The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

by Ian Mortimer

  28. Riley (ed.), Memorials, pp. 492-93.

  29. Wylie, Henry V, I, pp. 31-32.

  30. Harding, Law Courts, p. 95.

  31. Wylie, England under Henry IV, IV, p. 318. This event actually dates from 1410 but it may be considered indicative of the security afforded to transfers of money generally

  32. Hanawalt Westman, “The Peasant Family and Crime,” p. 13.

  33. Hanawalt Westman, “The Peasant Family and Crime,”pp. 14-15.

  34. Platt, Medieval England, p. 110.

  35. McKisack, Fourteenth Century, p. 207.

  36. Details of the Folville and Coterel gangs here have been drawn from Stones, “The Folvilles of Ashby-Folville” and Bellamy, “The Coterel Gang.”

  37. An example is Henry Beaufort, bishop of Lincoln and later bishop of Winchester. He had a daughter, Joan, by Alice Fitzalan. See ODNB.

  38. Woodcock, Ecclesiastical Courts, p. 61.

  39. Cam, Hundred Rolls, p. 193.

  40. Coulton (ed.), Social Life, p. 320.

  41. Brie (ed.), Brut, II, p. 442.

  11. What to Do

  1. Prestwich, “Court of Edward II,’ p. 61.

  2. Wright (ed.), La Tour-Landry, p. 1.

  3. Chaplais, Piers Gaveston, p. 78.

  4. TNAE 101/387/9 m. 7.

  5. TNAE 101/389/8 m. 19.

  6. TNAE 101/396/11 fol.l9r.

  7. Society of Antiquaries of London, A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations, p. 3.

  8. Smith, Expeditions, p. 137.

  9. Illustrated in Reeves, Pleasures and Pastimes, p. 46.

  10. Coulton, Medieval Panorama, pp. 98-99.

  11. This list is from the Cambridge University website Medieval Imaginations, downloaded November 1, 2007: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/medieval. Exeter has been added in view of the performance of the satirical Order of Brothelyngham play there.

  12. TNA E 101/388/8 m. 4. The “cucking stool” here is actually described as a “shelving stool,” the old word “shelving” here meaning “tipping” (OED).

  13. TNAE 101/391/14 mm. 8-9.

  14. Mortimer, Perfect King, p. 259.

  15. Coulton (ed.), Social Life, pp. 391-92, quotingjohn Stow.

  16. Coulton (ed.), Social Life, p. 493.

  17. Keen, Chivalry, p. 88, quoting Roger of Hoveden. The detail of eighty killed at the tournament of Neuss in 1241 is from Keen, Chivalry, p. 87.

  18. Barber and Barker, Tournaments, p. 34. There is uncertainty as to the places of these jousts of war. I give a different reading in Mortimer, Perfect King, p. 191, drawing on Lumby (ed.), Knighton, II, p. 23. Another version again appears in Maxwell (ed.), Scalachronica, p. 112.

  19. Given-Wilson, Royal Household, p. 61.

  20. Woolgar, Great Household, p. 193.

  21. TNAE 101/390/2 m. 1.

  22. Given-Wilson, Royal Household, p. 61.

  23. Hamilton, “Character of Edward II,” p. 61.

  24. Coulton (ed.), Social Life, p. 396.

  25. Chaucer’s Miller “always won the ram at wrestling matches up and down the land.” Chaucer, trans. Wright, The Canterbury Tales, p. 15.

  26. Reeves, Pleasures and Pastimes, p. 96.

  27. Woolgar, Great Household, p. 101.

  28. Coulton, Medieval Panorama, pp. 83-84.

  29. Coulton (ed.), Social Life, p. 400, quoting Froissart.

  30. Coulton (ed.), Social Life, p. 397.

  31. The description of the bow is mainly from the 1298 example described in Bradbury, Medieval Archer, p. 81. The note on the draw weight comes from Reeves, Pleasures and Pastimes, p. 98.

