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Unveiling the medieval world
Step into the medieval world, where the echoes of history come to life. Manchester Medieval Sources Online offers a captivating array of first-hand accounts, vividly illustrating the realities of life in this bygone era. Many of these accounts are presented in English for the very first time. From the harrowing tales of the Black Death to the gripping drama of the Norman invasion, our collection immerses you in the heart of medieval experiences.
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What sets this collection apart is a commitment to providing extensive introductory and explanatory materials. These resources serve as your compass, helping beginners grasp the diversity of interpretations within these sources. Moreover, they shed light on linguistic challenges that have sparked controversy and debate.
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The records sampled in this chapter demonstrate the partially successful attempts of urban councils and officials to establish and to implement norms of good practice for building. It also demonstrates the process to foster a more inclusive sense of collective responsibility for public spaces, for common interests in food supply, water and health, and for the quality of life in the town. Life at close quarters, industrial sounds and at the same time a pervasive flavour of the farmyard characterised the streets of the medieval town. It is illuminating to consider the range of urban and environmental matters for which city rulers were willing and even anxious to take responsibility. The provision of a town cross was a public work with both practical and symbolic purpose. These and the efforts to provide uncontaminated water were significant contributions by town councils to the enhancement of the quality of life.
As much as it was a tangible construction of stone, wood and plaster, the medieval town was an idea in the minds of its inhabitants and of its visitors. Mythologised or romantic as they might be, ideas of the town's prestigious origins and present eminence influenced the ideals and actions of its population. The sources gathered in this chapter include examples of the currency and expression of such ideas. They also exemplify some of the ways in which a distinguished history and idealised image of the town circulated and became embedded in local culture. Liberally strewn with allusions to the antique world of Rome, William fitz-Stephen's text joins Christian hagiography to a classicising emulation of pre-Christian writers in the praise of cities. At the end of the period the celebratory allusions to the history of Exeter and of Bristol come from civic officials: a mayor and a town clerk.
The introduction situates the extracts within the larger context of European urban history, and against a wider chronological backdrop. The traces of medieval urban experience are to be found in a great variety of historical sources. New scholarship in the related fields of social history and the history of gender relations, economic history and the history of religion has also brought fresh evidence and new questions to the particular context of urban studies.
This chapter contains an introduction and a selection of translated and annotated texts on religion and culture. Fraternities added to the texture of urban religious life, and further accentuated the scope for the agency and variety of lay religion. Urban wills are eloquent of a creative range of both devotional and fraternal ties, forged over a lifetime as so many means to address the challenges of life in the late medieval town. In addition to the material and spiritual support offered to their own members, guilds or fraternities often provided charitable support to a wider community. Although vastly depleted by Reformation and seventeenth-century iconoclasm, enough evidence survives to show how the fabric of a medieval city church functioned as a site for the construction of both social and religious identities. Yet, late medieval religious culture was too multivalent to be manipulated in the sole interest of bishops or magistrates.
This chapter contains an introduction and a selection of translated and annotated texts on social development. Urban society in the Middle Ages was in some important ways very like that of the countryside. The social experience of the town differed from that of its rural surroundings by virtue of its concentrated diversity and its fluidity. Late medieval observers often declared that they were looking at significant social change in the form of inferior artisans and their wives who affected the manners and dress of their betters. An element in the urban population prior to the end of the thirteenth century, the history of which was both tragically unique and yet absolutely characteristic, was the Jews. Following the Norman Conquest, Jewish settlers scattered themselves through sixty English towns. From well before the Conquest, English towns were home to longterm and short-term settlers from all other parts of Christendom.
This chapter contains an introduction and a selection of translated and annotated texts on tensions an violence in medieval towns. Economic growth raised the stakes, leading to differentiation of wealth and status and encouraging increased competition for control of taxation and access to markets. During the long thirteenth century, as the medieval European economy expanded to its limits, a series of clashes over municipal jurisdiction sprang from a clear economic motivation. The university environment generated in peculiarly concentrated form a widely encountered tendency of young men in towns to congregate socially, to drink, and on occasion to prove their developing masculinity in acts of collective violence. As the medieval town was defined by the diversity of its component elements, so it was condemned to the strains of tension and to periodic violence. Most recorded incidents had their origins in domestic arguments, generational conflicts, tensions in the workplace or the perceived corruption of justices or tax officials, each of which was fostered by the multiple inequalities of urban society.
This book is the first collection of translated sources on towns in medieval England between 1100 and 1500. Drawing on a variety of written evidence for the significan and dynamic period, it provides an overview of English medieval urban history. Readers are invited to consider the challenges and opportunities presented by a wide range of sources. The merchant, for example, is seen from different angles - as an economic agent, as a religious patron and in Chaucer's fictional depiction. The prominence of London and the other major cities is reflected in the selection, but due attention is also given to a number of small market towns. Occasions of conflict are represented, as are examples of groups and societies which both contributed to and helped to contain the tensions within urban society. Changing indicators of wealth and poverty are considered, together with evidence for more complex questions concerning the quality of life in the medieval town. The book moves between the experience of urban life and contemporary perceptions of it - from domestic furnishings to legends of civic origins and plays in which townspeople enacted their own history.
This chapter contains an introduction and a selection of translated and annotated texts on urban government. The rhetoric of urban government emphasised the ideal of unity under the crown: several town councils claimed that their respective city was 'the king's chamber'. The assumptions behind medieval government were far from any modern principle of democracy. The underlying principle of citizenship was that full rights to participate in the economic opportunities of urban life carried a responsibility to share in its regulation through office-holding and to bear its costs by contribution to civic taxes. Monarchs under financial duress were the more willing to delegate powers for a financial return. No civic corporation under the aegis of the medieval English monarchy was allowed to forget that it exercised delegated authority on suffrance. The county towns, as an elite class of regional centres was defined by about 1100, would always be seen from the point of view of royal government as means for the expression and assertion of central authority.
This chapter contains an introduction and a selection of translated and annotated texts on urban growth. The use by English monarchs of their towns as frames for the spectacular display of royal power would have a long history. The different case of Bury St Edmunds exemplifies the potential of a monastic establishment to act as a catalyst of urban growth. A reflection of urban growth in the Anglo-Norman period are the bids by local groups of merchants for increased autonomy and scope to manage their affairs, free from the daily meddling of royal officials. A spectacular instance of urban promotion was the bishop of Salisbury's project to relocate both his cathedral and its surrounding city from the dramatic hilltop setting of 'Old Salisbury' to the foot of the escarpment. While archaeology has revealed traces of earlier settlement on the site of 'New Salisbury', the grid-planned and fortified town in the thirteenth century is a dramatic instance of ecclesiastical involvement in the urban expansion of the period.
In many ways, the opening years of Count Ludwig III of Arnstein's life seem to have been typical ones for a twelfth-century German count. The text translated in this chapter combines an account of Ludwig's life with a history of the Premonstratensian community at Arnstein. As it shows, Ludwig did not disappear from the world of the secular nobility after joining his religious foundation. On the contrary, his reputation amongst the local laity seems to have grown after he bound himself to the Premonstratensians. People flocked to his side, offering properties to Arnstein and asking Ludwig to help reform other monastic communities in the neighbourhood. This was because there was much spiritual capital to be gained by following a count who had dedicated himself to the religious life.