The Story Of Medieval England

A thorough and well-illustrated history with eight long essays by leading scholars which cover the history and culture of England, rather than the British Isles, from the 5th to the 15th century. Contents: Medieval England - Identity, Politics and Society ( Nigel Saul ); Anglo-Saxon England ( Janet L Nelson ); Conquered England ( George Garnett ); Late Medieval England 1215-1485 ( Chris Given-Wilson ); Economy and Society ( Christopher Dyer ); Piety, Religion and the Church ( Henrietta Leyser ); The Visual Arts ( Nicola Coldstream ); Language and Literature ( Derek Pearsall ).

Imagine you were transported back in time to Medieval England and had to start a new life there. Without mobile phones, ipads, internet and social media networks, when transport means walking or, if you’re fortunate, horse-back, how will you know where you are or what to do? Where will you live? What is there to eat? What shall you wear? How can you communicate when nobody speaks as you do and what about money? Who can you go to if you fall ill or are mugged in the street? However can you fit into and thrive in this strange environment full of odd people who seem so different from you? All these questions and many more are answered in this new guide book for time-travellers: How to Survive in Medieval England. A handy self-help guide with tips and suggestions to make your visit to the Middle Ages much more fun, this lively and engaging book will help the reader deal with the new experiences they may encounter and the problems that might occur. Know the laws so you don’t get into trouble or show your ignorance in an embarrassing faux pas. Enjoy interviews with the celebrities of the day, from a business woman and a condemned felon, to a royal cook and King Richard III himself. Have a go at preparing medieval dishes and learn some new words to set the mood for your time-travelling adventure. Have an exciting visit but be sure to keep this book to hand.

The priorities of medieval chroniclers and historians were not those of the modern historian, nor was the way that they gathered, arranged and presented evidence. Yet if we understand how they approached their task, and their assumption of God's immanence in the world, much that they wrote becomes clear. Many of them were men of high intelligence whose interpretation of events sheds clear light on what happened. Christopher Given-Wilson is one of the leading authorities on medieval English historical writing. He examines how medieval writers such as Ranulf Higden and Adam Usk treated chronology and geography, politics and warfare, heroes and villains. He looks at the ways in which chronicles were used during the middle ages, and at how the writing of history changed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.

By drawing equally on the work of historians and archaeologists, Colin Platt puts forward a view of English medieval society in which there is much that is new and unexpected. Medieval England brings together a wide range of themes, from castle and palace to peasant hovel, from the great cathedrals and monasteries to the parish churches and `alien' cells. The book is fully illustrated, the pictures being an integral part of the text.For this re-issue Professor Platt has written a new preface which updates the work with a survay of archaeological and historical developments in the last decade.

A detailed survey which examines the major developments in English society during this period of social crises, population decline, agarian unrest, the introduction to enclosures - and political tensions particularly over succession.

1326 was one of the most dramatic years in English history. The queen of England, Isabella of France, invaded the country with an army of mercenaries to destroy her husband's powerful and detested lover, Hugh Despenser the Younger, and brought down her husband King Edward II in the process. It was also a year, however, when the majority of English people carried on living their normal, ordinary lives: Eleyne Glaswreghte ran her own successful glass-making business in London, Jack Cressing the master carpenter repaired the beams in a tower of Kenilworth Castle, Alis Coleman sold her best ale at a penny and a half for a gallon in Byfleet, and Will Muleward made the king 'laugh greatly' when he spent time with him at a wedding in Marlborough. England sweltered in one of the hottest, driest summers of the Middle Ages, a whale washed ashore at Walton-on-the-Naze, and the unfortunate John Toly died when he relieved himself out of the window of his London house at midnight, and lost his balance. Living in Medieval England: The Turbulent Year of 1326 tells the true and fascinating stories of the men and women alive in England in this most eventful year, narrated chronologically with a chapter devoted to each month.

This anthology brings together medieval documents and narratives illustrative of the political, social, economic, and cultural history of England during the Middle Ages. Authors and subjects included are both secular and clerical, male and female, mighty and low. Along with classic texts, such as the Domesday Book and Magna Carta, the collection also contains materials on less frequently addressed topics, such as the persecution of Jews, and the writings of a number of women, such as Margery of Kempe and Queen Isabella of Angoul?me.

In this collection of essays, Antonia Gransden brings out the virtues of medieval writers and highlights their attitudes and habits of thought. She traces the continuing influence of Bede, the greatest of early medieval English historians, from his death to the 16th century. Bede's clarity and authority were welcomed by generations of monastic historians. At the other end is a humble 14th-century chronicle produced at Lynn with little to add other than a few local references.

Explains the methods and knowledge to understand how and why paper was used in medieval writing and beyond.

Medieval England was a time of great change and uncertainty. Readers will be enthralled as they learn about various aspects of the Middle Ages in England including the feudal system, Hundred Years War, War of the Roses, and the bubonic plague. The detailed images and captivating facts and sidebars work in conjunction with easy-to-read text, glossary, and index to give readers an enjoyable and engaging reading experience that introduces them to such rulers as Henry II, Thomas Beckett, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Richard the Lion Hearted.

