Late Medieval England

The Language of Abuse provides the first comprehensive examination of marital violence in later medieval England. Drawing from a wide variety of legal and literary sources, this book develops a nuanced perspective of the acceptability of marital violence at a time when social expectations of gender and marriage were in transition. As such, Butler’s work contributes to current debates concerning the role of the jury, levels of violence in late medieval England, the power relationship within marriage, and the position of women in medieval society.

Available for $25, through Brill Mybook.

Published in "Fourteenth Century England", vol. VII, ed. M. Ormrod (2012).
This is about the lawyer from Toulouse Ramon Durand who served the king of England-duke of Aquitaine Edward II as lawyer, then as seneschal of Périgord and lieutenant of the seneschal of Gascony. He is more famous as seneschal of the Landes and has been one of the most important support of the king of England in Gascony. In this position he became knight and attempted to buy a lordship in the Basque Country. Sadly, he lost it to a cadet of the Albret family and was killed in the assault of a small town of the Landes in 1333.

The overt mercantilism of The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye has overshadowed important questions surrounding the poem’s purpose and literary form. As the work attempts to justify economic protectionism, its preoccupation with legal and bureaucratic practices breaks new ground for the hybrid genre of bill-poems. This article associates The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye with civilian bills, or libelli, and re-evaluates the immediate historical context surrounding the poem’s composition. The wealth and accuracy of economic, political, and legal information that is contained in the poem points to the poet’s intimate familiarity with the highest functions of the King’s writing offices at Westminster. I argue that The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye must have been composed from within the closest circle of Henry VI’s senior administrators. The poem, I shall contend, formed part of the Privy Seal’s strategy to identify the adolescent monarch, who had only just begun to exercise the royal privilege of granting petitions, with a defence of Calais and an ideological pursuit of peace. Central to this process were William Lyndwood, Keeper of the Privy Seal, and Walter Hungerford, the poem’s sponsor. In additionto historical and circumstantial evidence, Lyndwood’s association with The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye is supported by the centrality the poem assigns to seals and documentary validity, its legal mode as a libellus, and its programmatic emphasis on peace and unity, which Lyndwood had championed in a parliamentary sermon of 1431.

The Anglo-Scottish wars of the later middle ages cannot be adequately explained by a catalogue of battles and sieges. Both sides used legal, historical and spiritual arguments to give authority to their respective claims to independence (Scots) or sovereignty (English). Saints played a particularly key role in the Scottish articulation of independence. The official patron St Andrew provided a direct link to the papacy, whilst the careers of a wide range of other saints, from the ‘first bishop’ Palladius to Queen Margaret, were used to demonstrate the richness and longevity of the kingdom’s Christian past and of its independent ecclesiastical institutions. One individual who sat awkwardly in this narrative was Ninian of Whithorn, a saint whose shrine was located in Galloway, a region of traditionally weak royal authority close to the English border and whose bishops were suffragens of York until 1472. A winning blend of specific and general thaumaturgical and protective functions meant that in late medieval Scotland devotion to Ninian far surpassed that of traditional regional patron saints like Columba, Margaret and Kentigern. For many Scots in this period, particularly those who lived or travelled abroad, Ninian had evolved into a popular national patron in addition, or as an alternative, to the formal patron Andrew. This broad popularity led in the fifteenth-century to efforts by the Scottish governmental structures of national church and crown to appropriate the cult to their cause. However, by the late fourteenth century the fame of Ninian and his shrine at Whithorn had spread beyond Scotland and his cult was established in northern England, where in the late fifteenth century it found a high profile patron in the person of Richard III. The establishment of the cult in fifteenth-century England is particularly striking as cross-border saints are extremely rare in the jingoistic political atmosphere that followed the Anglo-Scottish wars of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This article will explore the attempts by the Scottish authorities to claim Ninian, consider how and why the cult spread into England and examine the motivations behind Richard III’s remarkable patronage of the saint.

‘Best loved of the King’: homosocial bonding and male friendships at the courts of Edward IV and Henry VIII


Homosocial bonding played a major role throughout the Middle Ages in the transfer of power and prestige between the king and his men at court. In particular the bond between knights at the courts of both Edward IV and Henry VIII was expressed as a form of ennobling love. Many of these ‘new men’ at the courts of Edward IV and Henry VIII were able to advance their status through homosocial relationships, which were clearly an important aspect of a man's identity as a courtly gentleman in this period. This paper examines and reflects on the representation of male friendships in the late Middle Ages, which has often failed to depict homosociality as anything other than a superficial interaction. Yet Edward IV and Henry VIII chose to prioritise these male friendships above their male-female relationships and they formed an emotional attachment to these men.

