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activities and personal movements. In the 1440s, England went into a deep and prolonged economic recession, with a collapse of imports and exports, a major contraction in internal markets and a serious shortage of ready coin; signs of recovery did not become evident until the 1470s. 5 For much of the period under consideration, furthermore, England was at war. Hostilities with Scotland began in the 1290s as a result of Edward I’s attempts to take over the independent northern kingdom as an adjunct of England; although such aims were abandoned
mountains’. 98 Then sharp increases in production from the Rammelsberg and other silver mines meant that ‘the last years of the tenth century and the first half of the eleventh were in many ways the most significant period for the early growth of the use of coin in western Europe.’ 99 In these same decades princely and seigneurial mints proliferated. 100 But ransoms could, of course
much reduced rates, so on 26 September 1322 the treasure of the Crown, in the form of fifty-two barrels of coins, each containing £500, was moved from the treasury at Westminster to the Tower of London. The transfer from the Queen’s Bridge on the river at Westminster to the water’s edge at the Tower took place in two barges and four boats at the cost of 2s. 9d.61 This is considerably less than the 4s. paid to move the bell to Windsor in 1351 but costs of handling would also have affected price. Although timber, coins and a bell are all similarly heavy, timber can be
Public Works in Medieval Law (1915 and 1923) have a rich collection of contemporary accounts of the maintenance of bridges, ditches and rivers as well as roads. He coined the memorable phrase that ‘the King’s Highway made and maintained itself’,6 and noted that there was no legal distinction between a king’s highway (via regia) and a common road (via communis). The first article to attempt to study the road network (by Sir Frank Stenton) was not published until 1936.7 A few new roads were built; for example, in 1278 Roger Mortimer was charged by Edward I to enlarge and
tribute in the form of cattle, but by the 1240s the Welsh economy had developed to be able to support large payments in coin. 96 J. Beverley Smith saw the documents in a broader context which had implications for the political hegemony of Gwynedd since the agreement meant in practice that the ‘custom and law of Wales’ would be judged in the English king’s court by the king’s decision and applied to a major lordship. Thus Smith rightly identifies the intention of the English king to partition Gwynedd into two parts, and the justification for treating Dafydd and Gruffudd
were dependent on the manorial caput. The term ‘baronial manor’ was coined by Empey ( 1981 ) to describe this manorial caput lording over the sub-manors, and he equated it to a cantred-sized area. Although describing the high Middle Ages, the legacy of this might be represented in higher concentrations of tower houses in certain counties. Phosphate analysis has been used in a handful of instances to identify the location of settlements, including at Oughterard in County Kildare and Newcastle Lyons in County Dublin. These investigations
a coin of Offa’ (C. F. Keary, Catalogue of English Coins in the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Series, I (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1887), 28, but ‘no other example of either form of the name seems to be forthcoming’. See also the PASE (Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England) database: www.pase.ac.uk. 13 See Max Lieberman, The March of Wales, 1067–1300: A Borderland of Medieval Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), 1. 14 Colgrave, Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, 76–9. 15 Ibid., 174 n. 16 T. M. Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 350
from new analyses of large corpora of primary sources, however, were active people, often fully integrated into local society. At the same time, they were also part of social groups that were not strictly local, such as the clergy of the diocese or, in some cases, the regional wealthy. In this sense, they were ‘men in the middle’, or ‘hinge persons’, to borrow a term recently coined by John Howe, that is, men who connected the local laity to the church and its hierarchy, to the world of writing and knowledge, and, on occasion, to the supra-local level of landowners
the royal image promoted on coins and documents. 4 Claims about Frankish ‘invincibility’ like those voiced in 763–4 articulated the forging of new aristocratic coalitions around the new ruler: this much is well known. 5 But what of the identification of Frankish rule with Christian orthodoxy, and the denigration and denial of the Christian credentials of the Franks’ opponents, claims which
‘tower house’ refers to the specific monument type. The term ‘tower house’ was not coined until the mid-nineteenth century; however, it is an apt phrase in terms of the castle form it describes ( ibid .). In documentation contemporary to their construction we find them described as castles; most often ‘ castellum ’, ‘ cúirt ’ and ‘ fortalicium ’, the latter sometimes written as ‘fortalice’. Consequently, despite their small size, it is apparent that late medieval society viewed them as a continuation of the castle-building tradition – one