Download or read book The Medieval Account Books of the Mercers of London written by Lisa Jefferson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 1486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the premier livery company, the Mercers Company in medieval England enjoyed a prominent role in London's governance and exercised much influence over England's overseas trade and political interests. This substantial two-volume set provides a comprehensive edition of the surviving Mercers' accounts from 1347 to 1464, and opens a unique window into the day-to-day workings of one of England's most powerful institutions at the height of its influence. The accounts list income, derived from fees for apprentices and entry fees, from fines (whose cause is usually given, sometimes with many details), from gifts and bequests, from property rents, and from other sources, and then list expenditures: on salaries to priests and chaplains, to the beadle, the rent-collector, and to scribes and scriveners; on alms payments; on quit-rents due on their properties; on repairs to properties; and on a whole host of other costs, differing from year to year, and including court cases, special furnishings for the chapel or Hall, negotiations over trade with Burgundy, transport costs, funeral costs or those for attendance at state occasions, etc. Included also in some years are ordinances, deeds and other material of which they wanted to ensure a record was kept. Beginning with an early account for 1347-48, and the company's ordinances of that year, the accounts preserved form an entire block from 1390 until 1464. The material is arranged in facing-page format, with an accurate edition of the original text mirrored by a translation into modern English. A substantial introduction describes the manuscripts in full detail and explains the accounting system used by the Mercers and the financial vocabulary associated with it. Exhaustive name and subject indexes ensure that the material is easily accessible and this edition will become an essential tool for all studying the social, cultural or economic developments of late-medieval England.

Download or read book Paper in Medieval England written by Orietta Da Rold and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the methods and knowledge to understand how and why paper was used in medieval writing and beyond.

Download or read book Merchants of Innovation written by Esther-Miriam Wagner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traders around the world use particular spoken argots, to guard commercial secrets or to cement their identity as members of a certain group. The written registers of traders, too, in correspondence and other commercial texts show significant differences from the language used in official, legal or private writing. This volume suggests a clear cross-linguistic tendency that mercantile writing displays a greater degree of language mixing, code-switching and linguistic innovations, and, by setting precedents, promote language change. This interdisciplinary volume aims to place the traders' languages within a wider sociolinguistic context. Questions addressed include: What differences can be observed between mercantile registers and those of court or legal scribes? Do the traders' texts show the early emergence of features that take longer to permeate into the 'higher' varieties of the same language? Do they anticipate language change in the standard register or influence it by setting linguistic precedents? What sets traders' letters apart from private correspondence and other 'low' registers? The book will also examine bilingualism, semi-bilingualism, reasons for code-switching and the choice of particular languages over others in commercial correspondence.

Download or read book Citizen of London written by Michael McCarthy and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2022-09-29 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary story of Richard Whittington, from his arrival in London as a young boy to his death in 1423, against a backdrop of plague, politics and war; turbulence between Crown, City and Commons; and the unrelenting financial demands of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, to whom Whittington was mercer, lender and fixer. A man determined to follow his own path, Whittington was a significant figure in London's ceaseless development. As a banker, Collector of the Wool Custom, King's Council member and four-time mayor, Whittington featured prominently in the rise of the capital's merchant class and powerful livery companies. Civic reformer, enemy of corruption and author of an extraordinary social legacy, he contributed to Henry V's victory at Agincourt and oversaw building works at Westminster Abbey. In London, Whittington found his 'second' family: a mentor, Sir Ivo Fitzwarin, and an inspirational wife in Fitzwarin's daughter Alice. Today's Dick Whittington pantomimes, enjoyed by millions, have a grain of truth in them, but the real story is far more compelling--minus that sadly mythical cat.