  32. Reeves, Pleasures and Pastimes, pp. 98-99.

  33. Mortimer, Perfect King, p. 103.

  34. Smith, Expeditions, p. 107.

  35. Mortimer, Greatest Traitor, pp. 118,120.

  36. Smith, Expeditions, p. 281.

  37. TNAE 101/392/15 m. 1 (made for Edward III, 1360); E 101 /393/4 (Isabella, 1358). Isabella had two such sets; one was given to her daughter after her death.

  38. Heath, Pilgrim Life, pp. 43-44.

  39. Heath, Pilgrim Life, p. 29.

  40. Coulton (ed.), Social Life, p. 39, quoting an Italian Relation of England (CamdenSoc, 1847).

  41. Alexander and Binski, Age of Chivalry, pp. 222-23.

  42. Alexander and Binski, Age of Chivalry, p. 206. Salisbury has been omitted as St. Osmund was not canonized until 1457.

  43. Heath, Pilgrim Life, pp. 238-39.

  44. Heath, Pilgrim Life, pp. 59-60.

  45. Given-Wilson, Royal Household, p. 61, quoting Edward IV’s Black Book, in which the custom is described as “of old.”

  46. Johnstone, Edward of Camarón, p. 18.

  47. TNA E 101/393/4 fol. 8r; Lewis, ‘Apocalypse of Isabella,” p. 233.

  48. Stratford, “Royal Library,” p. 189.

  49. Mortimer, Greatest Traitor, p. 120; Anthony Tuck, “Thomas, duke of Gloucester (1355-1397)” in ODNB.

  50. Mortimer, Perfect King, pp. 34-38.

  51. Shonk, ‘Auchinleck manuscript” ; MS description on website maintained by National Library of Scotland, http://www.nls.uk/auchinleck/, downloaded November 15, 2007.

  52. Bellamy, “Coterel Gang,” pp. 700-701.

  53. Holt, Robin Hood, pp. 40-50.

  54. Langland, trans. Tiller, Piers Plowman, pp. 110-11.

  55. Anon., trans. Stone, Gawain and the Green Knight, p. 64.

  56. Douglas Gray, “Chaucer, Geoffrey (c. 1340-1400),” in ODNB.

  57. See his entry in ODNB for his height and appearance.

  Envoi

  1. Or, as Keith Jenkins succinctly puts it, “We can never really know the past… the gap between the past and history… is such that no amount of epistemological effort can bridge it” (Jenkins, Re-thinking History, p. 23).

  2. Ian Mortimer, “What Isn’t History?” pp. 454-74.

  Full Titles of Works Mentioned in the Notes

  A few key texts have been of fundamental importance in writing this book. I feel obliged to single out books by Christopher Dyer, Barbara Harvey and Christopher Woolgar as particularly informative. I am also indebted to those older source-based books by G. G. Coulton, L. F. Salzman, Lucy Toulmin Smith and Henry T. Riley But over the last twenty or so years I have looked at a large number of secondary sources and manuscripts, and visited many museums and historical sites. To try to list them all now would be tedious as well as extremely difficult. It would also suggest I had given them all equal weight. For this reason, only those works cited in a short form in the notes are listed here.

  J. Alexander and P. Binski (eds.), The Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200-1400 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987).

  Anonymous, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2nd ed., Brian Stone, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974). p. 64.

  Richard Barber and Juliet Barker, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989).

  P. S. Barnwell and A. T. Adams, The House Within: Interpreting Medieval Houses in Kent (London: HMSO, 1994).

  Patricia Basing, Trades and Crafts in Medieval Manuscripts (London: British Library, 1990).

  Tania Bayard (ed.), A Medieval Home Companion (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991).

  J. G Bellamy, “The Coterel Gang: An Anatomy of a Band of Fourteenth-Century Criminals,” English Historical Review 79, 313 (1964), pp. 698-717.

  H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor: A Study of Peasant Conditions 1150-1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).

  Maggie Black, Food and Cooking in Medieval Britain: History and Recipes (London: Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, 1985).

  J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy 1150-1500 (London: Dent, 1980).

  Jim Bradbury, The Medieval Archer (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1985; reprint 1998).

  Henry Bradley (ed.), Dialogues in French and English by William Caxton: Adapted from the Fourteenth-Century Book of Dialogues in French and Flemish (London: Early English Text Socie
ty 1900).