My analysis of Edward IV and Henry VIII’s relationship with these men focuses on one important setting that enabled them to develop a close homosocial bond with these knights: the medieval tournament. This paper argues that the primacy of Edward and Henry’s love for their chivalrous companions was displayed through a non-verbal form of interaction in the tiltyard. Though this was a public space, the close proximity and bodily contact experienced between king and knight signified the homosocial bonds of chivalry. It is the aim of this paper to demonstrate that the performance of chivalric masculinity was intimately bound up with the companionship of other men and that this desire to be included in the dominant male group led to the formation of strong emotional bonds between king and knight.

Published in the "Revue Historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde", no. 20, 2014.
Several unpublished documents permit to know the paid truces (the "patis") made between places of Aquitaine-Gascony, particularly Saint-Emilion, and some neighbouring "French" garrisons.

During the early and central middle ages St Cuthbert of Durham (d. 687) was arguably the most important local saint in northern England and southern Scotland. His cult encompassed a region approximately corresponding to the ancient kingdom of Northumbria. While Scottish devotion to the saint in that period has been well researched, the later medieval cult in Scotland has been surprisingly little studied. Following the outbreak of Anglo-Scottish warfare in 1296 a series of English monarchs, the Durham clergy and local political leaders identified Cuthbert with military victories over the Scots. Several historians have assumed that this association between Cuthbert and English arms led to the decline of his cult in Scotland. This article surveys the various manifestations of devotion to St Cuthbert in late medieval Scotland in order to reappraise the role of the saint and his cult north of the border in the later middle ages.

Published in "Les Cahiers du Bazadais", no. 152 (2006).
This article is about the political song written by the late troubadour Pey de Ladils of the town of Bazas (now in département Gironde, France) about the conflict in Gascony between the king of England and the king of France. Ladils criticizes there the inaction of the king of England (probably Edward II) against the attacks of the king of France. He underlines the fidelity of the Gascons towards the king of England.

Published in "Nottingham Medieval Studies", L, 2006, pp. 59-114.
Contrary to assumed ideas, the support of inhabitants of the principality of Aquitaine to its prince Edward of Woodstock (nicknamed "the Black Prince" from the 16th century onwards) was more important than usually assumed, particularly in Poitou, Saintonge and Angoumois until the military defeat of the "Poitevins" in 1372, but also in other regions (ex. of the towns of Millau and Montauban). Similarly while the "City" of Limoges submitted to the French and was later sacked by the Black Prince's army on 19 September 1370, the "Castle" of Limoges, the main part of Limoges, remained faithful to the Prince until 1371. Several other examples demonstrate that the assumed ideas on a tyrannical rule of the English and the Black Prince in Aquitaine are to be seriously qualified or even refused.

Since Barbara Kellum’s pioneering work on child murder in medieval England, published in 1973, medieval historians have argued that the courts adopted an approach to child murder that highlighted “the casual nature and mild consequences of infanticide in late medieval England.”  Kellum concluded that royal officials rarely bothered to prosecute either infanticide or filicide, and justices and jurors treated those cases that did appear in the courts with lenience: specifically, Kellum argues that the courts viewed child murdering mothers as mentally incompetent and thus awarded them pardons. Further compounding the argument, Barbara Hanawalt has noted that a mother was not even guilty of homicide in the killing of her infant until the mid-sixteenth century under statute law, thus medieval “jurors may have been unclear whether or not indictment was appropriate.”  The goal of this paper is to test these commonly held assumptions about child murder, employing a sampling of 131 instances of child murder (comprising 144 victims) from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries in England.  In particular, this paper will argue that infanticide was a felony in the Middle Ages and that neither jurors nor royal officials treated child murder with indifference.  In fact, there is no reason to believe that the English royal courts treated the murder of infants or older children as anything less than homicide. This paper will ask a number of pertinent questions in order to uncover the nature of medieval child murder and its treatment in the courts of medieval England. How did royal officials and jurors react to cases of child murder? Was this a woman’s crime (in particular, was this a singlewoman’s crime)?  Were the victims usually female?  Finally, what happened to child murderers?  For the purposes of this paper, child murder as a category is restricted to cases of infanticide by a parent (homicide of an infant, from newborns up to the age of one), and filicide (homicide of young children, that is under the age of seven).

