Clerical Poverty in Early Sixteenth-Century England: Some East Anglian Evidence

1986 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Pound

The economic standing of the English parochial clergy in the early sixteenth century has been re-examined recently by Michael Zell, and the evidence at his disposal suggests that many of them were poverty-stricken in the extreme. He points to the large surplus of unendowed curates, chaplains and the like, and to the fact that when employment was available it was neither rewarding, in a monetary sense, nor necessarily secure. Stipends were officially regulated by an early fifteenth-century statute which set a maximum of £5 6s. 8d. per annum, and ‘evidence from all regions of England indicates that very rarely were curates and chaplains given more than that’. It was not uncommon for areas in the north to pay even less than this. In Lancashire, for example, the average salary of about 100 curates and chaplains in 1524 was £2 9s. 6d. In the East Riding of Yorkshire a year later it was £4. On the basis of such evidence, Mr Zell reasonably concludes that the unbeneficed clergy must have found it very difficult to survive, and that ‘the average country priest could not have been a person of high social status’.

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pankaj Kumar Jha

The making of the imperial subjects is as much a matter of historical process as the emergence of the empire. In the case of the Mughal state, this process started much before its actual establishment in the sixteenth century. The fifteenth century in North India was a period of unusual cultural ferment. The emergence of the Mughal imperial formation in the next century was intimately related to the fast congealing tendency of the north Indian society towards greater disciplining of itself. This tendency is evident in the multilingual literary cultures and diverse knowledge formations of the long fifteenth century.


AmS-Skrifter ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 53-61
Author(s):  
Adolf E. Hofmeister

There is little evidence of Bremen merchants in Norway before the royal charters issued from 1279 onwards, even though Bremen had been the seat of the missionary archbishop for the Nordic countries since the ninth century. Trade in Bergen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was dominated by the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic Sea coast led by merchants from Lübeck. Despite opposition from Hanseatic merchants sailing to Bergen, merchants from Hamburg and Bremen developed new trading posts to barter cod on Iceland and Shetland in the fifteenth century. Traders from Hamburg and Bremen on Iceland competed for licences issued by the Danish king. The 1558 debt register of a merchant from Bremen in Kumbaravogur provides considerable insight into this trade. The Danish king restricted sailings to Iceland to Danish merchants from 1601. On Shetland the Scottish foud allotted landing places to foreign skippers and traders. Merchants from Bremen became respected members of the island communities and in the seventeenth century they changed to trading in herring. Several tariff rate rises led to the end of Bremen sailings to Shetland by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Bremen merchants in Norway succeeded in breaking the Lübeck dominance in Bergen in the sixteenth century. By 1600, other Norwegian harbours in the North Atlantic, notably Stavanger, were also destinations for ships from Bremen.


Archaeologia ◽  
1901 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-358
Author(s):  
Roland W. Paul

In the latter half of the fifteenth century great changes took place in the fabric of the priory church at Great Malvern, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century it had been transformed from what was largely, if not entirely, a Norman church to one of Perpendicular character. With the exception of a doorway on the south side of the nave, the nave arcade, and the bases of the piers that support the central tower, there are no evidences of work prior to the alteration. To this rebuilding both Richard III. and Henry VII. are said to have contributed, the west window of the nave is said to have been the gift of the former and the north window of the transept that of the latter, besides a very long list of benefactors, members of well-known families of the day, local and otherwise; and it is therefore not surprising that even in its present comparatively mutilated state the decorative work in this church is among the finest in England of its date, and the glass and encaustic tiles practically unsurpassed for beauty and interest.


Author(s):  
Innocent Pikirayi

Archaeologists struggle to understand the demise of Great Zimbabwe because of poor appreciation of local and regional histories of the southern Zimbabwe plateau, post-fifteenth century. Listening to some of these extant regional histories and living narratives is key to understanding developments around Great Zimbabwe from the sixteenth century onwards. The focus in this chapter is on two sites, Boroma, a toponym east of Great Zimbabwe, and Chizhou Hill, some 80 kilometers to the north. In sixteenth-century Portuguese accounts, "Burrom" (Boroma) is presented as a prince in charge of a 'fortress' whose location coincides with Great Zimbabwe. Local narratives and indigenous histories collected from villagers near Chizhou Hill, as well as documented written sources, connect the site to the resettlement of the area by migrants from the Mutapa State in northern Zimbabwe. Combined, both sites attest to a complex process leading to the demise of Great Zimbabwe and its culture from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.


