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age In twenty-first-century Britain, chronological age has a key role in defining the entry into senior citizenship. Sixty-five is the official age for retirement and pension entitlement. During the later medieval period, ‘sixty’ achieved some pre-eminence as a synonym for ‘old’. The poet Olivier de la Marche ( c .1426–1502) used ‘sixty’ to describe an old woman whose past
the secular and religious social systems of which he is a part. In John’s writings the pursuit of the common good becomes an ethical priority, although it remains one that sits alongside the pursuit of faith, and humanity’s ultimate citizenship in the universal Church. John was greatly influenced by the blurring inherent in Stoic ideology between public and private performance of duties: the good political leader must also be a good man. Living virtuously consisted of pursuit of the summum bonum , happiness attained through the perfect
of the Low Countries, organised in guilds which exerted control over workers’ skills and the quality of the products. 115 The node in this system was the Flemish city of Bruges, where the Burgundian court and its administrators indulged in conspicuous consumption and an unequalled concentration of foreign merchants bought goods for export. 116 Artisans all over the Low Countries and further afield supplied the Bruges market and many migrated to the city, buying citizenship and setting up shop close to their customers. 117 Nevertheless
the individuals. For some of the people who received them, any such inference would indeed be disadvantageous. Drew Malherbe, the son of a French father and an English mother, was described as a ‘burgess of Amiens and Northampton’ in a petition for the release of his property following the confiscations of 1294, denoting his determination to retain rights on both sides of the Channel. 53 Similarly, Walter de Bardi, who was a member of the great Florentine family of bankers and ran the king’s mint in London from the 1360s to the 1390s, took out citizenship of London
English colleagues as agents. 10 Londoners also acted as sureties when alien merchants or artisans obtained the freedom of the city and became members of one of its livery companies. In 1356, the London cloth workers John Payn, Richard atte Boure and John Bennet helped the Fleming John Kempe join the guild of native weavers and acquire citizenship, allowing him to trade retail in the city. 11 In 1453, the London drapers John Walshawe, William Russell, Henry Waver and Henry Kent stood surety for the Venetian Jacopo Falleron, so that he could buy the freedom and enter
still very far off the assumptions made in modern states that immigrants seeking citizenship have to demonstrate the ability to communicate in the appropriate language. It is clear, however, that language was in many respects both the primary barrier to, and the primary vector of, social integration. There is a huge body of written evidence from which we can deduce much about the nature of the spoken languages of England in this period. Ironically, however, that evidence yields remarkably little by way of insight into the challenges that confronted those who sought to
that it would further good citizenship and promote civic values. The optimistic Estates of Scotland required all barons and freeholders to send their children to school at eight or nine; the council of Hamburg founded several schools in 1402; and tax exemptions and free accommodation were used to tempt teachers into Italian cities. Craft guilds too began to lay more emphasis on reading and writing skills
Historical Journal ,24 (1981), 791– 806; Rachel Foxley, ‘John Lilburne and the citizenship of “Free-Born Englishmen”’, The Historical Journal , 47 (2004), 849 – 74. 59 George Owen of Henllys, The Description of Penbrokshire , ed. H. Owen (4 vols, Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, Cymmrodorion Record Series, 1, 1892 –1936), i. 15 –16. 60 Dillwyn Miles, ‘George Owen (1552 –1613), antiquary’, ODNB . 61 Miles, ‘George Owen’. 62 Charles, George Owen , pp. 3 – 4
apprentice, this rite of passage would be marked by a public admission to citizenship. In Bristol, the ritual was intended to acknowledge that a person had been, in the words of Anne Yarborough, ‘accepted into the web of ties and obligations which defined the identity of the urban adult’. 165 The rituals that propelled a Venetian adolescent into the ranks of full nobility began with the Balla d
As we have seen with regard to the philosophical notion of agency, lack of reason entailed lack of will, and without will there could be no agency. From looking at the language of legal texts, it seems that such philosophical concepts had been ported across in an unadulterated fashion. ‘What the madman shared with the infant was not a recognized disease or malady or measured deficiency. It was, rather, the unfitness of both for citizenship, and the fact that punishment would do nothing to improve them.’ 121 The free citizen had the capacity, under the discipline