Throughout Western history, abortion has been a contentious issue; nevertheless, ethically and legally, society has drawn a line between voluntary and involuntary abortion.  Women who bring an abortion on themselves by enlisting the services of a medical practitioner or by imbibing venomous draughts have rarely managed to draw sympathy from the communities in which they live.  On the other hand, pregnant women who become the victims of brutal assault and miscarry as a result, have been treated in a different manner entirely.  According to medieval common law, if the foetus had already been endowed with a soul (roughly around the third month), such an attack was indeed homicide.  It has been argued, however, that in practice, English jurors refused to acknowledge assaults of this nature as such.  Cyril C. Means, Jr. maintains that not only was an abortion not felonious in medieval England, it was not even criminal.  More recently, John M. Riddle reminds us that we “must distinguish between legal principles as known by jurists and the principles of fact on which juries were willing to find people guilty.”  While medieval common law probably viewed abortion by assault as a crime, English jurors did not.  The underlying argument is that because abortion by assault is a crime against women, like rape, male jurors are loath to impose the death penalty. Both Means and Riddle base their conclusions on a mere handful of cases. A greater number of cases presents a much different view.  While conviction rates for assault on pregnant women are very low (not unusual given the general reticence of jurors to convict for any felony), the responses of those involved demonstrate that Englishmen and women certainly believed it was a crime of felonious proportions.  Moreover, the role played by husbands as plaintiffs makes it clear that this was not merely a women’s issue.  As the recent work of Becky R. Lee  and Fiona Harris Stoertz  indicate, the birth of a child was a moment of great pride and celebration for medieval men; they not only cared for the welfare of their unborn children, but also the future health and fertility of their wives.  Abortion by assault was never an easy judgment for jurors to deliver; but there is very little reason to believe it was not a criminal matter, taken seriously by plaintiffs, jurors and defendants.

Most scholars of the medieval family would agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an easy one.  Medieval husbands held the upper hand in the power relationship, both legally and socially.  Lawrence Stone has depicted married life in the Middle Ages as “brutal and often hostile, with little communication, [and] much wife-beating.”  Judith Bennett also contends that wife-beating was “a normal part of marriage.”  What is more, the rules of coverture rigidly enforced by the common law courts of England left a wife economically vulnerable.  Because all real and movable property were thought to belong to the husband as head of the household, a wife who fell out of favour with her husband might well find herself expelled from the family home, without any resources to fall back on.  At a time when families, not individuals, were generally responsible for spousal selection, it is not hard to imagine that many medieval wives found their fates difficult to accept.  In general, historians have assumed that wives passively accepted this position – and yet, ecclesiastical and secular records for the English courts both abound with evidence of wives who deserted their husbands, refusing to adhere to unhappy or unsatisfying marriages.  The goal of this paper is to examine this evidence, focusing on bishops’ registers, ecclesiastical actbooks, manorial courts, chancery records, and even assize rolls, to discern better the frequency and common features of wife desertion, as well as contemporary attitudes held by both wives and society in general.

Published in the "Nottingham Medieval Studies", LII, 2008.
From 1364 until the end of Anglo-Gascon Aquitaine (1453), an assembly of the Three Estates has existed, often divided into two assemblies (the Three Estates of Bordelais and Landes). It is an attempt to trace the story of this assembly according to the surviving sources.

