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Richard II (1377-99) has long suffered from an unusually unmanly reputation. He has been associated with lavish courtly expenditure, absolutist ideas, Francophile tendencies, and a love of peace habitually linked to the king's physical effeminacy. Even sympathetic accounts of his reign have only dismissed particular facets of this picture, or reinterpreted it as yielding evidence of praiseworthy dissent from accepted norms of masculinity. This book takes a different tack. It does so by putting the politics of Richard's reign back in the context of contemporary assumptions about the nature of manhood and youth. This makes it possible not only to understand the agenda behind the attacks of the king's critics, but also to suggest a new account of his actions. It is argued that Richard tried to establish his manhood (and hence authority to rule) by thoroughly conventional means. The inability of his subjects to support this aspiration produced a sequence of conflicts with the king, in which Richard's opponents found it convenient to ascribe to him the faults of youth. These critiques derived their force not from the king's real personality but from the fit between certain contemporary assumptions about youth, effeminacy, and masculinity on the one hand, and the actions of Richard's government — constrained by difficult and complex circumstances — on the other. This book thus uses an inquiry into contemporary concepts of manhood and youth to understand not only the role they played in providing useful rhetorical strategies, but also in structuring the priorities of political actors.

In the course of the fifth century, the Roman farms and villas of lowland Britain were replaced by the new, distinctive settlements of Anglo-Saxon communities. This volume presents a major synthesis of the evidence, now rapidly growing, for such settlements from across England and throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. Its aim is to explore what this evidence reveals about the communities who lived in them and whose daily lives went almost wholly unrecorded. The book examines the appearance, ‘life-cycles’ and function of their buildings; the relationship of Anglo-Saxon settlements to the Romano-British landscape and to later medieval villages; the role of ritual in daily life; what distinguished ‘rural’ from ‘urban’; and the relationship between farming regimes and settlement forms. A central theme throughout the book is the impact on rural producers of the rise of lordship and markets, and how this impact is reflected in the remains of their settlements.

This book offers a new approach to the study of lay religion as evidenced in collections of miracle narratives in 12th-century England. There are a number of problems associated with the interpretation of this hagiographical genre and an extended introduction discusses these. The first issue is the tendency to read these narratives as transparent accounts of lay religion as if it were something susceptible to static, ‘ethnographic’ treatment in isolation from wider social and political activities. The second issue is the challenge of explaining the miraculous as a credible part of cultural experience, without appealing to reductionist notions of a ‘medieval mindset’. The third issue is the problem of how to take full account of the fact that these sources are representations of lay experience by monastic authors. The author argues that miracle narratives were the product of and helped to foster lay notions of Christian practice and identity centred on the spiritual patronage of certain enshrined saints. The six main chapters provide fully contextualized studies of selected miracle collections. The author looks at when these collections were made, who wrote them, the kinds of audiences they are likely to have reached, and the messages they were intended to convey. He shows how these texts served to represent specific cults in terms that articulated the values and interests of the institutions acting as custodians of the relics; and how alongside other programmes of textual production, these collections of stories can be linked to occasions of uncertainty or need in the life of these institutions. A concluding chapter argues the case for miracle collections as evidence of the attempt by traditional monasteries to reach out to the relatively affluent peasantry, and to urban communities in society, and their rural hinterlands with offers of protection and opportunities for them to express their social status with reference to tomb-centred sanctity.

The 1279–80 hundred rolls are one of the most important but neglected sources for 13th-century English history. This book places the inquiry in its historical context among other inquiries by Edward I in England, Gascony, the Channel Islands, and Wales, and by other rulers on the Continent. It examines its purpose and whether it was conceived deliberately as a second Domesday Book. The geographical range and chronology of the inquiry are examined, how it was conducted and the way in which the returns were compiled. The book concludes with an assessment of the uses which contemporaries and modern historians have made of the returns. There are appendices providing lists of the manuscripts and printed editions of all known surviving rolls, the commission of inquiry and oath taken by commissioners and the articles of inquiry for Cambridgeshire and London.

Timekeeping is an essential activity in the modern world, and we take it for granted that our lives are shaped by the hours of the day. This book is a study of the practice of timekeeping in England and Wales between 1300 and 1800 and how it was brought about by centuries of technical innovation and circulation of ideas about time. The authors illustrate how a particular kind of common sense about time came into being, and how it developed during this period. The study cites famous figures like John Harrison, who solved the problem of longitude, and less familiar characters like sailors, gamblers, and burglars. Overturning many common perceptions of the past — for example, that clock time and the industrial revolution were intimately related — this historical study is interested in how ‘telling the time’ has come to dominate our way of life.

Penetrating behind the seal of medieval confession is among the most formidable historiographical challenges. One route is through confessors’ manuals. This is a full-scale scholarly study of a fourteenth-century confessor’s English example. It contributes to the European-wide research on pre-Reformation confessional practice and clerical training. On another level, the Memoriale Presbiterorum’s peculiarly intense concern with social morality affords pungent commentary on contemporary English society. The author analyses a remarkable treatise both as a vehicle of social doctrine and as a mirror of the milieu to which it is directed. While presenting it against its general intellectual background, continental and English, he also argues for its setting within a vigorous and largely neglected episcopal regime, that of Bishop Grandisson of Exeter.