Download or read book Bridges Law and Power in Medieval England 700 1400 written by Alan Cooper and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2006-11-16 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the time of Alfred the Great until beyond the end of the Middle Ages, bridges were vital to the rulers and people of England, but they were expensive and difficult to maintain. Who then was responsible for their upkeep? The answer to this question changes over the centuries, and the way in which it changes reveals much about law and power in medieval England. The development of law concerning the maintenance of bridges did not follow a straightforward line: legal ideas developed by the Anglo-Saxons, which had made the first age of bridge building possible, were rejected by the Normans, and royal lawyers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had to find new solutions to the problem. The fate of famous bridges, especially London Bridge, shows the way in which the spiritual, historical and entrepreneurial imagination was pressed into service to find solutions; the fate of humbler bridges shows the urgency with which this problem was debated across the country. By concentrating on this aspect of practical governance and tracing it through the course of the Middle Ages, much is shown about the limitations of royal power and the creativity of the medieval legal mind. ALAN COOPER is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University.
Download or read book Waterways and Canal Building in Medieval England written by John Blair and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-25 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman canals and waterways, this book is based on evidence surrounding the nature of water transport in the period. A collection of essays, this study unearths this neglected but important aspect of medieval engineering and economic growth.
Download or read book The Passenger Medieval Texts and Transits written by James L. Smith and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2017-12-08 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What strange transactions take place in the mobile spaces between loci? How does the flow of forces between fixed points enliven texts, suggest new connections, and map out the dizzying motion of myriad interactions? The essays in this volume were first presented at the 2014 New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland where a meeting of minds in a shared intermediate space initiated dialogue from diverse perspectives and wended its way through the invisible spaces between concrete categories, objects, and entities. The resulting volume asks a core question: what can we learn by tarrying at the nexus points and hubs through which things move in and out of texts, attempting to trace not the things themselves or their supposedly stable significations, but rather their forms of emergence and retreat, of disorder and disequilibrium? The answer is complex and intermediate, for we ourselves are emerging and retreating within our own systems of transit and experiencing our own disequilibrium. Scholarship, like transit, is never complete and yet never congeals into inertia. Through the manifold explorations of the dynamic transit, transports, scapes, and flows found within literary-and Chaucerian-thought-worlds, new vistas of motion and motivation emerge. Following John Urry's mobile sociology, the volume advances the notion that we can no longer view either social worlds or textual worlds as uniform surfaces upon which one can trace or write a history of the horizontal movements of humans and human mentalities; rather, everything is in constant motion: objects, images, information/ideas, and mobility is thus also vertical, involving human and non-human actants. The essays in this volume consider, then, how medieval literary texts in Chaucer's period rewarp time and space by the means of sophisticated transit and transport structures, which might be traced within specific works but also across works, such as in text networks. Motive entities within literature twist and turn, interact and collide, and destabilise predictable trajectories with unpredictable vigor. TABLE OF CONTENTS // James L. Smith, "Introduction: Transport, Scape, Flow: Medieval Transit Systems" - Christopher Roman, "Bios in The Prik of Conscience: The Apophatic Body and the Sensuous Soul" - Jennie Friedrich, "Concordia discors: The Traveling Heart as Foreign Object in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde" - Robert Stanton, "Whan I schal passyn hens: Moving With/In The Book of Margery Kempe" - Carolynn Van Dyke, "Animal Vehicles: Mobility beyond Metaphor" - Sarah Breckenridge Wright, "Building Bridges to Canterbury" - Thomas R. Schneider, "Chaucer's Physics: Motion in The House of Fame"
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain written by Christopher Gerrard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 968 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle Ages are all around us in Britain. The Tower of London and the castles of Scotland and Wales are mainstays of cultural tourism and an inspiring cross-section of later medieval finds can now be seen on display in museums across England, Scotland, and Wales. Medieval institutions from Parliament and monarchy to universities are familiar to us and we come into contact with the later Middle Ages every day when we drive through a village or town, look up at the castle on the hill, visit a local church or wonder about the earthworks in the fields we see from the window of a train. The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain provides an overview of the archaeology of the later Middle Ages in Britain between AD 1066 and 1550. 61 entries, divided into 10 thematic sections, cover topics ranging from later medieval objects, human remains, archaeological science, standing buildings, and sites such as castles and monasteries, to the well-preserved relict landscapes which still survive. This is a rich and exciting period of the past and most of what we have learnt about the material culture of our medieval past has been discovered in the past two generations. This volume provides comprehensive coverage of the latest research and describes the major projects and concepts that are changing our understanding of our medieval heritage.
Download or read book Roadworks written by Valerie Allen and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study of roads and wayfinding in medieval England, Wales, and Scotland. It looks afresh at the relationship between the road as a material condition of daily life and the formation of local and national communities.
Download or read book The Medieval English Landscape 1000 1540 written by Graeme J. White and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The landscape of medieval England was the product of a multitude of hands. While the power to shape the landscape inevitably lay with the Crown, the nobility and the religious houses, this study also highlights the contribution of the peasantry in the layout of rural settlements and ridge-and-furrow field works, and the funding of parish churches by ordinary townsfolk. The importance of population trends is emphasised as a major factor in shaping the medieval landscape: the rising curve of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries imposing growing pressures on resources, and the devastating impact of the Black Death leading to radical decline in the fourteenth century. Opening with a broad-ranging analysis of political and economic trends in medieval England, the book progresses thematically to assess the impact of farming, rural settlement, towns, the Church, and fortification using many original case studies. The concluding chapter charts the end of the medieval landscape with the dissolution of the monasteries, the replacement of castles by country houses, the ongoing enclosure of fields, and the growth of towns.
Download or read book Alfred s Wars written by Ryan Lavelle and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Although this book provides a selection from sources and interpretations of warfare in Viking-Age England, and presents a consideration of them, it is more than a purely historiographical study. It investigates the current state of scholarship and the key points of its development, indicating areas for enquiry and point out some less familiar sources along the way. The intention is not to deal with the canon of historical works on the Anglo-Saxon army, for remarkably there is no 'canon' as such. Much, though by no means all, scholarship on the organization of military systems in the Anglo-Saxon state has been undertaken by historians and scholars from related disciplines for whom warfare is not a primary concern. Many of the sources used will be familiar to students of early medieval England, but others are included because they are less often considered ... I have not attempted to use a chronological structure, nor have I retold any particular narrative history of the English Kingdom during the Viking Age, although for the reader's convenience a chronology of events is included as an appendix. The focus is rather the exploration of the practice and politics of warfare."--Preface.
Download or read book London Bridge and its Houses c 1209 1761 written by Dorian Gerhold and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2021-10-31 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: London Bridge lined with houses from end to end was one of the most extraordinary structures ever seen in London. It was home to over 500 people, perched above the rushing waters of the Thames, and was one of the city’s main shopping streets. It is among the most familiar images of London in the past, but little has previously been known about the houses and the people who lived and worked in them. This book uses plentiful newly-discovered evidence, including detailed descriptions of nearly every house, to tell the story of the bridge and its houses and inhabitants. With the new information it is possible to reconstruct the plan of the bridge and houses in the seventeenth century, to trace the history of each house back through rentals and a survey to 1358, revealing the original layout, to date most of the houses which appear in later views, and to show how the houses and their occupants changed during five and half centuries. The book describes what stopped the houses falling into the river, how the houses were gradually enlarged, what their layout was inside, what goods were sold on the bridge and how these changed over time, the extensive rebuilding in 1477-1548 and 1683-96, and the removal of the houses around 1760. There are many new discoveries - about the structure of the bridge, the width of the roadway, the original layout of the houses, how the houses were supported, the size and internal planning of the houses, the quality of their architecture, and the trades practised on the bridge. The book includes five newly-commissioned reconstruction drawings showing what we now know about the bridge and its houses.