Download or read book Among the Wolves of Court written by Lauren Mackay and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-30 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tragic story of Anne Boleyn has been retold over the centuries, yet two key figures in Anne's life-her father Thomas and brother George- are often relegated to the margins of Henry VIII's turbulent reign. Well before Anne's coronation in 1533, Thomas was regarded as one of Henry's most skilled and experienced ambassadors, and George was a talented young courtier on the rise. But Anne's downfall was to have a devastating effect on her family – ultimately costing her and her brother their lives. A family whose success and prestige had been shaped over generations was destroyed in a violent and brutal episode as the king sought a new wife and a male heir. In this first biography devoted to the Boleyn men, Lauren Mackay takes us beyond the stereotypes of Thomas and George to present a story that has almost been lost to history. This book follows the Boleyn men as they negotiated their way through the ruthless game of politics among the wolves of the court, and establishes their place in Tudor history.

Download or read book The Ends of the Body written by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on Arabic, English, French, Irish, Latin and Spanish sources, the essays share a focus on the body’s productive capacity – whether expressed through the flesh’s materiality, or through its role in performing meaning. The collection is divided into four clusters. ‘Foundations’ traces the use of physical remnants of the body in the form of relics or memorial monuments that replicate the form of the body as foundational in communal structures; ‘Performing the Body’ focuses on the ways in which the individual body functions as the medium through which the social body is maintained; ‘Bodily Rhetoric’ explores the poetic linkage of body and meaning; and ‘Material Bodies’ engages with the processes of corporeal being, ranging from the energetic flow of humoural liquids to the decay of the flesh. Together, the essays provide new perspectives on the centrality of the medieval body and underscore the vitality of this rich field of study.

Download or read book Chaucer s People Everyday Lives in Medieval England written by Liza Picard and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle Ages re-created through the cast of pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. Among the surviving records of fourteenth-century England, Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry is the most vivid. Chaucer wrote about everyday people outside the walls of the English court—men and women who spent days at the pedal of a loom, or maintaining the ledgers of an estate, or on the high seas. In Chaucer’s People, Liza Picard transforms The Canterbury Tales into a masterful guide for a gloriously detailed tour of medieval England, from the mills and farms of a manor house to the lending houses and Inns of Court in London. In Chaucer’s People we meet again the motley crew of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. Drawing on a range of historical records such as the Magna Carta, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Cookery in English, Picard puts Chaucer’s characters into historical context and mines them for insights into what people ate, wore, read, and thought in the Middle Ages. What can the Miller, “big…of brawn and eke of bones” tell us about farming in fourteenth-century England? What do we learn of medieval diets and cooking methods from the Cook? With boundless curiosity and wit, Picard re-creates the religious, political, and financial institutions and customs that gave order to these lives.

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 The English Woollen Industry c 1200 c 1560 written by John Oldland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to describe the early English woollens’ industry and its dominance of the trade in quality cloth across Europe by the mid-sixteenth century, as English trade was transformed from dependence on wool to value-added woollen cloth. It compares English and continental draperies, weighs the advantages of urban and rural production, and examines both quality and coarse cloths. Rural clothiers who made broadcloth to a consistent high quality at relatively low cost, Merchant Adventurers who enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Low Countries, and Antwerp’s artisans who finished cloth to customers’ needs all eventually combined to make English woollens unbeatable on the continent.

Download or read book The Register of the Goldsmiths Company Deeds and Documents C 1190 to C 1666 written by Lisa Jefferson and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 1816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This three-volume edition provides translations of the Goldsmiths' Company Register of Deeds with full explicatory annotation, and with a clear introduction to both the manuscript and the legal texts contained in it.

Download or read book Chaucer s Scribes written by Lawrence Warner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2004 announcement that Chaucer's scribe had been discovered resulted in a paradigm shift in medieval studies. Adam Pynkhurst dominated the classroom, became a fictional character, and led to suggestions that this identification should prompt the abandonment of our understanding of the development of London English and acceptance that the clerks of the Guildhall were promoting vernacular literature as part of a concerted political program. In this meticulously researched study, Lawrence Warner challenges the narratives and conclusions of recent scholarship. In place of the accepted story, Warner provides a fresh, more nuanced one in which many more scribes, anonymous ones, worked in conditions we are only beginning to understand. Bringing to light new information, not least, hundreds of documents in the hand of one of the most important fifteenth-century scribes of Chaucer and Langland, this book represents an important intervention in the field of Middle English studies.