Originally published in 1952 The Lost Literature of Medieval England provides an account of lost masterpieces of medieval English literature. The book examines the evidence for their existence and pieces together a fuller understanding of the literary traditions of the period. In more specific detail, the book looks at the concept of Christian epics and religious and didactic literature, as well as the drama and the lyrical poetry of the period.

Medieval England presents the political and cultural development of English society from the Norman Conquest to the end of the Wars of the Roses. It is a story of change, progress, setback, and consolidation, with England emerging as a wealthy and stable country, many of whose essential features were to remain unchanged until the Industrial Revolution. Edmund King traces his chronicle through the lives of successive monarchs, the inescapable central thread of that epoch. The momentous events of the times are also recreated, from the compiling of the Domesday Book, through the wars with the Scots, the Welsh, and the French, to the Peasants' Revolt and the disastrous Black Death.

In this collection of essays, Antonia Gransden brings out the virtues of medieval writers and highlights their attitudes and habits of thought. She traces the continuing influence of Bede, the greatest of early medieval English historians, from his death to the sixteenth century. Bede's clarity and authority were welcomed by generations of monastic historians. At the other end is a humble fourteenth-century chronicle produced at Lynn with little to add other than a few local references.

The medieval north of England has been underexplored to date, and this volume may be seen as an invitation for further exploration. It brings together scholars with shared interests in language, literature, culture, history and manuscript studies, viewed from different disciplinary perspectives such as English philology, historical linguistics and medieval literature. While many scholars have thus far been debating the dividing lines between north and south as well as between north, Midlands and south, the contributors to this volume are interested in texts produced in the north, the providence of which has been determined by way of affiliation to religious and civic writing centres including the important monastic houses in the north (such as Durham, York and the Yorkshire Cistercian houses). Most of the contributions grow out of recent and ongoing research projects that touch upon different aspects of the north of England in the medieval period. Concentrating on the north as a centre of manuscript production, dissemination and reception, this volume aims also at illustrating the fluidity of boundaries and communication, and the resulting links to different geographical regions.

A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary NOTE: This edition does not include color images.

Based on new readings of some of the least-read texts by some of the best-known scribes of later medieval England, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England reconceptualizes medieval scribes as authors, and the texts surviving in medieval manuscripts as authored. Culling evidence from history writing in later medieval England, Matthew Fisher concludes that we must reject the axiomatic division between scribe and author. Using the peculiarities of authority and intertextuality unique to medieval historiography, Fisher exposes the rich ambiguities of what it means for medieval scribes to "write" books. He thus frames the composition, transmission, and reception--indeed, the authorship--of some medieval texts as scribal phenomena. History writing is an inherently intertextual genre: in order to write about the past, texts must draw upon other texts. Scribal Authorship demonstrates that medieval historiography relies upon quotation, translation, and adaptation in such a way that the very idea that there is some line that divides author from scribe is an unsustainable and modern critical imposition. Given the reality that a scribe's work was far more nuanced than the simplistic binary of error and accuracy would suggest, Fisher completely overturns many of our assumptions about the processes through which manuscripts were assembled and texts (both canonical literature and the less obviously literary) were composed.

“A fascinating study of the also-rans and almost-made-its of medieval history . . . Beautifully written and well researched, it is an engaging read.” —History . . . The Interesting Bits! When William the Conqueror died in 1087, he left the throne of England to William Rufus . . . his second son. The result was an immediate war as Rufus’s elder brother Robert fought to gain the crown he saw as rightfully his; this conflict marked the start of 400 years of bloody disputes as the English monarchy’s line of hereditary succession was bent, twisted and finally broken when the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, fell at Bosworth in 1485. The Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet dynasties were renowned for their internecine strife, and in Lost Heirs we will unearth the hidden stories of fratricidal brothers, usurping cousins and murderous uncles; the many kings—and the occasional queen—who should have been but never were. History is written by the winners, but every game of thrones has its losers too, and their fascinating stories bring richness and depth to what is a colorful period of history. King John would not have gained the crown had he not murdered his young nephew, who was in line to become England’s first King Arthur; Henry V would never have been at Agincourt had his father not seized the throne by usurping and killing his cousin; and as the rival houses of York and Lancaster fought bloodily over the crown during the Wars of the Roses, life suddenly became very dangerous indeed for a young boy named Edmund. “A journey through the minefield of opposing factions fighting for the crown of England.” —Books Monthly

A unique guide to all aspects of life in the Middle Ages.

Discover an original, entertaining and illuminating guide to a completely different world: England in the Middle Ages. Imagine you could travel back to the fourteenth century. What would you see, and hear, and smell? Where would you stay? What are you going to eat? And how are you going to test to see if you are going down with the plague? In The Time Traveller's Guide Ian Mortimer's radical new approach turns our entire understanding of history upside down. History is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived, whether that's the life of a peasant or a lord. The result is perhaps the most astonishing history book you are ever likely to read; as revolutionary as it is informative, as entertaining as it is startling. 'Ian Mortimer is the most remarkable medieval historian of our time' The Times 'After The Canterbury Tales this has to be the most entertaining book ever written about the middle ages' Guardian

The only A Level book on the market covering medieval History