Download or read book An Encyclopaedia of British Bridges written by David McFetrich and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 1301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An already impressive reference work has been made significantly more valuable . . . a well-illustrated alphabetized compendium of notable bridges.” —The Happy Pontist Bridges have a universal appeal as examples of man’s mastery of nature, from picturesque packhorse bridges to great spans stretching across broad estuaries, and the development of the technology that allows ever more audacious constructions is never-ending. Of the million or more bridges throughout Great Britain, David McFetrich has selected those that are significant in terms of their design, construction or location, or of their connections with people or events of history. His definitive book contains 1,600 separate entries for individual bridge sites or related groups of bridges covering more than 2,000 different structures, 165 general entries about different types of bridge and such topics as collapses and failures, and a summary of about 200 record-holding bridges in 50 different categories. The concise text is supported by more than 900 illustrations and diagrams. The result is a fascinating and readily accessible compendium. The Institute of Civil Engineers (ICA) is also on board. “A valuable resource to use . . . if you plan to visit some of these structures while on holiday or are merely planning a day out.” —East Yorkshire Family History Society “Well-written and researched and eminently readable . . . Because of the ubiquity of bridges throughout Great Britain, this volume should have wide appeal.” —NZ Crown Mines “Full of details covering the many bridges around the UK . . . I found it fascinating to see the variety of bridges around Britain, even the ones not railway related.” —Rail Advent
Download or read book Transforming Townscapes written by Neil Christie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 934 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This monograph details the results of a major archaeological project based on and around the historic town of Wallingford in south Oxfordshire. Founded in the late Saxon period as a key defensive and administrative focus next to the Thames, the settlement also contained a substantial royal castle established shortly after the Norman Conquest. The volume traces the pre-town archaeology of Wallingford and then analyses the town's physical and social evolution, assessing defences, churches, housing, markets, material culture, coinage, communications and hinterland. Core questions running through the volume relate to the roles of the River Thames and of royal power in shaping Wallingford's fortunes and identity and in explaining the town's severe and early decline."
Download or read book Bridges written by Richard Hayman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the monumental splendour of Tower Bridge and the august span at Westminster to the engineering masterpieces at Ironbridge and the Forth, bridges comprise some of the most recognisable landmarks in Britain. Whether the smallest arch or the largest overpass, each has a rich architectural, economic, social and sometimes even religious history. This beautifully illustrated introduction by Richard Hayman explains how piety built and maintained bridges in the Middle Ages; how economic forces inspired a new generation of road bridges in the eighteenth century, such as the Menai Bridge in North Wales, and how technological prowess gave us soaring Victorian railway viaducts and the concrete road bridges of the twentieth century.
Download or read book All Things Medieval 2 volumes written by Ruth A. Johnston and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This insightful survey of the "things" of medieval Europe allows modern readers to understand what they looked like, what they were made of, how they were created, and how they were used. All Things Medieval: An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World covers the widest definition of "medieval Europe" possible, not by covering history in the traditional, textbook manner of listing wars, leaders, and significant historic events, but by presenting detailed alphabetical entries that describe the artifacts of medieval Europe. By examining the hidden material culture and by presenting information about topics that few books cover—pottery, locks and keys, shoes, weaving looms, barrels, toys, pets, ink, kitchen utensils, and much more—readers get invaluable insights into the nature of life during that time period and area. The heartland European regions such as England, France, Italy, and Germany are covered extensively, and information regarding the objects of regions such as Byzantium, Muslim Spain, and Scandinavia are also included. For each topic of material culture, the entry considers the full scope of the medieval period—roughly 500–1450—to give the reader a historical perspective of related traditions or inventions and describes the craftsmen and tools that produced it.