Archaeologia ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 117-142
Author(s):  
J. G. Mann

The Franciscan monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie is situated on the bank of the Mincio some five miles west of Mantua on the road to Cremona. My attention was first drawn to it by the late Baron de Cosson during a conversation in Florence in 1926, when he showed me a photograph of the interior of the church. He understood that the local tradition was that the statues were clad in armour taken from the battlefield of Marignano in 1515, and mentioned that there appeared to be some basis for this belief as the armour looked to to him genuine enough, so far as it was possible to see it from the floor of the church. ‘Rien n'est plus rare qu'une arinure ancienne’ The suggestion that there might be in existence a church full of armour dating from the early part of the sixteenth century, hitherto unrecorded, inspired a desire to visit the place at the first opportunity. I was unable to fulfil my intention that year, but two years later I was in the north of Italy again and was able to make the promised pilgrimage. The antiquary is well used to receiving specious accounts of treasures which on examination turn out to be utterly worthless. Perhaps objects associated with warlike exploits lend themselves even more commonly to exaggeration than most, and I was prepared to find that I had made a journey in vain. On my arrival a brother informed me that the armour on the statues was only of carta pesta and not worth looking at. But the first figure that I inspected showed that my hopes had been exceeded. Not only was much of the armour real, so far as one could tell through a coating of thick black paint overlaid with the dust of countless Italian summers, but its form was not that of the time of Marignano but of some fifty years earlier, when the art of the Italian armourer had reached its zenith. Last year I returned to the monastery and arranged to have a scaffold erected, and to have the seventeen figures which wear armour out of the total of sixty-seven photographed; for permission to do this I wish to record my gratitude to Monsignor Guarnieri and the Soprintendente di Belle Arti of.the district.


Author(s):  
A. Teixeira da Mota

SynopsisThe idea that only after 1490 the European sailors had ‘come for the first time in recorded history to struggle with the limitations placed on sailing ships by the winds and currents of the open ocean’ does not correspond to reality. There is enough proof to show that much earlier, in the fifteenth century, the North-East Trades’ regularity, the wind variability in the zone directly north of them, and the Canaries Current were already known. When the fifteenth century ended, the Portuguese had already verified the symmetry of wind patterns in the Atlantic on both sides of the equatorial calm zone, which led them to apply the significant name of ‘ventos gerais’ to the trade winds of both hemispheres.Accurate knowledge of the wind and current systems was essential to good navigation and the Portuguese ratters of the sixteenth century, chiefly ‘carreira da India’ rutters, include an increasing amount of information on that subject, referring especially to zones in the passage from the North Atlantic to the South Atlantic. The report of a voyage (1503) proves that at that time the Portuguese already knew the Gulf of Guinea winds and currents sufficiently well. As a result of oceanic sailing, the traditional ratters, exclusively coastal, developed considerably, not only by adding data about latitudes and compass variations but also by the indication of winds and currents. There appeared also an even newer type of ratter, the ‘oceanic rutter‘, in which the safest and quickest routes, because of the changeability of winds and current patterns, are indicated.Information about elements concerning winds and currents which are included in the Portuguese ratters was revealed in printed matter after the end of the sixteenth century and this allowed some European scientists to study, because of the availability of better information, the causes of those physical phenomena, which had already been treated briefly in the sixteenth century by two nautical treatise writers, D. João de Castro and Father Fernando Oliveira.


Costume ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fang Chen

The subject of this paper is a style of fur headdress for women that became fashionable in the sixteenth century and on into the seventeenth, in late Ming China. It has hitherto received little scholarly attention. In Chinese, it is called wotu’er and this can be translated as ‘crouching rabbit’, ‘crouching cottontail’ or ‘crouching lapin’. We know that it was one of the luxury goods of its day, worn as a mark of high social status and wealth. This essay examines the shape of the headdress and how it was worn, as well as its material and price. How long was it in fashion and why did it become fashionable in the first place? The relevance of nomadic dress in influencing women’s garments in the sixteenth century will also be considered, as will the shift in the use of fur from functional to decorative.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN MOLINEAUX ◽  
JOANNA KOPACZYK ◽  
RHONA ALCORN ◽  
WARREN MAGUIRE ◽  
VASILIS KARAISKOS ◽  
...  

The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations (<þ>, <ð>, <y> and <th>, among others) eventually settled on one digraph, <th>, for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. <f> vs <v> and <s> vs <z>) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by <y> and /θ/ by <th> (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively <th> (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where <y> progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while <th> recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for <þ> and <ð> via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes.


AmS-Skrifter ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 237-244
Author(s):  
Geir Atle Ersland

The Hanseatic Kontor in Bergen was one of the main hubs of trade in the North Sea region. This paper explores a possibility suggested in a late sixteenth-century manuscript that the Norwegian Kontor for some time was also located at Notau, a place south of Bergen. It is argued that this written source might refer to the years 1427–33 when the Hanseatic merchants withdrew from Bergen because of an on-going war between King Erik and northern German princes. Notau is mentioned several times in sources from the fifteenth century and most of these references are related to Hanseatic activity. However, viewed in a broader context, Notau stands out as an important harbour on the south-western Norwegian coast, visited both by Norwegians and Hanseatics, as well as travellers from other regions.


2014 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Turpie

St Duthac of Tain was one of the most popular Scottish saints of the later middle ages. From the late fourteenth century until the reformation devotion to Duthac outstripped that of Andrew, Columba, Margaret and Mungo, and Duthac's shrine in Easter Ross became a regular haunt of James IV (1488–1513) and James V (1513–42). Hitherto historians have tacitly accepted the view of David McRoberts that Duthac was one of several local saints whose emergence and popularity in the fifteenth century was part of a wider self-consciously nationalist trend in Scottish religious practice. This study looks beyond the paradigm of nationalism to trace and explain the popularity of St Duthac from the shadowy origins of the cult to its heyday in the early sixteenth century.


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