Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (30 page)

Hang the streets thorough which the king's grace shall come with clothes of arras, tapestry work and other, for there commen many southern lords and men of worship with them.

The city did put on an incredible spectacle, and many citizens contributed handsomely to it. The mayor and aldermen, all dressed in scarlet, rode with the king and queen through a city made of cloth, stopping for elaborate shows and displays as they went. They turned the place into a woollen Disneyland.

To many southern lords, it looked as though the Wars of the Roses had been referred back to the referee, and the north had won after all, especially when Richard filled his court with friends from the region. They were not at all happy, so they backed Henry Tudor to take over. Richard III became the last king of England to die in battle. But when news of his death at the Battle of Bosworth reached the York council chamber, the councillors did not declare their joy that England had been liberated from a tyrant:

King Richard late mercifully reigning upon us was through great treason of the Duke of Northfolk and many othres that turned ayenst him, with many othre lordes and nobles of these north parts, pitiously slain and murdred to the great heavinesse of this city.

That was a very dangerous thing to write in the city records; and it must have been deeply heartfelt. So why have we ended up with a picture of Richard the cruel and twisted tyrant?

I must be married to my brother's daughter
,

Or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass.

Murder her brothers, and then marry her!

The uncertain way of gain! But I am in

So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin:

Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.

Richard III

The answer is the mighty power of Tudor propaganda. Henry VII – Henry Tudor – had seized the crown, and his dynasty rested on that shaky foundation. It was necessary to invent a Richard who had never existed, a bogeyman, to justify the usurpation.

While Richard was still alive, writer John Rous described him as ‘a mighty prince and especial good Lord.' When the Tudors took power, Rous portrayed him as akin to the Antichrist: ‘Richard spent two whole years in his mother's womb and came out with a full set of teeth.' Shakespeare, writing a century later, was himself serving a Tudor monarch. His main sources were Tudor documents written by men in their sovereigns' service.

Medieval kings were not all striving for tyranny; in many ways, they were less free than their subjects (though, of course, much richer).The Good King/Bad King stories are the propaganda of their successors. And even the question of who was and was not a king of England was decided after the men themselves were dead – by the chroniclers.

Propaganda, thy name is History.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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WEB RESOURCES

The best way of finding quality-controlled www resources is through a major medievalists' website; two of the best are ORB, the On-Line Reference Book for Medieval Studies, at www.the-orb. net, which also refers to other sites on its ‘labyrinth' –
http://labyrinth.georgetown.edu/.
Searching for books in other libraries, or checking references, can be done through the Cambridge University Library website at
www.lib.cam.ac.uk/
(go to ‘Catalogues' from the homepage).

GENERAL

Bolton, J. L.,
The Medieval English Economy, 1150–1500
(Everyman, 1980)

Boureau,A.,
The Lord's First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage
, tr. Lydia G. Cochrane (University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Britnell, R.,
The Closing of the Middle Ages: England, 1471–1529
(Blackwell, 1997)

Campbell, J.,
The Anglo-Saxons
(Cornell, 1982)

DeVries, K.,
Medieval Military Technology
(Broadview, 1992)

Dyer, C.,
Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200–1520
(Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Gimpel, J.,
The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages
(Holt, 1976)

Hanawalt, B.,
Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History
(Oxford University Press, 1993)

Horrox, R. E. (ed.),
Fifteenth-Century Attitudes
(Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Keen, M.,
English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 1348–1500
(Penguin, 1990)

LeGoff,J.,
Medieval Civilization, 400–1500
(Blackwell, 1989)

LeGoff, J.,
Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages
(University of Chicago Press, 1980)

Pollard, A. J.,
Late Medieval England, 1399–1509

Prestwich, M.,
Armies and Warfare in the Midle Ages: The English Experience
(Yale University Press, 1996)

Rigby, S. H.,
English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender
(Macmillan, 1995)

Stenton, E,
William the Conqueror and the Rule of the Normans
(Barnes & Noble, 1966)

Stock, B.,
Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997)

Thomson, J. A. F,
The Transformation of Medieval England 1370–1529
(Longman, 1983)

Tuck, A.,
Crown and Nobility (1272–1461)
(Fontana, 1985)

Platt, C.,
Medieval England: A Social History and Archaeology from the Conquest to 1600 AD
(Routledge, 1988)

PEASANT

Allison, K.,
Wharram Percy: Deserted Medieval Village
(English Heritage Publications, 1999)

Beresford, M. & Hurst, J.,
Wharram Percy
–
Deserted Medieval Village
(Batsford, 1990)

Coulton, G. G.,
The Medieval Village
(Dover Publications, 1989)

Dobson, R. B. (ed.),
The Peasants' Revolt of 1381
(Macmillan, 1983)

Dyer, A.,
Decline and Growth in English Towns, 1400–1640
(Macmillan, 1991)

Hanawalt, B.,
The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England
(Oxford University Press, 1986)

Hatcher, J., Plague,
Population and the English Economy
, 1348–1530 (Macmillan, 1977)

Henisch, B. A.,
Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society
(Penn State UP, 1976)

Herlihy, D.,
Medieval Housholds
(Harvard University Press, 1985)

Hilton R. H. and Aston T. H. (eds.),
The English Rising of 1381
(1984)

Jordan, W. C.,
The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century
(Princeton University Press, 1998)

Mollat, M.,
The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History
(Yale University Press, 1986)

Newman, R.,
Cosmeston Mediaeval Village
(Glamorgan–Gwent Archaeological Trust, 1988)

Platt, C.,
King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late-medieval England
(UCL, 1996)

Poos, L.,
A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex, 1350–1525
(Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Rösener,W.,
Peasants in the Middle Ages
(University of Illinois, 1992)

Schmidt, A.V. C. (ed.),
William Langland: The Vision of Piers
Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text (Everyman Classics, 1987)

Schofield P. R.,
Peasant and Community in Medieval England, 1200–1500
(Macmillan, 2002)

Spufford, P.,
Money and its use in Medieval Europe
(Cambridge University Press, 1988)

Webber, R.,
Peasants' Revolt: The Uprising in Kent, Essex, East Anglia and London During the Reign of King Richard II
(T. Dalton, 1980)

MINSTREL

Aubrey, E.,
The Music of the Troubadours
(Indiana University Press, 1996)

Coleman, J.,
Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France
(Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Daniel, A.,
Pound's Translations of Arnaut Daniel: A Variorum Edition with Commentary from Unpublished Letters
(Garland Science, 1991)

Egan, M.,
The Vidas of the Troubadours
(Taylor & Francis, 1984)

Gaunt, S. & Kay, S. (eds.),
The Troubadours: An Introduction
(Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Green, R. F.,
Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages
(University of Toronto Press, 1980)

Hueffer, F.,
The Troubadours: A History of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages
(Ams Press, 1977)

Jensen, F.,
Troubadour Lyrics: A Bilingual Anthology
, Studies in the Humanities, Vol 39 (Peter Lang Pub. Inc., 1998)

Paden,W D.,
The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989)

Page C.,
Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France
(Oxford University Press, 1993)

Page C.,
The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100-1300
(University of California Press, 1989)

Paterson, L. (ed.),
The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100–1300
(Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Putter, A. & Gilbert, J. (eds.),
The Spirit of Medieval Popular Romance
(Longman, 2000)

Schulman, N. M.,
Where Troubadours Were Bishops: The Occitania of Folc of Marseille, 1150–1231
(Routledge, 2001)

Southworth, J.,
The English Medieval Minstrel
(Boydell Press, 1989)

Topsfield, L.T.,
Troubadours and Love
(Cambridge University Press, 1975)

Wilkins, N.,
Music in the Age of Chaucer
(Rowman & Littlefield, 1979)

OUTLAW

Bellamy, J. G., ‘The Coterel Gang: an Anatomy of a Band of Fourteenth-century Criminals',
English Historical Review
, vol. 79, (1964), pp. 698–717

Bellamy, J. G.,
Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages
(Routledge, 1973)

Chrimes, S. B.,
Introduction to the Administrative History of Medieval England
(Blackwell, 1966)

Hanawalt, B. A.,' Ballads and Bandits. Fourteenth-Century Outlaws and the Robin Hood Poems' in
Chaucer's England
, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (University of Minnesota Press, 1992)

Hanawalt, B. A.,
Crime and Conflict in English Communities 1300–1348
(Harvard University Press, 1979)

Holt, J. C.,
Robin Hood
, revised edn. (Thames and Hudson, 1989)

Johnston, A. F., ‘The Robin Hood of the Records' in
Playing Robin Hood. The Legend as Performance in Five Centuries
, ed. Lois Potter (University of Delaware, 1998)

Jusserand, J. J.,
English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages
, (Methuen, 1961) Part I, ch. in; Part II, ch. in

Keen, M.,
The Outlaws of Medieval Legend
, revised paperback edn. (Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1987)

Knight, S.,
Robin Hood. A Complete Study of the English Outlaw
(Blackwell, 1994)

Musson, A.,
Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants' Revolt
(Manchester University Press, 2001)

Powell, E.,
Kingship, Law and Society: Criminal Justice in the Reign of Henry V
(Clarendon Press, 1989)

Seal, G.,
The Outlaw Legend. A Cultural Tradition in Britain, America and Australia
(Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Spraggs, G.,
Outlaws and Highway-men. The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century
(Pimlico, 2001)

Stones, E. L. G., ‘The Folvilles of Ashby-Folville, Leicestershire, and their associates in crime, 1326–1347',
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
, 5th series, vol.7 (1957), pp. 117–36

Summerson, H., ‘The Criminal Underworld of Medieval England',
Journal of Legal History
, vol. 17, no. 3 (December, 1996), pp. 197–224

Wiles,
The Early Plays of Robin Hood
(Brewer, 1981)

Wilkinson, B.,
Constitutional History of England in the Fifteenth Century
(1964)

MONK

Brown, P.,
The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity
(Chicago University Press, 1981)

Burton, J.,
Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain 1000–1300
(Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Burton, J.,
The Monastic Order in Yorkshire, 1069–1215
(Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Butler, L. & Given-Wilson, C.,
Medieval Monasteries of Great Britain
(Michael Joseph, 1979)

Daly, J.,
Benedictine Monasticism: Its Formation and Development Through the 12th Century
(Sheed and Ward, Inc., 1965)

Evans, J.,
Monastic Life at Cluny 910–1157
(Oxford University Press, 1968)

Greene, J. P.,
Medieval Monasteries
(Leicester University Press, 1992)

Grundmann, H.,
Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women's Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century
(Notre Dame, 1995)

Haigh. C. A.,
English Reformations
(Clarendon Press, 1993)

Hill, B. D.,
English Cistercian Monasteries and Their Patrons in the Twelfth Century
(University of Illinois Press, 1968)

Hill, R., ‘From the Conquest to the Black Death',
A History of Religion in Britain
, ed. Sheridan Gilley and W.J. Sheils (Blackwell, 1994)

Hudson, A.,
The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History
(Clarendon Press, 1989)