Profit Piety And The Professions In Later Medieval England

Ten papers selected from the 1987 Winchester Conference explore the rise of new professionals and the accumulation of wealth that eventually allowed the competent upstarts to join the peerage. No subject index. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Ten papers selected from the 1987 Winchester Conference explore the rise of new professionals and the accumulation of wealth that eventually allowed the competent upstarts to join the peerage. No subject index. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

The late Middle Ages (c.1200-1500) was an age of transition. The major events of this period - the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, the rise of Parliament, the depositions of five English kings between 1327 and 1483 - are examined in detail in this book.

Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England offers an account of the fluidity and artificiality of legal personhood before the individualistic turn in law vis-à-vis juristictional pluralism.

Law mattered in later medieval England and Ireland. A quick glance at the sources suggests as much. From the charter to the will to the court roll, the majority of the documents which have survived from later medieval England and Ireland, and medieval Europe in general, are legal in nature. Yet despite the fact that law played a prominent role in medieval society, legal history has long been a marginal subject within medieval studies both in Britain and North America. Much good work has been done in this field, but there is much still to do. This volume, a collection of essays in honour of Paul Brand, who has contributed perhaps more than any other historian to our understanding of the legal developments of later medieval England and Ireland, is intended to help fill this gap. The essays collected in this volume, which range from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, offer the latest research on a variety of topics within this field of inquiry. While some consider familiar topics, they do so from new angles, whether by exploring the underlying assumptions behind England’s adoption of trial by jury for crime or by assessing the financial aspects of the General Eyre, a core institution of jurisdiction in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. Most, however, consider topics which have received little attention from scholars, from the significance of judges and lawyers smiling and laughing in the courtroom to the profits and perils of judicial office in English Ireland. The essays provide new insights into how the law developed and functioned within the legal profession and courtroom in late medieval England and Ireland, as well as how it pervaded the society at large.

Essays in this collection examine the lifestyles and attitudes of the gentry in late-medieval England. Through surveys of the gentry's military background, administrative and political roles, social behavior, and education, the reader is provided with an overview of how the group's culture evolved and how it was disseminated.

Drawing on an array of archival evidence from court records to the poems of Chaucer, this work explores how medieval thinkers understood economic activity, how their ideas were transmitted and the extent to which they were accepted. Moving beyond the impersonal operations of an economy to its ethical dimension, Hole’s socio-cultural study considers not only the ideas and beliefs of theologians and philosophers, but how these influenced assumptions and preoccupations about material concerns in late medieval English society. Beginning with late medieval English writings on economic ethics and its origins, the author illuminates a society which, although strictly hierarchical and unequal, nevertheless fostered expectations that all its members should avoid greed and excess consumption. Throughout, Hole aims to show that economic ethics had a broader application than trade and usury in late medieval England.

The eleven articles in this volume examine controversial subjects of central importance to medieval economic historians. Topics include the relative roles played by money and credit in financing the economy, whether credit could compensate for shortages of coin, and whether it could counteract the devastating mortality of the Black Death. Drawing on a detailed analysis of the Statute Merchant and Staple records, the articles chart the chronological and geographical changes in the economy from the late-thirteenth to the early-sixteenth centuries. This period started with the triumph of English merchants over alien exporters in the early 1300s, and concluded in the early 1500s with cloth exports overtaking wool in value. The articles assess how these changes came about, as well as the degree to which both political and economic forces altered the pattern of regional wealth and enterprise in ways which saw the northern towns decline, and London rise to be the undisputed financial as well as the political capital of England.