Download or read book The Mercery of London written by Anne F. Sutton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although mercers have long been recognised as one of the most influential trades in medieval London, this is the first book to offer a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the trade from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. The variety of mercery goods (linen, silk, worsted and small manufactured items including what is now called haberdashery) gave the mercers of London an edge over all competitors. The sources and production of all these commodities is traced throughout the period covered. It was as the major importers and distributors of linen in England that London mercers were able to take control of the Merchant Adventurers and the export of English cloth to the Low Countries. The development of the Adventurers' Company and its domination by London mercers is described from its first privileges of 1296 to after the fall of Antwerp. This book investigates the earliest itinerant mercers and the artisans who made and sold mercery goods (such as the silkwomen of London, so often mercers' wives), and their origins in counties like Norfolk, the source of linen and worsted. These diverse traders were united by the neighbourhood of the London Mercery on Cheapside and by their need for the privileges of the freedom of London. Extensive use of Netherlandish and French sources puts the London Mercery into the context of European Trade, and literary texts add a more personal image of the merchant and his preoccupation with his social status which rose from that of the despised pedlar to the advisor of princes. After a slow start, the Mercers' Company came to include some of the wealthiest and most powerful men of London and administer a wide range of charitable estates such as that of Richard Whittington. The story of how they survived the vicissitudes inflicted by the wars and religious changes of the sixteenth century concludes this fascinating and wide-ranging study.

Download or read book Makers and Users of Medieval Books written by Carol M. Meale and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays exploring different aspects of late medieval and early modern manuscript and book culture. Late medieval manuscripts and early modern print history form the focus of this volume. It includes new work on the compilation of some important medieval manuscript miscellanies and major studies of merchant patronage and of a newly revealed woman patron, alongside explorations of medieval texts and the post-medieval reception history of Langland, Chaucer and Nicholas Love. It thus pays a fitting tribute to the career of Professor A.S.G. Edwards, highlighting his scholarly interests and demonstrating the influence of his achievements. Carol M. Meale is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol; the late Derek Pearsall was Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and Honorary Research Professor at the University of York. Contributors: Nicolas Barker, J.A. Burrow, A.I. Doyle, Martha W. Driver, Susanna Fein, Jane Griffiths, Lotte Hellinga, Alfred Hiatt, Simon Horobin, Richard Linenthal, Carol M. Meale, Orietta Da Rold, John Scattergood, Kathleen L. Scott, Toshiyuki Takamiya, John J. Thompson.

Download or read book Medieval Clothing and Textiles written by Robin Netherton and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2010 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of medieval clothing and textiles reveals much about the history of our material culture, as well as social, economic and cultural history as a whole.

Download or read book The Theology of Debt in Late Medieval English Literature written by Anne Schuurman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-31 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring debt's permutations in Middle English texts, Anne Schuurman makes the bold claim that the capitalist spirit has its roots in Christian penitential theology. Her argument challenges the longstanding belief that faith and theological doctrine in the Middle Ages were inimical to the development of market economies, showing that the same idea of debt is in fact intrinsic to both. The double penitential-financial meaning of debt, and the spiritual paradoxes it creates, is a linchpin of scholastic and vernacular theology, and of the imaginative literature of late medieval England. Focusing on the doubleness of debt, this book traces the dynamic by which the Christian ascetic ideal, in its rejection of material profit and wealth acquisition, ends up producing precisely what it condemns. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Download or read book Anne Boleyn written by Amy Licence and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE biography of the most alluring, important and enigmatic of Henry VIII's six wives - Anne Boleyn.

Download or read book Concerns and Preoccupations written by Linda Clark and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This series [pushes] the boundaries of knowledge and [develops] new trends in approach and understanding. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW