The population of early tudor England: a re-evaluation of the 1522 Muster Returns and 1524 and 1525 Lay Subsidies

The Lay Subsidies of 1524 and 1525 provide a much fuller enumeration of the adult male population of England than hitherto appreciated. The basis for this argument is a detailed comparison of the Muster Returns of 1522 with successive Subsidy lists for three East Anglian hundreds. This evidence suggests that under-enumeration was only partly responsible for differences in the composition of successive listings, a high rate of turnover of population, principally by migration but also through maturation and mortality, being at least as important. From a critical examination of the listings an estimate of the population of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex is derived and from this a revised estimate of the population of the whole country is obtained of a little over 1·8 millions. A range of alternative estimates is also derived, according to different assumptions of the proportion of adult males in the total population and of the proportion of the total population of England residing in East Anglia. Finally, implications of this revised estimate for late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century population trends are outlined.     

Gifts of food in late medieval England

Gifts of food were an integral part of late medieval culture. Small items, such as fruit, might be given by anyone. As part of commensality, sociability, hospitality and charity, food gifts underpinned customary patterns of life; they developed networks of relationships, establishing good lordship, and played an important role in negotiations. Patterns of giving demonstrate the distinctiveness and appropriateness of some categories of foodstuff, and illuminate the purposes of donors. Changes over time can be identified: indiscriminate hospitality or large-scale food alms fell out of common practice after the Black Death and gifts of money were preferred in some circumstances. Giving choice foodstuffs, however, remained a constant.     

Gifts of food in late medieval England

Gifts of food were an integral part of late medieval culture. Small items, such as fruit, might be given by anyone. As part of commensality, sociability, hospitality and charity, food gifts underpinned customary patterns of life; they developed networks of relationships, establishing good lordship, and played an important role in negotiations. Patterns of giving demonstrate the distinctiveness and appropriateness of some categories of foodstuff, and illuminate the purposes of donors. Changes over time can be identified: indiscriminate hospitality or large-scale food alms fell out of common practice after the Black Death and gifts of money were preferred in some circumstances. Giving choice foodstuffs, however, remained a constant.     

Reconciling mendicant and secular confessors in late medieval England

This essay questions the argument, advanced by some historians to explain anti-fraternalism in fourteenth-century England, that friars appeared as lax and even socially disruptive confessors because they placed less emphasis than secular parish priests on confession and penance as a means of social discipline and resolution of interpersonal conflict, emphasising instead the individual, psychological aspects of sin. To test this hypothesis, this study examines instructions for interrogating penitents about the sins of wrath/anger and the requirements for the reconciliation of enemies. It compares the Latin manuals of the Dominican, John of Freiburg, and the anonymous, Franciscan Fasciculus morum on the one hand with the Latin manual by the secular clerk William of Pagula and the Middle English manuals for secular clergy by John Gaytrick and John Mirk on the other. The findings challenge the supposed dichotomy between secular and mendicant approaches to penance. Manuals for both types of confessor addressed conflict and enmity and encouraged introspection that connected anti-social behaviour and discord with an individual's psychology and spiritual wellbeing. Nor can it be assumed that such introspection was imposed on the laity, which was accustomed to struggling with feelings of anger or hatred when attempting to make peace.     

Village and community in early colonial New England

The long-standing correlation between community function and nucleated settlement form in early colonial New England is mistaken. Puritan communities were established, but new communities—often called villages in colonial records—were developed and survived quite well regardless of settlement form. As in England at the time, village meant community and community was a social web. Village status in New England provided a community with land and thus enabled the community to undertake settlement. But the social web that comprised community did not require nucleated settlement, and the dispersed settlement form that many colonists had known in England dominated the village landscape of early colonial New England.     

The transformation of kinship and the family in late Anglo-Saxon England

The development of the family into a small unit in which descent was traced almost exclusively through the male line is regarded as a major turning point in medieval European history. The early stages of the formation of agnatic kinship have usually been connected to strategies designed to preserve and retain control of patrimonies and castles, arising from the breakdown of public order. In this article it is suggested that the emergence of new kinship values was connected to the investment of aristocratic energy and resources in monastic programmes, and to subtle changes in lay involvement with the rituals associated with death and the salvation of souls.     

