guilds as institutions but on the social and moral processes which were catalysed by participation. These bodies are shown to have founded schools, built bridges, managed almshouses, governed small towns, shaped religious ritual, and commemorated the dead. Informing and transcending all of these activities, however, was the perception that association in a fraternity could be a catalyst of personal change. Members cultivated friendship between individuals on the understanding that the fulfilment of human potential depended upon a mutually transformative engagement with others. The peasants, artisans, and professionals who joined the guilds sought to change both their society and themselves. The study sheds light on the conception and construction of society in the Middle Ages, and suggests further that this evidence has implications for how we see ourselves.

This book explores the origins and development of regional variation in landscape character across southern Britain during the medieval period. The ‘long eighth century’, between the late seventh and the early ninth centuries, is highlighted as having seen significant changes in how the countryside was managed, with further developments around the tenth century. While villages and open fields were created in the central zone of England (for example in the East Midlands down as far as Somerset), there were also significant changes with regard to how the landscape was exploited and managed in areas such as the south‐west of England and East Anglia. A number of major boundaries in landscape character are identified, such as the Blackdown and Quantock Hills in the South‐West, and the Gipping and Lark valleys in East Anglia, and it is suggested that these have their origins in the pre‐medieval period. In the twelfth century the concept of managing the landscape through villages and open fields was exported into newly conquered southern Wales where major differences in landscape character reflect areas of English, Welsh, and Flemish settlement.

In thirteenth-century England, circumstance and personality converged to produce an episcopate uncommonly dedicated not only to its pastoral mission but also to the defence of the kingdom and the oversight of royal government. This cohort was bound by corporate solidarity and possessed an authority to reform the king—and so influence political events—unknown to the episcopates of other kingdoms. These bishops took a central part in the dramatic events of the reigns of King John and Henry III, throughout rebellion, civil war, and invasion from France, and the turbulent years of minority government and Henry’s early personal rule. They acted as peacemakers, supporting royal power when it was threatened, for the sake of regnal peace, but also using their unique authority to reform the king when his illegal actions threatened to provoke his barons to rebellion. This situation changed, however, between 1258 and 1265, when around half of England’s bishops set aside their loyalty to the king and joined a group of magnates, led by Simon de Montfort, in England’s first revolution, appropriating royal powers in order to establish a new form of government: conciliar rule. As members of Montfort’s regime, they helped to govern England, as well as constructing arguments to justify the new order. This book examines the interaction between the bishops’ actions on the ground and their culture, identity, and political thought. In so doing it reveals how the Montfortian bishops were forced to construct a new philosophy of power in the crucible of political crisis.

This book overturns many of the traditional assumptions about the nature and purpose of castle-building in the middle ages. It demolishes the traditional belief that castles were overwhelmingly military in their function, showing how this was simply one aspect of a more complicated whole, and sets out to recreate the medieval understanding of castles as symbolically fortified places of all kinds. It places castles in the context of medieval culture and society, as ancient walled post-Roman towns and prestigious religious enclaves to transitory campaign forts. Going back to the original sources, the book proposes a new and subtler understanding of the function and symbolism of castles as well as insights into the lives of the people who inhabited them. Fortresses were only occasionally caught up in war, but constantly were central to the ordinary life of all classes: of the nobility and gentry, of widows and heiresses, of prelates and clergy, of peasantry and townspeople alike. The book presents and explores this broad social panorama.

London’s civic ceremonies marked the relationships between the mayors and the crown, but also between denizens and their government, gild wardens and members, masters and apprentices, and parishioners and their church. London, like all premodern cities, was made up of immigrants. The number of people who were citizens (who enjoyed the “freedom of the city”) was a small proportion of the inhabitants. The newly arrived had to be taught the civic culture of the city so that the city could function peacefully. Ritual and ceremony played a key role in the acculturation process. In a society in which hierarchical authority was most commonly determined by the inheritance of title and office or sanctified by ordination, elected civic officials relied on rituals to cement their authority, power, and dominance. Since the term of office was a year, the election and inauguration of city officials had to be very public, and the robes of office had to distinguish the officers so that everyone would know who they were. Apprentices entering the city to take up a trade were educated in civic culture by their masters. Gilds also provided experience in leadership through gild governance. Again, rituals, oath swearing, and distinctive livery marked their belonging. Those who rebelled against authority and who broke the civic ordinances were made spectacles of through ritual humiliations so that others could learn from their example. At the parish level, and even at the level of the street, civic behavior was taught through example, proclamations, and ballads.

