Richard of Cornwall

On the basis of recent essays about the Franciscans and the crusade, this study provides a wider picture of the crusade as phenomenon and its “overcoming”. The focus is in particular on both  political crusades against the “Ghibellines”, and political and religious ones against heretics. Particular attention is given to the use of the expression pugil Christi in papal documents and in other historical sources, and to the use of the historical category of “Ghibellinism” for a specific period and context of the 13th century.

Launceston, once Cornwall's capital, but whose influence also ran deep into Devon, lies within landscape whose fabric allows the overpowering effect of clever design of structures and approaches, and the arrangements of excluding and enclosing walls, still to be felt. Once a central place, from where much of Cornwall's life was controlled during the second millennium AD, it was also a place of considerable drama, carefully contrived to overawe and subject. Visitors from within Cornwall followed routes that over their final miles took them through the open lands of common fields and common pastures, to make more stark the contrast with the closed world of the town itself, walled around, closed on one side by a deer park, and oppressively overseen by the castle's dominatingly massive motte. The sight of that motte, and its keep with central tower, beautifully skylined as people from Devon crossed the Tamar, transmitted important messages about the power of the Crown from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. Its influence later shifted towards administration and regulation, but that dwindled when the Assizes were moved to Bodmin in 1840 and perceptions of it now are also influenced by its more local recent role as a market town serving a large hinterland whose mixed farming has gradually become more pastoral.

For the thirteenth-century English noble, the estate steward was his chief representative in the localities. Supervising the whole gamut of local seignorial administration, from the auditing of accounts to presiding over sessions of the honorial court, the steward was the official who ensured that his lord’s interests were protected and his authority enforced. This was especially important for those nobles whose estates were scattered across several counties, as the demands of the royal court and public life made personal visits to their holdings intermittent.