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In around 911, the Viking adventurer Rollo was granted the city of Rouen and its surrounding district by the Frankish King Charles the Simple. Two further grants of territory followed in 924 and 933. But while Frankish kings might grant this land to Rollo and his son, William Longsword, these two Norman dukes and their successors had to fight and negotiate with rival lords, hostile neighbours, kings, and popes in order to establish and maintain their authority over it. This book explores the geographical and political development of what would become the duchy of Normandy, and the relations between the dukes and these rivals for their lands and their subjects' fidelity. It looks, too, at the...
1066 is the most famous date in English history. On 14 October, on Senlac Hill near Hastings, a battle was fought that would change the face of England forever. Over the next twenty years, Norman culture was imposed on England, and English politics and society were radically reshaped. But how much is really known about William 'the Conqueror', the Norman duke who led his men to victory on that autumn Saturday in what was to be the last successful invasion of England? Mark Hagger here takes a fresh look at William - his life and leadership. As king, he spent much of his reign threatened by rebellion and invasion. In response, he ordered castles and strongholds to be built across the land - a symbol of the force with which he defended his realm and which, along with Domesday Book, England's first public record, attest to a powerful legacy. This book provides a rounded portrait of one of England's greatest rulers.
Everyday life in early thirteenth-century England is revealed in vivid detail in this riveting collection of correspondence of people from all classes, from peasants and shopkeepers to bishops and earls. The documents presented here include letters between masters and servants, husbands and wives, neighbors and enemies, and cover a wide range of topics: politics and war, going to fairs and going to law, attending tournaments and stocking a game park, borrowing cash and doing favors for friends, investigating adultery and building a windmill. While letters by celebrated people have long been known, the correspondence of ordinary people has not survived and has generally been assumed never to ...
This Cambridge Companion offers readers a comparative cultural history of north-western Europe in the crucial period of the eleventh century: the age of William the Conqueror. Besides England, Normandy, and northern France, the volume also explores Scandinavia, the North Sea world, the insular world beyond the English Channel, and various parts of Continental Europe. This Companion features essays designed specifically for those wishing to advance their knowledge and understanding of this important period of European history using a holistic and contextual perspective, deliberately shifting the focus away from William the man and onto the rich and fascinating culture of the world in which he lived and ruled. This was not the age created by William, but the age that created him. With contributions by leading international experts, this volume provides an inclusive and innovative study companion that is both authoritative and timely.
"A series which is a model of its kind" Edmund King Considers the clerical friends of Ermengarde of Brittany, showing how these men enabled Ermengarde to fulfil both her duty and her desire to live an intensely pious life. Explores the ways in which grief was represented in the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal. Two thirteenth-century Evesham forgeries demonstrate that early thirteenth-century people, even so-called experts at the papal chancery, seem to have been ignorant of the physical form taken by early papal bulls. Explores the world of the scribes who composed Exon Domesday, demonstrating their working methods as well as giving us further insights into the composition of Great Domesd...
The most recent cutting-edge scholarship on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries.
The status of lord represented one of the most original solutions to the political and social transitions of the Medieval period. Questions still remain unanswered and require further investigation, thus many scholars have collaborated to produce this collection which offers a synthesis of the most recent scholarship. This book relates the workings of seigneurial systems in different areas of Europe, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from Castile to Pontus. In this way, the perspective remains the same, institutional and material. This book emphasises both the institutional and informal forms of lordship identified and crystallised by social and political actors (for example, communities, sovereigns, nobles, bishops, and abbots). It offers a general framework for those approaching the subject for the first time and a useful in-depth tool with numerous regional cases for long-term scholars.
In “The Making of Europe”: Essays in Honour of Robert Bartlett, a group of distinguished contributors analyse processes of conquest, colonization and cultural change in Europe in the tenth to fourteenth centuries. They assess and develop theses presented by Robert Bartlett in his famous book of that name. The geographical scope extends from Iceland to the Islamic Mediterranean, from Spain to Poland. Themes covered range from law to salt production, from aristocratic culture in the Christian West to Islamic views of Christendom. Like the volume that it honours, the present book extends our understanding of both medieval and present day Europe. Contributors are Sverre Bagge, Piotr Górecki...
For decades, medieval scholarship has been dominated by the paradigm that women who wielded power after c. 1100 were exceptions to the “rule” of female exclusion from governance and the public sphere. This collection makes a powerful case for a new paradigm. Building on the premise that elite women in positions of authority were expected, accepted, and routine, these essays traverse the cities and kingdoms of France, England, Germany, Portugal, and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in order to illuminate women’s roles in medieval power structures. Without losing sight of the predominance of patriarchy and misogyny, contributors lay the groundwork for the acceptance of female public authority as normal in medieval society, fostering a new framework for understanding medieval elite women and power.
An interpretative analysis of the history of the cross-Channel empire from 1066 to 1204.