This book provides the first comprehensive study of city‐states in medieval Europe for more than a century. Rather than highlighting the political and cultural achievements of city‐states, above all those of central and northern Italy, it offers a detailed comparison of city‐states in an urban belt which spanned the Alps from Italy to Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries, focusing on their territorial expansion: Why, how, and with what consequences did cities as communal polities succeed (or fail) in their efforts to construct landed territories and so become sovereign states in their own right. For the first time there is full coverage of the Swiss city‐states and the imperial cities of Germany. In contrast to the typologies of city‐states put forward by social and political scientists the study argues that city‐states were not a spent force in early modern Europe, but survived by transformation and adaption. Furthermore, it suggests that a historical framework for the city‐state which embraces both time and space should be sought in a regional approach which does not treat city‐states in isolation but within their wider geopolitical context.

This book argues that Duke William of Normandy's claim to succeed Edward the Confessor on the throne of England profoundly influenced not only the practice of royal succession, but also played a large part in creating a novel structure of land tenure, dependent on the king. In these two fundamental respects, the attempt made in the aftermath of the Conquest to demonstrate seamless continuity with Anglo-Saxon England severed almost all continuity. A notable result was a society in which instability in succession at the top exacerbated instability lower down. The first serious attempt to address these problems began when arrangements were made, in 1153, for the succession to King Stephen. Henry II duly succeeded him, but claimed rather to have succeeded his grandfather, Henry I, Stephen's predecessor. Henry II's attempts to demonstrate continuity with his grandfather were modeled on William the Conqueror's treatment of Edward the Confessor. Just as William's fabricated history had been the foundation for the tenurial settlement recorded in Domesday Book, so Henry II's, in a different way, underpinned the early common law procedures which began to undermine aspects of that settlement. The official history of the Conquest played a crucial role not only in creating a new society, but in the development of that society.

We are born and die alone, and are often alone in between. But this is true of all human beings, in their millions. So in another sense we are not alone at all, quite the opposite. To manage other shared problems our species has devised organisms specific to each. The organisms specific to our shared solitudes are religions. Because of the paradox in which they originate, religions have a double character: private and public. There is no clearer example than Christianity. It could never have come into existence without some degree of organization, with its half-dozen early members or, thanks to development of Roman and Jewish traditions, millions. But the whole purpose of the organization was to cultivate, in each member, responses essentially private, known only to God. The public and private elements in Christianity are always in tension, usually a creative one; but sometimes not. Murray’s five essays, produced for various occasions, consider different aspects of this tension, creative or otherwise, in the western church between, approximately, the millennium and 1300.

The king of England was also ‘lord of Ireland’ throughout the late Middle Ages, but the reach of royal power in Ireland contracted from the fourteenth century onwards. In the parts of the country that had been most densely colonized in the decades around 1200, however, political and cultural ties with England remained strong. One such area was Louth, situated on the coast north of Dublin and adjacent to the earldom of Ulster. The settlers there maintained links with England in part because of the presence of the significant trading port of Drogheda. The residence among them of the archbishop of Armagh, primate of Ireland, also extended their international horizons. Their sense of English identity was strengthened rather than weakened by the challenges they faced. The Black Death of 1348–9, and recurrent visitations of plague thereafter, reduced their numbers significantly, and encouraged the Irish lordships on their borders to challenge their local supremacy. How to counter this threat absorbed their energies and resources. It involved not only mounting armed campaigns and building small stone castles, but also intermarrying with their Irish enemies and entering into solemn, if short-lived, treaties with them. The frontier coloured every aspect of settler life, and local families jostled with each other, sometimes murderously, in this dangerous borderland of the English world.

