The native Irish and English law in medieval Ireland

1950 ◽  
Vol 7 (25) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven

The problems set by the Norman conquest of Ireland which began under Henry II cannot be properly appreciated if they are viewed in isolation. Similar problems had been set by the Norman conquest of England only a hundred years earlier; similar problems existed in Wales. In England, however, the conquest had been both rapid and complete, and problems which were to last throughout the middle ages in Ireland were solved in England by the merging of the two peoples in a relatively short time. Moreover, in England no such clash of laws as was to come about in Ireland had followed the conquest: the Anglo-Saxons had possessed a well-developed system of local administration which was taken over with little or no modification by the Norman kings.

2018 ◽  
Vol 136 (4) ◽  
pp. 223-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Young

St Edmund, king and martyr (an Anglo-Saxon king martyred by the Vikings in 869) was one of the most venerated English saints in Ireland from the 12th century. In Dublin, St Edmund had his own chapel in Christ Church Cathedral and a guild, while Athassel Priory in County Tipperary claimed to possess a miraculous image of the saint. In the late 14th century the coat of arms ascribed to St Edmund became the emblem of the king of England’s lordship of Ireland, and the name Edmund (or its Irish equivalent Éamon) was widespread in the country by the end of the Middle Ages. This article argues that the cult of St Edmund, the traditional patron saint of the English people, served to reassure the English of Ireland of their Englishness, and challenges the idea that St Edmund was introduced to Ireland as a heavenly patron of the Anglo-Norman conquest.


Author(s):  
Louise D'Arcens

World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture explores the ways in which a range of modern textual cultures have continued to engage creatively with the medieval past in order to come to terms with the global present. Building its argument through four case studies—from the Middle East, France, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous Australia–it shows that to understand medievalism as a cultural idiom with global reach, we need to develop a more nuanced grasp of the different ways ‘the Middle Ages’ have come to signify beyond Europe as well as within a Europe that has been transformed by multiculturalism and the global economy. The book’s case studies are explored within a conceptual framework in which medievalism itself is formulated as ‘world-disclosing’—a transhistorical encounter that enables the modern subject to apprehend the past ‘world’ opened up in medieval and medievalist texts and objects. The book analyses the cultural and material conditions under which its texts are produced, disseminated, and received and examines literature alongside films, television programs, newspapers and journals, political tracts, as well as such material and artefactual texts as photographs, paintings, statues, buildings, rock art, and fossils. While the case studies feature distinctive localized forms of medievalism, taken together they reveal how imperial and global legacies have ensured that the medieval period continues to be perceived as a commonly held past that can be retrieved, reclaimed, or revived in response to the accelerated changes and uncertainties of global modernity.


1987 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 505-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morris S. Arnold

So portentous a title as I have contrived for tonight's lecture ought to come furnished with an appropriately bombastic beginning. In fact, it does not. Instead of concentrating on a beginning, I thought that we might more profitably focus our attention on the beginning, that is, on a time long before the sophisticated legal/administrative system of England's high middle ages had evolved. It will be interesting to get what peeks we can at the jurisprudential assumptions of, say, preconquest Englishmen. As Tom Green has recently demonstrated in his book on the criminal jury, these assumptions could exhibit a durability that had functional consequences for many centuries. If through the jury they could prevail against contrary official versions of what the substantive law was, as Green has shown, how much more potent could they be when the government was not inclined to oppose their effectuation?


Author(s):  
Clare A. Simmons

During the English Civil War period, the Diggers asserted that social degree was a product of humanity’s fallen nature, rather than part of God’s plan. Such a claim does not require a historical precedent beyond the Bible, yet the Levellers, Diggers, and other radical reformist groups frequently appealed to the Middle Ages, suggesting that the Norman Conquest was England’s own ‘fall’ from a more equitable political and economic system, and that documents such as Magna Carta marked the people’s efforts to reclaim those rights. The Diggers’ distinct contribution to this discussion, taken up in the nineteenth century by radical thinkers such as Thomas Spence, was that property ownership should be communal. This idea of the Middle Ages survived in the radical reformist tradition into the nineteenth century and can be found in the medievalism of William Blake, William Morris, and many others. The theory of the Norman yoke remained a significant influence on social and racial theory in Britain for much of the nineteenth century.


1961 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Makdisi

The history of Baghdad in the second half of the eleventh century is dominated by the name of the great Saljūqid minister, Niẓām al-Mulk, a name linked to an extensive network of institutions founded by him throughout the lands of the eastern caliphate: the Niẓāmīya colleges. Most widely known among them was the college in Baghdad, founded in 457/1065 and inaugurated in 459/1067. The renown of the Niẓāmīya of Baghdad, both in medieval oriental sources as well as in studies undertaken by modern Oriental and Western scholars, is such that it is the first institution likely to come to the mind of a person familiar with the period's history. Whenever historians have put their efforts into the field of Muslim education in the Middle Ages, whether in a general or specialized way, they have seldom failed to mention the fame of the college. Efforts have been made to establish the list of its professors and the most famous among its students; approximations have been made as to the date of its disappearance; investigations have been pursued to determine its exact location on Baghdad's east side; causes of its decline have been proposed; a whole treatise and other learned articles have been devoted to the history of this college alone.


PMLA ◽  
1907 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 597-607
Author(s):  
Henry Noble MacCracken

The career of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, from 1401 to 1439 is hardly to be equalled in the annals of chivalry, even by that earlier Richard, Cœur-de-Lion It is no part of this introductory note to his Virelai, to rehearse in detail the extraordinary events of his long life of travel, adventure, warfare, and diplomacy. Mr. James Gairdner's life of the hero tells the story of his chief exploits, and those to whom Dugdale's Warwickshire is accessible may read it in detail. But to come upon a literary personality in the fifteenth century is so rare a thing, and the character of Richard Beauchamp is so happy an example of a true knight of the Middle Ages, that these few notes upon him and his family, most of them not in Gairdner's article, will not come amiss to the student of the period.


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