  F.W.D. Brie (ed.), The Brut, 2 vols. (London: Early English Text Society 1906-1908).

  Edward Britton, The Community of the Vill (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1977).

  R. Allen Brown, H. M. Colvin, and A. J. Taylor, The History of the King’s Works: The Middle Ages 2 vols. (London: HMSO, 1963).

  Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, vol. 4, 1377-1388 (London: HMSO, 1957).

  Helen M. Cam, The Hundred and the Hundred Rolls: An Outline of Government in Medieval England, new ed. (London: Merlin Press, 1963).

  Leonard Cantor (ed.), The English Medieval Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1982).

  Pierre Chaplais, Piers Gaveston: Edward IFs Adoptive Brother (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

  Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, David Wright, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

  C. R. Cheney, Handbook of Dates for Students of English History (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1945; reprint 1991).

  G. E. Cokayne, revised by V Gibbs, H. A. Doubleday D. Warrand, Lord Howard de Waiden, and Peter Hammond (eds.), The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom Extant, Extinct or Dormant, 14 vols. (London: The St. Catherine Press, 1910-98).

  G G. Coulton, Chaucer and His England, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen & Co., 1909).

  ———,Medieval Panorama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938).

  G G. Coulton (ed.), Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918).

  Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Cass, 1965).

  C. Willett Cunnington and Phillis Cunnington, The History of Underclothes (London: Michael Joseph, 1951).

  C. Willett Cunnington, Phillis Cunnington, and Charles Beard, A Dictionary of English Costume 900-1900 (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1960).

  Phillis Cunnington and Catherine Lucas, Occupational Costume in England from the Eleventh Century to 1914 (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1967; reprint 1968).

  Matthew Davies and Ann Saunders, The History of the Merchant Taylors’ Company (Leeds: Maney, 2004).

  Robert S. Dilley, “The Customary Acre: An Indeterminate Measure”, Agricultural History Review, 23 (1975), pp. 173-76.

  Georges Duby (ed.), A History of Private Life, II: Revelations of the Medieval World, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (London: Belknap, 1988).

  Christopher Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England 2nd ed. (London: Hambledon Press, 2000).

  ———, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages rev. ed. (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  Anthony Emery, Dartington Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

  Audrey M. Erskine (ed.), The Accounts of the Fabric of Exeter Cathedral, 1279-1353, vol. 24, 26, (Torquay: Devon and Cornwall Record Society 1981-83).

  H.P.R. Finberg, Tavistock Abbey: A Study in the Social and Economic History of Devon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951).

  H.E.S. Fisher and A.R.J. Jurica (eds.), Documents in English Economic History: England from 1000 to 1760 (London: Bell & Hyman, 1984).

  Frederick J. Furnivall (ed.), The Babees Book, Early English Text Society 32 (1868, reprint Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1997.

  Jean Gimpel, Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (London, Wildwood House, 1988).

  Chris Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England 1360-1413 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

  Chris Given-Wilson (ed.), The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275-1504, CD ed. (Birmingham: Scholarly Digital Editions, 2005).

  Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (Harlow: Longman, 1992).

  Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death (London: Hale, 1983).

  J. Patrick Greene, Medieval Monasteries (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992).

  J. S. Hamilton, “The Character of Edward II: The Letters of Edward of Caernarfon Reconsidered,” in Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson (eds.), The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, in association with The Boydell Press with the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, 2006), pp. 5-21.

  B. A. Hanawalt, “Economic Influences of the Pattern of Crime,” American Journal of Legal History, 18 (1974), pp. 281-97.

  Barbara Hanawalt Westman, “The Peasant Family and Crime in Fourteenth-Century England,” The Journal of British Studies, 13, 2 (1974), pp. 1-18.

  Alan Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973).

  Sir William Hardy and Edward L. C. P. Hardy (eds.), A Collection of the Chronicles and Ancient Histories of Great Britain, Now Called England, by John de Wavrin, Lord of Foresta, 1399-1422 (London: HMSO, 1887).

  Esmond and Jeanette Harris, The Guinness Book of Trees (Enfield: Guinness Superlatives, 1981).

  Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England 1100-1540: The Monastic Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

  John Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy 1348-1530 (London: Macmillan, 1977).