论中世纪晚期英国议会政治

在学术界,似乎有一个不证自明的定论,即：作为近代资本主义政治制度核心构件的议会政治是与中世纪封建社会无缘的。但事实上,在特定历史条件下,两也完全有可能联系在一起。英国由于在早期历史中形成了政治协商传统和初步成型的议会协商机制以及相应的社会化理念,从而为中世纪晚期出现议会政治奠定了必要的历史基础;但历史基础仅仅提供了议会政治早产的可能性,而将这种可能变为现实的决定性力量则是当时各种具体的特殊原因和个人因素构成的偶然机缘。换言之,中世纪晚期英国议会政治的早产是一种历史偶然现象。由此可见,偶然因素也是一种应当给予充分重视的历史决定性力量。     

Acquiring,flaunting and destroying silk in late Anglo‐Saxon England

This paper argues that silk was ubiquitous in England in the late Anglo‐Saxon period. It also contends that when examined in the context of its use, it becomes clear that the deployment of silk was symbolic. People of means moved heaven and earth to get silk because it allowed them to appropriate its associated meanings for themselves. So, after establishing silk's ubiquity and its uses, the paper teases out its ideological underpinnings. Finally, the paper investigates the economics of silk. In the end it strives to prove that a whole spectrum of people acquired, displayed, and sometimes even destroyed silk, because it made others see them as they wished to be seen.     

The number of Huguenot immigrants in England in the late seventeenth century

The task of assessing the number of Huguenots seeking refuge in later Stuart England is exceptionally difficult. They left France by stealth, so no emigration lists exist. French names could be anglicized almost immediately on arrival across the Channel or otherwise changed beyond recognition, and marriage and burial records concerning Huguenots are often entered in the registers of English churches rather than those of the French congregations themselves. As refugees the mobility of the Huguenots was great. Guesses as to the numbers reaching England, exaggerated in the eighteenth century and since reduced, have varied from 20,000 to 150,000. A study of surviving baptismal records, in conjunction with other evidence including informed contemporary estimates, suggests that some 40,000–50,000 Huguenots settled in England betwen the late 1670s and the reign of Queen Anne. Refugee communities were located south of a line drawn from the Severn to the Wash. Almost all were near the sea, normally in towns rather than in the countryside. By far the largest concentration was in London; living for the most part in the eastern and western suburbs, Huguenots comprised about 5% of the total population of the capital at the end of the seventeenth century. Their contribution to the commercial and political transformation of England which took place at that time was significant and deserves re-evaluation.     

Two medieval plague treatises and their afterlife in early modern England

This study of an adaptation of the popular John of Burgundy plague treatise by Thomas Moulton, a Dominican friar, ca. 1475, and a translation of the so-called Canutus plague treatise by Thomas Paynell, printed 1534, shows how the medieval traditions they represent were carried forward, well into the sixteenth century, and also subjected to change in light of religious, moral, and medical concerns of early modern England. The former had a long life in print, ca. 1530-1580, whereas Paynell's translation exists in one printed version. Moulton's adaptation differs from its original and from the Canutus treatise in putting great emphasis on the idea that onsets of plague were acts of divine retribution for human sinfulness. In this respect, Moulton reshaped the tradition of the medieval plague treatise and anticipated the religious and social construction of plague that would take shape in the first half of the sixteenth century. Its long history in print indicates that Moulton's treatise expressed the spirit of that construction and probably influenced the construction as well. The contrasting histories of the two treatises attest not only to the dramatic change brought about by religious and social forces in the sixteenth century, but to a growing recognition of the value of the printing press for disseminating medical information-in forms that served social and ideological ends.     

Legitimation and delegitimation in early modern Europe: The case of England

In the year 1640, the government of England was monarchical; and the King that reigned, Charles, the first of that name, holding sovereignty, by right of a descent continued above six hundred years, and from a much longer descent King of Scotland, and from the time of his ancestor Henry II, King of Ireland …     

Disputing legal privilege: civic relations with the Church in late medieval England

This article explores how provincial town governments sought to bolster civic authority in the period from c.1350 to c.1500. It focuses on royal boroughs, such as York, Chester and Norwich, which had a strong sense of lay civic identity and political pride. In these places, the king was the direct overlord, but the power of civic government was nonetheless frequently challenged by the franchises of local abbeys and convents, cathedral chapters, bishops' palaces, areas of sanctuary and the estates of local nobles. The main case study is urban relations with the Church, in particular disputes with local religious houses and rivalry between the Church and borough courts. How town leaders sought to deal with rival authorities provides an insight into the creation and assertion of lay urban identity in the late medieval period, and illuminates broader themes of how power was legitimised and enforced in post-Black Death society.