This book uses manorial account rolls innovatively to reconstruct the economic mentalities of medieval farmers and, by so doing, argues that they have been unfairly stereotyped. It overturns the traditional view of medieval countrymen as economically backward and instead reveals that agricultural decision-making was as rational in the 14th and 15th centuries as in modern times. It investigates agricultural mentalities first in a detailed case study of the exceptionally well-documented demesne farm of Wisbech Barton, analysing the sale and consumption of produce, cereal-cropping strategies, crop rotations, the use of agrarian techniques, and livestock husbandry in four periods between 1313 and 1429. The last third of the book then tests the findings of this case study across medieval England as a whole. The book argues that human action shaped the course of the rural economy to a much greater extent than has hitherto been appreciated, and challenges the commonly held view that the medieval period was dominated by ecological and economic crises. In particular, it argues that rational decision-making rather than soil exhaustion or climatic change lay behind declining arable and pastoral yields at this time, and that the change in demesne management from direct cultivation to leasing during the later Middle Ages was partly the result of a managerial crisis. Although focused chiefly on well-documented farms of great landlords, the book also has crucial implications for our understanding of medieval peasant farming, not least the yield of their land, which may well have been significantly higher than is generally assumed.

Heresy was the most feared crime in the medieval moral universe. It was seen as a social disease capable of poisoning the body politic and shattering the unity of the church. The study of heresy in late medieval England has, to date, focussed largely on the heretics. In consequence, we know very little about how this crime was defined by the churchmen who passed authoritative judgement on it. By examining the drafting, publicizing, and implementing of new laws against heresy using published and unpublished judicial records, this book presents a study of inquisition in medieval England. It argues that because heresy was a problem simultaneously national and local, detection relied upon collaboration between rulers and the ruled. While involvement in detection brought local society into contact with the apparatus of government, uneducated laymen still had to be kept at arm's length because judgements about heresy were deemed too subtle and important to be left to them. Detection required bishops and inquisitors to balance reported suspicions against canonical proof, and threats to public safety against the rights of the suspect and the deficiencies of human justice. The major figures in the prosecution of heresy were Thomas Arundel and Henry Chichele, archbishops of Canterbury. At present, the character and significance of lollardy, the heresy associated with John Wyclif, in late medieval England is the subject of much debate. The book considers that this debate has to be informed by a greater awareness of the legal and social contexts within which heresy took on its many real and imagined attributes.

This book challenges the familiar view that Gaelic Scotland and Gaelic Ireland formed a cultural unit during the late middle ages and early modern period. Many commentators have emphasized the strong cultural and political ties that bound the ‘sea-divided’ Gaels together during this era, when Scottish Gaels supplied crucial military forces to the Gaelic Irish chiefs, and poets and learned men travelled extensively between the two countries. This book tests this view of a unified Gaelic ‘culture-province’ by examination of the surviving sources, especially formal bardic poetry. Although the evidence is patchy and occasionally contradictory, the book is able to show that Ireland was culturally dominant. While Scottish Gaeldom attached great significance to the Irish connection, viewing Ireland as the wellspring of historical and cultural prestige, Irish Gaeldom, the book argues, perceived Scotland as distant and peripheral.

This work examines the unique volumes called Domesday Book and the extraordinary survey which preceded them. Early chapters consider the architects of the enterprise: the bishops, royal clerks, sheriffs, jurors, and landholders who contributed to Domesday’s content and scope, and considers the question of a mastermind. A further four chapters are devoted to the core information in the Book: coinage, revenues from landholding, taxation and fiscal concessions, and to tenurial issues. Their record, while consolidating William the Conqueror’s position as king of the English, also laid the foundations for the twelfth-century Treasury and Exchequer. The book argues that the Domesday survey was also an inquest into individual sheriffs and officials; this affected the character of the data in Domesday, particularly in the matter of the boroughs. It discusses, too, how Domesday Book’s different contemporary names shed light upon its functions. Domesday Book is viewed here as the written evidence of a possibly ephemeral military conquest transforming itself into a permanent establishment, a conquest which used the Inquiry not only to cement its landholding revolution, but also to contain that new establishment within a strict fiscal and administrative framewor It is suggested that in certain respects the Survey constituted some sort of modus vivendi between conquerors and conquered. Whilst the subject matter is practical and material, the overlying theme is judgement: all classes in society, apart from the fully servile, had reason to regard the Survey’s proceedings as both a literal and a metaphorical day of account.