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 1972.
The 170 acta published in this volume provide one of the best records of the structuring of a new diocese and the establishment of a cathedral chapter. The diocese of Ely (comprising historic Cambridgeshire) was founded in 1109, and its first four bishops oversaw the elaboration of a system of local ecclesiastical government, and also the formulation of a settlement between themselves and the Benedictine monks of Ely, whose church became the cathedral. Two of the bishops also held high secular office - William de Longchamp was effective regent of England while King Richard I was on Crusade - and the acta issued in connection with these duties shed light on the delegation of royal power.
The English scholar John of Salisbury was a major intellectual of the twelfth century whose contributions to the fields of education, grammar, political theory, and rhetoric are well-known. His significance is amplified further in John of Salisbury: Military Authority of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, in which John D. Hosler examines his heretofore overlooked contributions to the ideals and practice of medieval warfare. This book surveys an array of military topics present within John’s extant corpus, including generalship, strategy, tactics, logistics, military organization, and training; it also collates John’s military lexicon and charts the influence of classical texts upon his conceptualization of war. John of Salisbury, it argues, deserves inclusion in the roll-call of military theoreticians and writers of pre-Reformation Europe.
The first two archbishops of Canterbury after the Norman Conquest, Lanfranc and Anselm, were towering figures in the medieval church and the sixth archbishop, the martyred Thomas Becket, is perhaps the most famous figure ever to hold the office. In between these giants of the ecclesiastical world came three less noteworthy men: Ralph d'Escures, William of Corbeil, and Theobald of Bec. Jean Truax's volume in the Ashgate Archbishops of Canterbury Series uniquely examines the pontificates of these three minor archbishops. Presenting their biographies, careers, thought and works as a unified period, Truax highlights crucial developments in the English church during the period of the pontificates of these three archbishops, from the death of Anselm to Becket. The resurgent power of the papacy, a changed relationship between church and state and the expansion of archiepiscopal scope and power ensured that in 1162 Becket faced a very different world from the one that Anselm had left in 1109. Selected correspondence, newly translated chronicle accounts and the text and a discussion of the Canterbury forgeries complete the volume.
With some notable exceptions, the subject of outlawry in medieval and early-modern English history has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. This volume helps to address this significant gap in scholarship, and encourage further study of the subject, by presenting a series of new studies, based on original research, that address significant features of outlawry and criminality over an extensive period of time. The volume casts important light on, and raises provocative questions about, the definition, ambiguity, variety, causes, function, adaptability, impact and representation of outlawry during this period. It also helps to illuminate social and governmental attitudes and responses to outlawry and criminality, which involved the interests of both church and state. From different perspectives, the contributions to the volume address the complex relationships between outlaws, the societies in which they lived, the law and secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and, in doing so, reveal much about the strengths and limitations of the developing state in England. In terms of its breadth and the compelling interest of its subject matter, the volume will appeal to a wide audience of social, legal, political and cultural historians.
A case study examining the history of a house of English Augustinian canons, this book reveals the ways in which Plympton Priory formed connections with the laity, the episcopacy, the secular clergy, and the Crown in the late Middle Ages.
The secular clergy - priests and other clerics outside of monastic orders - were among the most influential and powerful groups in European society during the central Middle Ages. The secular clergy got their title from the Latin word for world, saeculum, and secular clerics kept the Church running in the world beyond the cloister wall, with responsibility for the bulk of pastoral care and ecclesiastical administration. This gave them enormous religious influence, although they were considered too worldly by many contemporary moralists - trying, for instance, to oppose the elimination of clerical marriage and concubinage. Although their worldliness created many tensions, it also gave the secular clergy much worldly influence. Contemporaries treated elite secular clerics as equivalent to knights, and some were as wealthy as minor barons. Secular clerics had a huge role in the rise of royal bureaucracy, one of the key historical developments of the period. They were instrumental to the intellectual and cultural flowering of the twelfth century, the rise of the schools, the creation of the book trade, and the invention of universities. They performed music, produced literature in a variety of genres and languages, and patronized art and architecture. Indeed, this volume argues that they contributed more than any other group to the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Yet the secular clergy as a group have received almost no attention from scholars, unlike monks, nuns, or secular nobles. In The Secular Clergy in England, 1066-1216, Hugh Thomas aims to correct this deficiency through a major study of the secular clergy below the level of bishop in England from 1066 to 1216.
In around 911, the Viking adventurer Rollo was granted the city of Rouen and its surrounding district by the Frankish King Charles the Simple. Two further grants of territory followed in 924 and 933. But while Frankish kings might grant this land to Rollo and his son, William Longsword, these two Norman dukes and their successors had to fight and negotiate with rival lords, hostile neighbours, kings, and popes in order to establish and maintain their authority over it. This book explores the geographical and political development of what would become the duchy of Normandy, and the relations between the dukes and these rivals for their lands and their subjects' fidelity. It looks, too, at the administrative machinery the dukes built to support their regime, from their toll-collectors and vicomtes (an official similar to the English sheriff) to the political theatre of their courts and the buildings in which they were staged. At the heart of this exercise are the narratives that purport to tell us about what the dukes did, and the surviving body of the dukes' diplomas. Neither can be taken at face value, and both tell us as much about the concerns and criticisms of the dukes' subjects as they do about the strength of the dukes' authority. The diplomas, in particular, because most of them were not written by scribes attached to the dukes' households but rather by their beneficiaries, can be used to recover something of how the dukes' subjects saw their rulers, as well as something of what they wanted or needed from them. Ducal power was the result of a dialogue, and this volume enables both sides to speak. Mark Hagger is a senior lecturer in medieval history at Bangor University.
