The English estates of the Abbey of Holy Trinity, Caen included manors situated in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, East Anglia, and Wiltshire, which differed greatly in economic organisation and social structure. Among the records of estate administration are surveys describing the rents and services of tenants, the resources of the demesne, and the advance of cultivation in woodland and waste. The present volume contains surveys for the whole estate made in the reigns of Henry I and Henry II, thirteenth century custumals for Minchinhampton, Avening, and Felsted, and twenty-six charters and leases, some of which relate to property in London. They provide valuable evidence of social conditions and changing methods of estate exploitation, and are printed for the first time.
"This is a critical edition of six twelfth-century surveys of the vast estates of Glastonbury Abbey, five of which are printed for the first time." "They deal with both the monastic household and the Abbot's lordship as tenant-in-chief. They throw much light on the changing methods by which he exploited the resources of his demesne manors, and provide evidence of how the services and holdings of the peasantry were affected by a rising population." "The introduction explains the contemporary context of surveys - documents which are of fundamental importance for the economic, social, and monastic history of twelfth-century England."--BOOK JACKET.
This is the first detailed study of the role of the Church in the commercialization of milling in medieval England. Focusing on the period from the late eleventh to the mid sixteenth centuries, it examines the estate management practices of more than thirty English religious houses founded by the Benedictines, Cistercians, Augustinians and other minor orders, with an emphasis on the role played by mills and milling in the establishment and development of a range of different sized episcopal and conventual foundations. Contrary to the views espoused by a number of prominent historians of technology since the 1930s, the book demonstrates that patterns of mill acquisition, innovation and exploitation were shaped not only by the size, wealth and distribution of a house’s estates, but also by environmental and demographic factors, changing cultural attitudes and legal conventions, prevailing and emergent technical traditions, the personal relations of a house with its patrons, tenants, servants and neighbours, and the entrepreneurial and administrative flair of bishops, abbots, priors and other ecclesiastical officials.
This is the first of two volumes, now covering the heads of religious houses in England and Wales from the tenth-century reform to the death of Edward III, 940–1377. This first volume, by the great master of monastic history, Dom David Knowles, aided by Christopher Brooke and Vera London, was published first in 1972 and was quickly recognised as a major work of reference, noted for its mastery of accurate detail. It has now been brought up to date with substantial addenda and corrigenda by Christopher Brooke. The 1972 volume covers the period 940–1216, and comprises fully documented, critical lists of monastic superiors, with succinct biographical details. It is an essential foundation for all prosopographical study of the religious history of the period; and the precise chronology that it underpins is invaluable for dating innumerable undated documents. As such, the book is a fundamental tool of medieval research.
This is the first detailed scholarly study of the Order of Fontevraud's English monastic houses. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Order was notably prestigious and autonomous, renowned both for the prayerfulness of its members and for their independent management of their affairs. The huge following of Robert Arbrissel (d. 1116) included many women - not at first the aristocrats who later dominated the Order of Fontevraud, but prostitutes, beggars, and other representatives of the dregs of society. Urged by Church authorities to stabilize his women followers, Robert gave them a Rule which was, in essentials, that of St Benedict, but he introduced men as chaplains, clerks, and lay-brothers for the nuns. Uniquely, however, for contemporary houses for women, the men were placed firmly under the direction of the nuns and remained there throughout the Order's history. Sister Berenice Kerr's study of Fontevraud's English establishments: Amesbury, Nuneaton, and Westwood (Grovebury, the Order's fourth foundation, was never more than administrative centre) opens up a wide range of insights and information about monasticism and religious life for women in the middle ages. Dr Kerr examines the endowment of each house, and its subsequent acquisition of property and its administration; monastic observance; domestic economy, including expenditure on food and drink; the scale and layout of conventual buildings, and the exploitation of new assets, such as salt-pans, markets, and appropriated churches.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.
Medieval historians have for some time recognized the significance of personal naming processes and patterns for the illumination of social relations such as kinship and spiritual kinship or godparenthood. Increasingly, they are employing the investigation of personal naming (anthroponymy) as part of their elucidation of cultural change-attempting, through changes in patterns of personal naming, to discern cultural transitions and transformations. Recent coordinated research on the European continent has produced major collaborative discussion of the cultural implications of naming in France, the Iberian peninsular, and 'Italy'. The fruits of new research into the 'Germanic' lands have also richly enhanced our understanding of cultural change there. So it is predicated that a new trans-European culture arose in the centuries about and after the year 1000. Omitted from this coordinated understanding of the arrival of a new European cultural tradition (as it came to persist) is the British archipelago. We are, however, far from devoid of scholarly examination of the culture of personal naming in the British Isles. An older generation of linguists produced a basic foundation, although it has not remained free of some criticism. Subsequently, several scholars have independently advanced the interpretive analysis (Clark, Fellows Jensen, Insley, and McClure). At one level, then, this book attempts a synthesis of that previous, highly valuable, but diffuse, research, to make it more widely known, understood and accessible. At another level, nonetheless, it engages with what has become a prevailing narrative of cultural change in England after the Norman Conquest: the rapid transformation of English naming (and culture) through the assimilation of a new, dominant, extraneous influence. By reinserting the detail and complexity, it is hoped to demonstrate that far from a single uniform (homologous) culture, there existed residual, even resistant, and 'regional', cultures. The account, it is hoped, presents a cohesive, new narrative of the cultural implications of personal naming in England, whilst also addressing important issues of gender, politics, and social organization.
