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This is a study of noblewomen in twelfth-century England and Normandy, and of the ways in which they exercised power. It draws on a mix of evidence to offer a reconceptualization of women's role in aristocratic society, and in doing so suggests new ways of looking at lordship and the ruling elite in the high Middle Ages. The book considers a wide range of literary sources—such as chronicles, charters, seals and governmental records—to draw out a detailed picture of noblewomen in the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman realm. It asserts the importance of the life-cycle in determining the power of these aristocratic women, thereby demonstrating that the influence of gender on lordship was profound, complex and varied.
period? One could, after all, quite easily make the case that heated intellectual argument about the nature of justice is – if not a perennial problem – hardly a phenomenon discovered in, or exclusive to, twelfth-century England. 1 The choice of twelfth- and early thirteenth-century England as the subject for this study is justified on two grounds. The period c.1100–c.1250 (the ‘long twelfth century’) in England saw two key and coinciding changes. 2 The first was the rise of scholasticism across Northern Europe, and the set of intellectual
noblewomen and power 7 Seals Representation, image and identity here are over 145 extant secular women’s seals from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.1 They present the historian with unique opportunities to study the portrayal of female identity in twelfth-century England. Seals were visual representations of power, and they conveyed notions of authority and legitimacy. They publicly presented a view of both men and women which visibly crystallised ideas about gender, class and lordship. The modern historian of seals owes a considerable debt to
looked at women in particular and found that there was a difference in male and female naming patterns, female names ‘lagging behind’ male names when change occurred owing to fashion. Clark found that women’s forenames in twelfth-century England were more insular and men’s forenames were more Continental.44 David Postles, building on these foundations, found that there was a ‘virtual revolution’ in patterns of forenaming in the mid-twelfth century and that women’s names were more archaic than men’s. He suggested that women’s role as bearers of English cultural
? The case for ‘popular’ discussion of mercy set out here may seem at odds with some recent verdicts on twelfth-century England. Paul Hyams, for example, has made the case for understanding that world as a ‘vengeance’ culture (or better still, a culture of enmity), in which matters of self-help and personal sleights were still of paramount importance, and where enmity still remained commonplace and accepted as a feature of the social landscape. 45 Hyams’s point was that we misunderstand the social world of Anglo-Norman and Angevin England if we assume the
sixteenth-century example indicates, it was still possible there, as in Spain in the same period, to buy or, as in this case, receive exemption from the penalties attached to Jewish, as to Muslim or heretical Christian ancestry. The last, fairly lengthy, section of this chapter concerns a false accusation against Jews which went back to twelfth-century England
caused by female succession systems when they developed in twelfth-century England. This is a formidable body of scholarship which has clarified important aspects of female land tenure and shown noblewomen as an element in the exercise of lordship. The importance of this and, by extension, the possibility of women’s power as active participants therein is not clarified directly, because the authors are interested in discussing succession systems and rules of inheritance, or feudalism and lordship, not in discussing women’s power. Yet much can be learned about women
Press, 1984), pp. 161–89, seeks a wider canvas. For twelfth-century England see S. K. Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-century England (Chapel Hill NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); for anchoresses see A. K. Warren, ‘The nun as anchoress: England, 1100–1500’, in J. A. Nichols and L. Thomas Shank (eds), Distant Echoes: Medieval Religious Women, I, Distant Echoes (Kalamazoo MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984), pp. 197–212. For the functions of a twelfth-century saint see H. Mayr-Harting, ‘Functions of a twelfth-century shrine: the miracles of St
me was the anonymous Fair Maid of Bristow , set in twelfth-century England, in which a woman’s loyalty to her husband survives not only his unfaithfulness but also, in a hint at the two plays by Heywood and Day, his apparent intent to have her murdered so that he can enjoy his mistress. The faked poisoning is used to contrive a comedic but morally bewildering conclusion. 4 The errant husband, Vallenger, believes that he has
the meanings and symbolisms of countergifts should be set into a paradigm which acknowledges that changes in diplomatic may have affected documentary forms. Thus as a gauge of social realities this assessment of countergifts is placed in a 108 countergifts and affidation framework similar to that established in the previous chapter to analyse witnessing. Although both men and women received an array of items as countergifts in twelfth-century England, male recipients of countergifts tended to receive horses, armour, hunting birds or money.11 Barthélemy’s study