  Sidney Heath, Pilgrim Life in the Middle Ages (London: Unwin, 1911).

  Mary C. Hill, The King’s Messengers 1199-1377 (London: Edward Arnold, 1961).

  Paul Hindle, Medieval Roads and Tracks (Risborough: Shire, 2002).

  F. C. Hingeston (ed.), Royal and Historical Letters During the Reign of Henry IV, King of England and France and Lord of Ireland, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1860; reprint, 1964).

  J. C. Holt, Robin Hood, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989).

  W. G. Hoskins, Local History in England, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1984).

  ———, The Making of the English Landscape (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1955; reprint 1985).

  G. Hutchinson, Medieval Ships and Shipping (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994).

  Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History, rev. ed. (London: Routledge Classics, 2003).

  Helen M. Jewell, English Local Administration in the Middle Ages (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1972).

  Thomas Johnes (ed.), The Chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, 2 vols. (London: H. G. Bohn, 1853).

  Hilda Johnstone, Edward of Carnarvon 1284-1307 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1946).

  J. J. Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life in the Fourteenth Century (London: Ernest Benn, 1889).

  Richard W Kaeuper, “Two Early Lists of Literates in England: 1334, 1373,” English Historical Review, 99 (1984), pp. 363-69.

  Maurice Keen, Chivalry (London: Yale University Press, 1984).

  C. L. Kingsford, “A London Merchant’s House and Its Owners,” Archaeologia, 74 (1924), pp. 137-58.

  David Knowles and R Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses (London: Longmans, Green, 1953).

  Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324, Barbara Bray, trans. (London: Scholar Press, 1978).

  William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, Terence Tiller, trans. (1981).

  Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of England, 7th ed., 4 vols. (London: S Lewis & Co., 1849).

  Suzanne Lewis, “The Apocalypse of Isabella of France: Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS Fr. 13096,” The Art Bulletin, 72, 2 (1990), pp. 224-60.

  Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Women (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995; reprint 1997).

  John Lister (ed.), Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield; vol. 3, 1313-1316 and 1286, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Rec. Ser. 57 (1917).

  J. R. Lumby (ed.), Chronicon Henrici Knighton, vel Cnitthon, monachi Leycestrensis, 2 vols. (London: HMSO, 1889-95).

  Mary Lyon, Bruce Lyon and Henry S. Lucas (eds.), The Wardrobe Book of William de Norwell (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1983), pp. 313-27.
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  Richard Marks and Paul Williamson (eds.), Gothic: Art for England 1400-1547 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2003).

  Sir Herbert Maxwell (ed.), The Scalachronica: The Reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III as recorded by Sir Thomas Grey (Glasgow: n. p., 1907; reprint Felinfach: Llanerch, 2000).

  May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1307-1399 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959).

  Kate Mertes, The English Noble Household (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

  Nick Millea, The Gough Map: the Earliest Road Map of Great Britain (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007).

  Patricia Moore (ed.), The Borough Ordinances of Cowbridge in Glamorgan (Cardiff: Glamorgan Archive Service, 1986).

  Henry Morley Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair (1859; reprint London: Hugh Evelyn, 1973).

  Ian Mortimer, The Fears of King Henry IV; The Life of England’s Self Made King (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007).

  ———, The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, Ruler of England 1327-1330 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003).

  ———, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation (London: Jonathan Cape: 2006).

  ———, What Isn’t History? The Nature and Enjoyment of History in the Twenty-First Century,” History, 312, 93 (2008), pp. 454-74.

  Stella Newton, Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1980).

  Norbert Ohler, The Medieval Traveller, Caroline Hillier, trans. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989; reprint 1995).

  W. M. Ormrod, “The Personal Religion of Edward III,” Speculum, 64 (1989), pp. 849-911.

  The Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1985).

  ODNB: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edition).

  OED: The Oxford English Dictionary (online edition).

  D. M. Palliser, The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 1, c. 600-c. 1540 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  Colin Platt, The English Medieval Town (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1976; reprint 1988).

  ———, Medieval England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988).

  Elizabeth Prescott, The English Medieval Hospital (Melksham: Seaby, 1992).