Piers Plowman has not struck many critics as providing “the kind of attention to the sacrament of the altar which could generate” extended literary and theological analysis. When compared to the overt defences of the Eucharist against Lollardy found in the writing of Nicholas Love and other near contemporaries, Langland seems relatively uninterested in debates surrounding the Eucharist, offering little in the way of a developed theological discourse of the Sacrament of the Altar. I hope to prove otherwise by offering an account of Langland’s Theology of the Eucharist, revealing a sophisticated engagement with the Eucharist as the sacrament of the “whole Christ.” I will employ Aquinas’ Theology of the Sacrament to analyse key scenes in Piers Plowman where the Eucharist is deployed in its literal, corporate and apocalyptic senses. Such an analysis reveals that, while Langland does not offer regurgitated defenses of transubstantiation, nor fantastical lists outlining the benefits of Mass and receiving communion, he does offer a far deeper vision of the Eucharist which emphasizes its communal and eschatological significance for medieval Christians. My argument will track a tripartite conception of the Eucharist developed in the Summa Theologica. Aquinas speaks of the sacrament as the literal “sacrifice” of Christ’s body to the Father; the sign of “communion” both among believers and between the Church and Christ; and as the “viaticum” that prepares the soul, and the Church, for the eschatological telos of divine union toward which medieval spiritual life is ordered. The figure of Piers Plowman is central to this eschatological telos, since he progressively becomes, like the bread and wine, nothing more than the ‘form’ under which Christ’s person is hidden in the poem. Langland’s theology of the Eucharist thus becomes the key to understanding Piers’ metalepsis into perfect identification with Christ. In this way, Piers Plowman offers a vision of how “worthy” reception of the sacrament can lead to the final union of Christian society within the very Christ it worships on the altar, even if that altar was, in reality, the source of the deepest religious divisions in Langland’s own time.

Published in "Aquitaine Historique", 117 (2012).
This is paper about an administrative medieval entity named in Gascon "Comtau d'Ornon" and was situated at the south of Bordeaux. Originally a possession of the counts of Bordeaux, it has been thereafer owned by the lords of Blaye, then it has been bought by the king of England-duke of Aquitaine Edward I. This latter created there two new towns (bastides)  and one of them called Baa (name coming from the English place Bath) did not develop even if we have kept detailed accounts of its creation and surveying.

This is a complete copy of my doctoral dissertation, completed in 1995 and defended in 1996, and supervised by Jonathan J. G. Alexander. Thanks to all of you who have expressed an interest in it. Since 1996 it  has been available via UMI and ProQuest. If you do use information from it, please do acknowledge it. You may also wish to consult my articles on Egerton 2781, the Neville of Hornby Hours (1997/98, 1999), and my 2003 book, 'Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England,' which include additional interpretations of and information about Egerton 2781 and other manuscripts.

Alexander Murray has written that, in the Middle Ages, women were more frequently excused of suicide because “female suicide was just too horrible to think about.”  Murray’s perspective builds on a heritage of ideas about chivalry and modesty. Christian hagiography, replete with stories about the deaths of virgin martyrs, women who killed themselves rather than jeopardise their vows of chastity, in particular, would seem to pardon female suicides.  More generally, historians have had difficulty imagining that medieval society imposed the full weight of the law on self-killers. At a time when a suicide was refused proper burial in consecrated ground, interred at a crossroads with a stake through its heart, and all its goods and property were confiscated by the king, merciful declarations of non compos mentis would seem most fitting. An examination of 718 cases of suicide from coroners and eyre rolls, however, suggests that this was not the case.  Medieval juries usually declared a suicide felonious.  This rule holds true also for medieval women, who played a significant role in the crime.  In fact, medieval Englishwomen were far more likely to participate in suicide than in any other felony. The treatment of female suicides by juries certainly demonstrates a degree of compassion; and yet, more often than not, their verdicts show signs of malice and resentment.  An investigation of cases of female suicide in these documents opens a window into the minds of medieval jurors to reveal their attitudes towards female suicide in a wide variety of situations; at the same time, these cases offer evidence to explain why medieval women sometimes resorted to suicide.

Within a few years of Lateran IV’s prohibition of priestly involvement in trial by ordeal, England moved definitively toward a criminal justice system based on trial by jury. This paper will explore the underlying assumptions of king, council and justices at the time of the criminal trial jury’s introduction (c. 1220) as to the jury’s precise function within a prosecutory system that countenanced only capital sanctions for those convicted of felony. Unearthing these assumptions will require careful consideration of earlier ordeal procedure and other kinds of juries in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, most notably juries of presentment, coroners’ inquests, and juries tasked with responding to writs de odio et atia. It will also require situating trial by jury within the broader context of felony adjudication with its manifold escape valves, including benefit of clergy, sanctuary, abjuration and pardons. The paper will rely on a re-examination of primary source materials and engagement with the existing secondary literature to grapple with the broad questions of what constituted serious criminal wrongdoing, what jurors were expected to know and do in adjudicating felony cases, and the extent to which jurors’ verdicts were based on knowledge or belief in the guilt of an individual, as opposed to such factors as reputation, rumor or expected recidivism. With regard to the issue of jury independence, the paper will query whether juries engaged in unilateral nullification of the law, or whether verdicts that appear to be contrary to the law reflect instead a consensus of judge and jury. Related to this is the macro-level question of what constituted the law, including the related matters of how jurors were to know the law and respond to it. As a think piece, this paper will test several hypotheses regarding problems fundamental to the history of English criminal law, some of which may prove unresolvable.

