Nottingham Medieval Studies

Domesday Book is a valuable source for studying royal clergy in England between 1066 and 1086. This paper focuses on two of these clerics, both with landholdings in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, to explore what these can show us about the services they carried out for Edward the Confessor and William I. The first, Earnwine the priest, held strings of landholdings, mostly small and sited at intervals along major routeways across the dioceses of Lincoln and York, while the activities of the second, Earnwig the sheriff, were more closely focused on the north-east Midlands. Earnwine probably acted as a confidential royal messenger along major routes, while Earnwig, the post-Conquest sheriff of Nottingham and Derby, operated within a more narrowly defined area. Both assisted kings to communicate with peripheries.

The Normans, like many of the nascent Iberian societies in the tenth and eleventh centuries, developed an understanding of the concept of loyalty as a bond between members of the warring elites that helped forge their shared identity. So, when the Norman diaspora began in the early eleventh century, they began a process of conquest and assimilation in the regions they encountered. The Iberian Peninsula with its embryonic group of Christian principalities that were being consolidated after centuries of Umayyad dominance served as a new theatre for the Norman incursions. Therefore, as in southern Italy, because of their numerical inferiority the Normans made alliances with their Iberian coreligionists to advance in their conquest designs. This essay discusses the contractual relations forged between the Normans and their Iberian coreligionists. It explores the concept of loyalty that both groups shared in consolidating their own political and social identities. It shows that the Normans’ conceptualization of loyalty played a vital role in the establishment of temporary alliances between the different factions in their common military struggle against the Muslim-controlled political entities of the peninsula. Finally, it compares them to the arrangements forged between the Breton routiers and their employers explored by Michael Jones.

England contained hundreds of schools in and after the twelfth century. They did not fall under the jurisdiction of the Crown, or that of the Church to more than a limited extent. Neither authority regulated them through legislation or regular inspection. Yet their functioning reveals a remarkable degree of cohesion and similarity. How schools were organized and taught was much the same, wherever the place. Centre and edges kept in touch. The article explores how this was achieved: through the circulation of commonly accepted textbooks, the training of some teachers at Oxford and Cambridge, movements of teachers from one school to another, the expectations of parents, and eventually the influence of prestigious national institutions like Eton, St Paul’s London, and Winchester.

By the start of the fourteenth century the petition was established as one of the most important modes of communication between towns and cities on the one hand, and the English crown on the other. Petitions underscored the need of urban communities to obtain the intervention of royal government in their affairs. This discussion investigates the language of these supplications, focusing specifically on the choice of vocabulary used to describe the collective identity of those in whose name the petition was presented. The investigation raises important questions about urban identity and power structures, and the principles underpinning civic governance. It also highlights the importance of linguistic analysis in understanding the interaction between rulers and ruled in late medieval England.

This paper considers the ways in which successive Plantagenet monarchs created apanages — semi-independent lordships — for members of the (extended) royal family. It surveys the major apanages, considers their administrations, and asks if this process constituted a devolution of power from the centre during a period in which ‘state-formation’ is typically said to be underway in England.

This article examines the escorted convoy of ships that brought wine from Bordeaux to England in 1372–1373. By offering advantageous terms of service to shipowners willing to provide large ships refitted and manned for war, the crown was able to deploy a powerful, armed flotilla, which, beyond escort duty, could seize opportunities for enrichment at sea, thereby recouping some of the expense of mobilization. The article focuses on ten well-documented ships among the escorts and on the careers of their owners and masters: men who, during the 1370s, were emerging as naval enterprisers. At a time when commerce and naval duties necessarily coexisted, the volatility of the maritime sphere encouraged naval enterprise, and with it the perception among enterprisers that the political, social, and economic gains could outweigh their losses.

This essay seeks to challenge the opinion that when a bishop was outside his see his diocesan duties were neglected; rather, he was able to combine service to both church and state while staying in London, conducting ecclesiastical business, both routine and exceptional, and attending parliament and council, and networking with fellow prelates. Buckingham’s political role under Richard II is also investigated.

In late medieval Nottingham, matters of nuisance were dealt with by the Mickletorn Jury. Drawing on contextual information gleaned from the borough court rolls, this article provides a detailed spatial analysis of the nuisances reported by the Mickletorn Jury in October 1407 and biographical information on the named nuisance-makers. The roll is shown to be unusual in its arrangement and, with its emphasis on removing dung and dunghills, unusual in its content. It is tentatively suggested that this change in procedure and focus may have been prompted by an outbreak of plague in southern and western England, and perhaps indicates that Nottingham’s town authorities moved proactively to sanitize its streets in an effort to protect its inhabitants in advance of the plague’s expected arrival.

MS Harley 2250, dated 1477, is an assemblage of religious works in English and Latin for the use and instruction of priests and their parishioners. The dialect of the English, together with the marginalia place the manuscript securely in Cheshire, and two of its texts, the Stanzaic Life of Christ and St Erkenwald are certainly Cheshire compositions. The essay examines the representation in the manuscript of a regional culture distinct from that of the central culture of London and the south. This is followed by a detailed description of the contents of MS Harley 2250.

In the mid-1460s, an experienced French soldier named Jean de Bueil wrote Le Jouvencel, a fictional account of the military career of an anonymous young soldier rising through the ranks. This was inspired by real events, people, and places that the author had known and witnessed during his own military career stretching back to the 1420s. Though it was not an autobiography or memoir that offered a simple account of the life and career of its author, it did provide an unusually realistic window into both warfare and attitudes towards the military life during the final stages of the Hundred Years War. So, it is striking that Le Jouvencel offered an aggressive diatribe against courtiers and the court, denouncing it as a dangerous environment full of envy and corruption. It might therefore be tempting to see this as evidence for a growing separation between martial and court cultures during the brutal last decades of the Hundred Years War, foreshadowing later developments in the professionalization of military cultures. But the criticisms of the court offered in Le Jouvencel testified to the literary sophistication of Bueil, echoing learned traditions of anti-curial writing, and more importantly, as a reaction to specific events in his own life that both he and his biographer, Guillaume Tringant, deliberately omitted from their narratives.

This contribution seeks to trace the history of a long, drawn-out editorial project and the ways in which it has reflected changing approaches to the study of medieval England’s European continental possessions. Beginning in 1885, the Anglo-French venture to edit and publish the Gascon Rolls experienced a somewhat chequered history until the recent successful conclusion of the project as an online source. Its vicissitudes are recounted. The significant role of figures such as Montagu Burrows, Yves Renouard, and others are discussed. Some of the opportunities offered to future research by the publication are outlined and the scope for possible comparative studies with the history of the later overseas dominions of the English (then British) crown are suggested.