Towards an Ideology of the Early English Law of Obligations

1987 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 505-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morris S. Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Administrative System ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Functional Consequences ◽  
English Law ◽  
The Government ◽  
To Come ◽  
Substantive Law ◽  
Early English

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?

SACRED POLYPHONY ‘NOT UNDERSTANDID’: MEDIEVAL EXEGESIS, RITUAL TRADITION AND HENRY VIII'S REFORMATION

2010 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 33-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana T. Marsh
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Traditional Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
To Come ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

This study focuses on the ritual ‘conservatism’ of Henry VIII's Reformation through a new look at biblical exegeses of the period dealing with sacred music. Accordingly, it reconsiders the one extant passage of rhetoric to come from the Henrician regime in support of traditional church polyphony, as found in A Book of Ceremonies to be Used in the Church of England, c.1540. Examining the document's genesis, editorial history and ultimate suppression by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, it is shown that Bishop Richard Sampson, Dean of the Chapel Royal (1522–40), was responsible for the original drafting of the musical paragraph. Beginning with Sampson's printed commentaries on the Psalms and on the Epistles of St Paul, the literary precedents and historical continuities upon which Sampson's topos in Ceremonies was founded are traced in detail. Identified through recurring patterns of scriptural and patristic citation, and understood via transhistorical shifts in the meaning of certain key words (e.g. iubilare), this new perspective clarifies important origins of the English church's musical ‘traditionalism’ on the eve of the Reformation. Moreover, it reveals a precise species of exegetical method – anagogy – as the literary vehicle through which influential clergy were able to justify expansions and elaborations of musical practice in the Western Church from the high Middle Ages to the Reformation.

The native Irish and English law in medieval Ireland

1950 ◽  
Vol 7 (25) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Local Administration ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
English Law ◽  
To Come ◽  
Short Time ◽  
Medieval Ireland ◽  
The Middle Ages

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.

scholarly journals The Women's Suffrage Movement in England

1913 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 588-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Raymond Turner
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Legal Argument ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Public Mind ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Veil ◽  
To Come

At present neither the prospect of home rule nor the danger from Germany nor the mighty design of imperial federation assails the public mind of England so insistently as the demand for the enfranchisement of women. Since 1905 it has come to be realized that British men and women are face to face with a change of profound importance, and that the veil of the future hides immense possibilities of good or of ill soon to come.Allowing British women to take part in the government of the realm is a question of the last century and particularly of the years since 1867, but the antiquarian traces the elements of the problem in the feudal law of the earlier middle ages, when tenure and service rather than persons furnished the basis of organization, and when instances occur of women taking part in local affairs and holding office and jurisdiction. For the most part, however, these instances are valuable now merely as the slender basis for legal argument.

Abjuring the Realm

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Chester Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Other ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
English Law ◽  
Special Circumstances ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers the factors that justified kings' and administrators' resort to the exile of large numbers of the criminal population. The relationship between the medieval English law of exile and the laws addressing felons and felonies is a complicated and, by modern reckoning, an unusual one. This is especially the case because two groups of people suspected of, or implicated in, felonies in the High Middle Ages regularly avoided the punishments which would have been meted out to them if they had been convicted in a court of law. One group was composed of men and women who, though not convicted of the crimes of which they were suspected, were in such bad repute that they were obliged to abjure (foreswear) the realm. The other comprised felons who confessed their crimes in sanctuary (on which, more shortly) or in other special circumstances, who also were obliged to abjure.

Presidential Address: Great Historical Enterprises IV. The Rolls Series

1961 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 137-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rev. M. D. Knowles
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
British History ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
English History ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
The Government ◽  
Early English ◽  
Selective Collection

The publication of the Chronicles and Memorials of GreatBritain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, known familiarly as the Rolls Series, was the outcome of a movement set on foot early in the nineteenth century by Henry Petrie. Petrte (1768-1842), who began life as a dancing master, made himself a learned and zealous antiquary, and acquired a knowledge, unrivalled in his day, of the materials for early English history. He was patronized by the second earl Spencer (1755-1834), then engaged upon the enrichment of Althorp library, and in 1818 a meeting of noblemen and gentlemen was convened at Spencer House to induce the government to support a scheme for printing the early sources of British history. The project was approved by the then prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and took shape in an humble address of the House of Commons to King George IV (25 July 1822), begging for the publication of manuscript sources of history; as a result of this Petrie, who had been appointed Keeper of Records in the Tower of London in 1819, assembled extracts from various sources for the period before the Norman Conquest, which were published posthumously in 1848 as Monumenta Historical Britannica. This was a selective collection, modelled on the Recueil of the Maurist Dom Bouquet, which Guizot had continued in France. Petrie's Monumenta was inordinately costly, while it failed to give real satisfaction to historians.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.E.M. Lippiatt
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Governing Institutions

Historians of political development in the High Middle Ages often focus on the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as the generations in which monarchy finally triumphed over aristocracy to create a monopoly on governing institutions in Western Europe. However, it was precisely in this period that Simon of Montfort emerged from his modest forest lordship in France to conquer a principality stretching from the Pyrenees to the Rhône. A remarkable ascendancy in any period, it is perhaps especially so in its contrast with the accepted historiographical narrative. Despite the supposed triumph of monarchy during his lifetime, Simon’s meteoric career took place largely outside of royal auspices. Simon’s experience provides a challenge to an uncomplicated or teleological understanding of contemporary politics as effectively national affairs directed by kings.

Simon V of Montfort and Baronial Government, 1195-1218

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.E.M. Lippiatt
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Southern France ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Fourth Crusade ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Biographical Study

Dissenter from the Fourth Crusade, disseised earl of Leicester, leader of the Albigensian Crusade, prince of southern France: Simon of Montfort led a remarkable career of ascent from mid-level French baron to semi-independent count before his violent death before the walls of Toulouse in 1218. Through the vehicle of the crusade, Simon cultivated autonomous power in the liminal space between competing royal lordships in southern France in order to build his own principality. This first English biographical study of his life examines the ways in which Simon succeeded and failed in developing this independence in France, England, the Midi, and on campaign to Jerusalem. Simon’s familial, social, and intellectual connexions shaped his conceptions of political order, which he then implemented in his conquests. By analysing contemporary narrative, scholastic, and documentary evidence—including a wealth of archival material—this book argues that Simon’s career demonstrates the vitality of baronial independence in the High Middle Ages, despite the emergence of centralised royal bureaucracies. More importantly, Simon’s experience shows that barons themselves adopted methods of government that reflected a concern for accountability, public order, and contemporary reform ideals. This study therefore marks an important entry in the debate about baronial responsibility in medieval political development, as well as providing the most complete modern account of the life of this important but oft-overlooked crusader.

Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hummer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Mechanisms ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Late Roman

What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring that question, this book offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high Middle Ages, the period bridging Europe’s primitive past and its modern present. It critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deeper prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. It argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe. It delineates an alternative ethnographic approach inspired by recent anthropological work that privileges indigenous expressions of kinship and the interpretive potential of native ontologies. The book reveals that kinship in the Middle Ages was not biological, primitive, or a regulator of social mechanisms; nor is it traceable by bio-genealogical connections. In the Middle Ages kinship signified a sociality that flowed from convictions about the divine source of all things and wove together families, institutions, and divinities into an expansive eschatological vision animated by “the most righteous principle of love.”

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