Since Piers Plowman occupies a central place in the study of medieval English literature, much attention has been paid to the vexed question of the poem's authorship. This justified interest in revealing the human agent behind the family of interrelated versions of the poem, usually named A, B, and C, continues to feed a vibrant industry of speculative scholarship on the person behind the poem. This article reassesses the relevance of the 'Langland' myth for the contemporary reception of the poem, and argues that medieval audiences of the B Version associated the work with a 'Long Will' author-persona. In this context, the case of a previously unnoticed Norfolk poacher in the weeks leading up to the 1381 rising, a William Longewille, and his encroachment on the estate of the former sheriff and tax collector Richard Holdych echo the Ploughing of the Half-Acre in Piers Plowman, in particular as it is presented in the B Version of the poem. As a result, this article proposes that both the A and B Versions of the poem may have been available to (some of) the rebels of 1381, and that the B Version may have circulated in Norfolk along Cluniac and Benedictine networks before and after the unrest.

The taxation returns of 1377 and 1524 have previously been cited to show that towns made up a growing proportion of England's population in the later middle ages or, alternatively, that this proportion was stable or even declined. Such calculations have often relied on debatable estimates of national population and on controversial multipliers with which to turn numbers of taxpayers into town populations. This paper used a more straightforward approach and calculates the number of taxpayers in 100 English provincial towns for which we have evidence in 1377 and 1524 as a proportion of the number of taxpayers for all of the communities for which we have figures at both of these dates. It concludes that there was a slight decline in the proportion of people living in England's provincial towns, that smaller towns fared better than large ones and that the growth of London was partly at the expense of other towns.

When William Beufo, vicar of (Winterborne) Whitechurch, a parish church in the county of Dorset, turned to the chancellor sometime in the period 1473-75 seeking assistance, his petition adopted a tone of utter desperation. As he tells the story, Beufo did nothing to provoke the violence against him. He was minding his own business, "in God's peace and the king's," occupied with conducting the mass in his church on the Saturday before the feast of the Apostles Simon and Jude when one of his parishioners, a man by the name of John Tanner, barged into the church leading a crowd of armed men. As Beufo writes, one hundred men, all "evilly disposed" and "arrayed in manner and form of war," that is wearing jakkes (quilted defensive tunics) and salettes (light bowl-shaped helmets), carrying bows, arrows, bills, glaives and other "horrible weapons," entered the church precisely because they knew that Beufo would be there, and they intended to slay him. Moreover, Beufo tells us that that is exactly what they would have done, had he not had foreknowledge of their coming and fled the church to hide in his vicarage just moments before their grand entrance.

"Contact and Exchange in Later Medieval Europe. Essays in Honour of Malcolm Vale", ed. H. Skoda et alii, 2012.
It is often assumed that people sharing a common language follow the same political allegiance. In comparing the medieval history of Gascony and Brittany, it is possible to conclude that it was not the case despite strong ethno-linguistic feelings.