Download or read book Contesting the City written by Christian Drummond Liddy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The political narrative of late medieval English towns is often reduced to the story of the gradual intensification of oligarchy, in which power was exercised and projected by an ever smaller ruling group over an increasingly subservient urban population. Contesting the City takes its inspiration not from English historiography, but from a more dynamic continental scholarship on towns in the southern Low Countries, Germany, and France. Its premise is that scholarly debate about urban oligarchy has obscured contemporary debate about urban citizenship. It identifies from the records of English towns a tradition of urban citizenship, which did not draw upon the intellectual legacy of classical models of the 'citizen'. This was a vernacular citizenship, which was not peculiar to England, but which was present elsewhere in late medieval Europe. It was a citizenship that was defined and created through action. There were multiple, and divergent, ideas about citizenship, which encouraged townspeople to make demands, to assert rights, and to resist authority. This volume exploits the rich archival sources of the five major towns in England - Bristol, Coventry, London, Norwich, and York - in order to present a new picture of town government and urban politics over three centuries. The power of urban governors was much more precarious than historians have imagined. Urban oligarchy could never prevail - whether ideologically or in practice - when there was never a single, fixed meaning of the citizen.
Download or read book Power and Pleasure written by Hugh M. Thomas and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although King John is remembered for his political and military failures, he also resided over a magnificent court. This book uses records of his reign to reconstruct his life at court, and explore how it produced both pleasure and soft power for the king.
Download or read book The Ancient Ways of Wessex written by Alexander Langlands and published by Windgather Press. This book was released on 2019-11-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ancient Ways of Wessex tells the story of Wessex’s roads in the early medieval period, at the point at which they first emerge in the historical record. This is the age of the Anglo-Saxons and an era that witnessed the rise of a kingdom that was taken to the very brink of defeat by the Viking invasions of the ninth century. It is a period that goes on to become one within which we can trace the beginnings of the political entity we have come to know today as England. In a series of ten detailed case studies the reader is invited to consider historical and archaeological evidence, alongside topographic information and ancient place-names, in the reconstruction of the networks of routeways and communications that served the people and places of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Whether you were a peasant, pilgrim, drover, trader, warrior, bishop, king or queen, travel would have been fundamental to life in the early middle ages and this book explores the physical means by which the landscape was constituted to facilitate and improve the movement of people, goods and ideas from the seventh through to the eleventh centuries. What emerges is a dynamic web of interconnecting routeways serving multiple functions and one, perhaps, even busier than that in our own working countryside. A narrative of transition, one of both of continuity and change, provides a fresh and alternative window into the everyday workings of an early medieval landscape through the pathways trodden over a millennium ago.
Download or read book Anglo Saxon England Volume 38 written by Malcolm Godden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-18 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anglo-Saxon England was the first publication to consistently embrace all the main aspects of study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture - linguistic, literary, textual, palaeographic, religious, intellectual, historical, archaeological and artistic - and which promotes the more unusual interests - in music or medicine or education, for example. Articles in volume 38 include: The Passio Andreae and The Dream of the Rood by Thomas D. Hill, Beowulf off the Map by Alfred Hiatt, Numerical Composition and Beowulf: A Re-consideration by Yvette Kisor, 'The Landed Endowment of the Anglo-Saxon Minster at Hanbury (Worcs.) by Steven Bassett, Scapegoating the Secular Clergy: The Hermeneutic Style as a Form of Monastic Self-Definition by Rebecca Stephenson, Understanding Numbers in MS London, British Library Harley by Daniel Anlezark, Tudor Antiquaries and the Vita 'dwardi Regis by Henry Summerso and Earl Godwine's Ship by Simon Keynes and Rosalind Love. A comprehensive bibliography concludes the volume, listing publications on Anglo-Saxon England during 2008.
Download or read book Food Eating and Identity in Early Medieval England written by Allen J. Frantzen and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh approach to the implications of obtaining, preparing, and consuming food, concentrating on the little-investigated routines of everyday life. Food in the Middle Ages usually evokes images of feasting, speeches, and special occasions, even though most evidence of food culture consists of fragments of ordinary things such as knives, cooking pots, and grinding stones, which are rarely mentioned by contemporary writers. This book puts daily life and its objects at the centre of the food world. It brings together archaeological and textual evidence to show how words and implements associated with food contributed to social identity at all levels of Anglo-Saxon society. It also looks at the networks which connected fields to kitchens and linked rural centres to trading sites. Fasting, redesigned field systems, and the place offish in the diet are examined in a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary inquiry into the power of food to reveal social complexity. Allen J. Frantzen is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago.
