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This view of a society composed of the aged as well as of the young and the middle aged is reinforced by an examination of peers, bishops, and members of parliament and urban office holders, for whom demographic and career-length information exists. Many individuals had active careers until near the end of their lives; the aged were neither rarities nor outcasts within their world.
Comprehensive and engaging, this colourful study covers the whole sweep of ritual history from the earliest written records to the present day. From May Day revels and Midsummer fires, to Harvest Home and Hallowe'en, to the twelve days of Christmas, Ronald Hutton takes us on a fascinating journey through the ritual year in Britain. He challenges many common assumptions about the customs of the past, and debunks many myths surrounding festivals of the present, to illuminate the history of the calendar year we live by today.
Stratigraphy is the key to understanding the geological evolution of the earth. It provides the framework for our interpretation of the sequences of events which have shaped the earth throughout its 4600 million years of existence. It provides the timescale with which we can determine the relative order of these events, and it provides the means whereby we can calibrate this using absolute ages in years. Stratigraphy is therefore the most fundamental subject in the science of geology, and all geologists are practising stratigraphers. Traditionally, however, stratigraphy has been considered as a Victorian science, a ponderous process of the naming and cataloguing of innumerable geological uni...
Entries on persons living in post-Conquest England (1066-1166), documented in Domesday book, pipe rolls, and Cartae Baronum. Includes Continental origins, family relationships, and descent of fees.
Concentrating on the pictorial evidence, these papers raise many complex and varied themes related to women's creation, use and patronage of books, and the representation of women in them.
"England of the Plantagenet kings was a turbulent place. In politics it saw Simon de Montfort's challenge to the crown in Henry III's reign and it witnessed the deposition of Edward II. By contrast, and as relief, it also experienced the highly successful rules of Edward I and his grandson, Edward III. Political institutions were transformed with the development of parliament, and war, the stimulus for some of that change, was never far away. Wales was conquered and the Scottish Wars of Independence started in Edward I's reign, while Crecy and Poitiers were English triumphs under Edward III." "Beyond politics, the structure of English society was developing, from the great magnates at the to...
Barbara A. Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment in many ways correspond with our twentieth-century solutions. Using a remarkable array of sources, including over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, Hanawalt emphasizes the continuity of the nucle...