Why in the pre-industrial period were some settlements resilient and stable over the long term while other settlements were vulnerable to crisis? Indeed, what made certain human habitations more prone to decline or even total collapse, than others? All pre-industrial societies had to face certain challenges: exogenous environmental hazards such as earthquakes or plagues, economic or political hazards from ‘outside’ such as warfare or expropriation of property, or hazards of their own-making such as soil erosion or subsistence crises. How then can we explain why some societies were able to overcome or negate these problems, while other societies proved susceptible to failure, as settlements contracted, stagnated, were abandoned, or even disappeared entirely?
This book has been stimulated by the questions and hypotheses put forward by a recent ‘disaster studies’ literature - in particular, by placing the intrinsic arrangement of societies at the forefront of the explanatory framework. Essentially it is suggested that the resilience or vulnerability of habitation has less to do with exogenous crises themselves, but on endogenous societal responses which dictate: (a) the extent of destruction caused by crises and the capacity for society to protect itself; and (b) the capacity to create a sufficient recovery. By empirically testing the explanatory framework on a number of societies between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century in England, the Low Countries, and Italy, it is ultimately argued in this book that rather than the protective functions of the state or the market, or the implementation of technological innovation or capital investment, the most resilient human habitations in the pre-industrial period were those than displayed an equitable distribution of property and a well-balanced distribution of power between social interest groups. Equitable distributions of power and property were the underlying conditions in pre-industrial societies that allowed 'favourable' institutions to emerge with high rates of participation down the social hierarchy, giving people the freedom and room to choose their own fate - not necessarily reliant on one coping strategy but with the capacity to combine many different ones in search of optimum resilience.

Fears of being accused of malpractice have plagued the field of medicine since its inception. Despite the longevity of the concerns, English law was slow to catch up and only did so eventually because of the pressure exerted from below by users of medicine rather than the practitioners themselves. Much of the hostility between medical practitioners and their dissatisfied patients is reflected in disputes over payment in an economy that functioned exclusively on supply and demand: patients refused to pay for anything less than a cure, and they withheld fees when they believed that the quality of the service was less than exemplary.

An England between reality and dream. Literature and Society in England in the Fourteenth century
In the last centuries of the Middle Ages, England is changing in many ways – cultural, social, political… The complexity of these transformations appear in the contemporary poetical production, a fondamental medium of communication through this period. The object of this study is the analysis of the interaction between these changes and a corpus of alliterative poems written in the fourteenth century (above all, Piers Plowman of William Langland). The author firstly puts these texts in their social and cultural frame, before studying their audience. Next, she analyses the thematics of the poems, which reflect the multiple interests of the poets : organisation of society, government and law, church and knowledge, salvation, literary activity. Their critics, as well as their propositions and wishes, reflect and nourish a rich dialogue in the English society.

This version, which I intend to translate in English when I will have the time for it, is the long version of a paper published in the volume Frédéric Boutoulle et Stéphane Gomis (dir.), Cultures villageoises au Moyen Âge et à l’époque moderne. 37e journées internationales de Flaran, Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail (Cahiers de Flaran, 37), 2017, p. 105-117.

In the late Middle Ages, yeomanry covers an ambivalent social reality, as a mirror of important recomposition in post-Black Death England. A yeoman can refer to a free peasant of a correct standing, a household servant, and even a craftsman or a merchant. This complexity shows itself as well in the English legislation, notably sumptuary laws, than in vernacular literature of the end of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries - Robin Hood being, of course the best known yeoman. By studying these literary works in comparison with other types of documents, especially the Rolls of Parliament, I intend to clarify this complexity, especially in relation with a lively peasant's culture in all its diversity.

This paper takes as its starting point a definition of islands that goes beyond geographical isolation to consider islands as social constructs insofar as they reflect feelings of isolation, separateness, distinctiveness and otherness. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of the ‘dry’ island, an island that although once surrounded by water has long since lost its physical isolation due to changes in sea level and drainage patterns. Taking the Isle of Ely in the fens of East Anglia in the United Kingdom between AD 1200-1600 as a case study, and utilising archaeological evidence for diet and for the local Ely ware pottery, it is possible to reconstruct a cognitive mappa, which describes the perception of islandness amongst the island’s medieval inhabitants.

Avery Cornburgh (d.1487) of Bere Ferrers (Devon) and Dovers (Essex) – a Lancastrian, Yorkist, and Tudor household servant – was one of the appreciable numbers of crown servants utilised in local government during the fifteenth century. Serving in Cornwall and Essex as JP, MP, sheriff, and commissioner, he was prominent in Cornish affairs as a result of the positions he enjoyed in the Duchy of Cornwall.

This case study of his career in the royal household and Duchy of Cornwall and associations with magnates and gentry in South-West England – (re-)constructed from eclectic sources (including Duchy of Cornwall (and other) archives) – provides an insight into local and national politics in the later fifteenth century: Cornburgh's Duchy and royal service culminated with his appointments as Under-Treasurer of England (under Richard III), and Keeper of the Wardrobe (under Henry VII).

