Search results for ""Author Louise J. Wilkinson""

A detailed investigation of the place of women in thirteenth-century society, using individual case studies to reappraise orthodox opinion. This book offers the first regional study of women in thirteenth-century England, making pioneering use of charters, chronicles, government records and some of the earliest manorial court rolls to examine the interaction of gender, status and life-cycle in shaping women's experiences in Lincolnshire. The author investigates the lives of noblewomen, gentlewomen, townswomen, peasant women, criminal women and women religious from a variety of angles. Not onlydoes she consider how far women were partners alongside men, especially within the family, but she also explores whether they might have been both at once constrained and yet, to an extent, empowered by religious and biological ideas about gender difference which found expression in inheritance practices and the common law. Valuable light on the avenues for political influence open to elite women is shed through case studies of Nicholaa de la Haye (d. 1230), sheriff of Lincoln, Hawise de Quency (d. 1243), countess of Lincoln, and Margaret de Lacy (d. 1266), countess of Lincoln. The book also addresses women's roles within the rural and urban labour markets before the Black Death. LOUISE J. WILKINSON is Professor of Medieval Studies, University of Lincoln,

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Edition with English translation of a document shedding huge light on one of the most important figures of her time. The household roll of Eleanor, countess of Leicester and Pembroke, offers a fascinating insight into one of the most important domestic establishments in England during the Second Barons' War of 1263-7. As the wife of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, the leading figure within the baronial regime, and the sister and aunt of King Henry III and the Lord Edward, respectively, Countess Eleanor occupied a position at the heart of English political affairs up to, and after, her husband's death at the Battle of Evesham on 4 August 1265. This volume is a critical edition of the extant thirteen membranes of Countess Eleanor's household account roll for that momentous year, 1265 (British Library, Additional MS 8877). Presented here in the original Latin and with an accompanying English translation, Countess Eleanor's roll includes her diet account for the period from 19 February to 29 August 1265, listing her visitors and the different items of food and drink consumed on each day at each castle at which she was resident, including Wallingford, Odiham and Dover. The roll also incorporates a "wardrobe journal", covering the period up until 1 October 1265, detailing expenditure on the purchase and repair of household furnishings, goods and utensils, on clothing and wages, on the Montfortian war effort in the South, and on messengers travelling to and from the countess, Earl Simon, her sons and associates, in the months before and after the Battle of Evesham.

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The true importance of cathedrals during the Anglo-Norman period is here brought out, through an examination of the most important aspects of their history. Cathedrals dominated the ecclesiastical (and physical) landscape of the British Isles and Normandy in the middle ages; yet, in comparison with the history of monasteries, theirs has received significantly less attention. This volume helps to redress the balance by examining major themes in their development between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. These include the composition, life, corporate identity and memory of cathedral communities; the relationships, sometimes supportive, sometimes conflicting, that they had with kings (e.g. King John), aristocracies, and neighbouring urban and religious communities; the importance of cathedrals as centres of lordship and patronage; their role in promoting and utilizing saints' cults (e.g. that of St Thomas Becket); episcopal relations; and the involvement of cathedrals in religious and political conflicts, and in the settlement of disputes. A critical introduction locates medieval cathedrals in space and time, and against a backdrop of wider ecclesiastical change in the period. Contributors: Paul Dalton, Charles Insley, Louise J. Wilkinson, Ann Williams, C.P. Lewis, RichardAllen, John Reuben Davies, Thomas Roche, Stephen Marritt, Michael Staunton, Sheila Sweetinburgh, Paul Webster, Nicholas Vincent

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A survey of the complexity and sophistication of English royal government in the thirteenth century, a period of radical change. The years between 1258 and 1276 comprise one of the most influential periods in the Middle Ages in Britain. This turbulent decade witnessed a bitter power struggle between Henry III and his barons over who should control the government of the realm. Before England eventually descended into civil war, a significant proportion of the baronage had attempted to transform its governance by imposing on the crown a programme of legislative and administrative reform far more radical and wide-ranging than Magna Carta in 1215. Constituting a critical stage in the development of parliament, the reformist movement would remain unsurpassed in its radicalism until the upheavals of the seventeenth century. Simon de Montfort, the baronial champion, became the first leader of a political movement to seize power and govern in the king's name. The essays here draw on material available for the first time via the completion of the project to calendar all the Fine Rolls of Henry III; these rolls comprise the last series of records of the English Chancery from that period to become readily available in a convenient form, thereby transforming accessto several important fields of research, including financial, legal, political and social issues. The volume covers topics including the evidential value of the fine rolls themselves and their wider significance for the English polity, developments in legal and financial administration, the roles of women and the church, and the fascinating details of the development of the office of escheator. Related or parallel developments in Scotland, Wales and Ireland are also dealt with, giving a broader British dimension. LOUISE J. WILKINSON is Professor of Medieval Studies, University of Lincoln; DAVID CROOK is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Notthingham. Contributors: Nick Barratt, Paul Brand, David Carpenter, David Crook, Paul Dryburgh, Beth Hartland, Philippa Hoskin, Charles Insley, Adrian Jobson, Tony Moore, Alice Taylor, Nicholas Vincent, Scott Waugh, Louise Wilkinson

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