Resumo: Este artigo busca apresentar como as crônicas do século XV produzidas na Inglaterra, construíram uma memória sobre a Batalha de Agincourt que justificava os direitos do rei Henrique V e dos ingleses ao trono francês. Percebe-se que a memória sobre o evento é muito mais um discurso em torno da viagem e provações do rei e seu exército até a conquista da vitória. Une-se também com a construção da identidade inglesa na qual a imagem do rei tornou-se um elemento unificador das virtudes do próprio povo, representado pelo contexto bélico que foi a Guerra dos Cem Anos. 

Abstract: This paper aims to present how the chronicles of the 15 th century made in England build a memory about the Battle of Agincourt, which explained the rights of Henry V and the English to the French throne. We notice that the memory on the event is much more a speech around the trip and probation of the king and his army to the conquest of the victory. It is united with the construction of the English identity in which the image of the king became a unifier element of the people virtues, represented by the war context that was the Hundred Years War.

Focussing on the Duchy of Cornwall’s organisational structure during the Wars of the Roses, this survey examines the principal offices (which evolved around administration of its marine and terrene regalities) and personnel (administrative elite) in Cornwall and Devon. Utilising Duchy of Cornwall (and other) archives, this analysis explores the Duchy’s governance in terms of estate administration (stewards, constables, and keepers of castles and parks); Stannary administration (coinage, courts, and convocations); Havenary administration (ports, customs, and fisheries); and revenues and accounts.

Consideration of successive Princes’ Councils and counsellors (and Councils of Wales and the Marches) leads onto exploration of the roles of various courtiers, magnates, and royal household servants in the affairs of the Duchy and the wider implications – for south-western England – of Duchy service. The duchy with its political hinterland – as a subsidiary core – radiated royal authority throughout the region, hence the significance of Duchy office-holding in royal patronage and especially for assessing royal policy in terms of regional governance.

The Duchy’s singular structures ensured that Cornwall remained distinctly different from England and Wales yet reflected the realm as a whole – it was a microcosm of national politics and government. The Duchy’s role as a focus for Cornish loyalties and identities was more complex: Duchy office-holding provided an agency for advancement, careerism, and social mobility – encouraging participation whilst, simultaneously, feeding senses of solidarity and separation. However, Cornish appreciation of the Duchy depended on the Duchy’s appreciation of the Cornish, their customs, and liberties; thus when the crown was believed to reneged on its responsibilities (such as in 1497 and 1549), the Cornish rose in rebellion.

Our article explores the bed as an object that projects notions of status, aspiration, decorum, and morality. We are interested in the economic and symbolic values that accrue to the bed, bedding, and the bedroom in late medieval England, as described in wills and household accounts, and as evoked in literary and artistic imagery. We situate our analysis in relation to literal and represented household beds, those associated with birth and inheritance and also those portrayed in images of death. “Childbed” and “deathbed” are terms that frame the human lifecycle. They also invoke the most important item of furniture in the premodern household. To Johan Bedell my servaunt . . . an honest whole complete bed and all other things therto belonging for a bedde.—John Goodwyn, 1522 (TNA Prob11/20/377) Take here hede and lerne howeȝ þou schalt make an honest bede and a good plesinge vnto god profitabel and worschipful vnto þi soule. (Take heed here and learn how you shall make an honest bed a...

York, York Minster Library MS XVI E. 32 is a late medieval codex, primarily written in English, which seems to be a living example of what a vernacular guide for medical practitioners was in fifteenth-century England. The manuscript is basically composed of herbal recipes; however, it also includes other texts considered to be scientific at that time, such as a chiromancy diagram, to interpret character from the lines on the palm of a person’s hand, or a bloodletting man, to know the veins that had to be cut to cure certain diseases.

A codicological analysis of the volume shows that a compiler and/or binder arranged its ten independent booklets to fit a purpose. It is my belief that this person’s aim was to assemble a group of utilitarian texts which turned out to be useful even to post-medieval readers, as suggested by the marginalia. I intend to provide a description of its treatises and collections in order to show the kind of medical texts that were thought to be indispensable in late medieval England.

Given at the 56e Rencontres du Centre européen d'Etudes bourguignonnes (XIVe-XVIe siècles), this conference paper aims to highlight, understand and differentiate the role of the Burgundian noblemen directly involved in the trade negotiations giving birth to the so-called Intercursus Magnus of 1496.