Juliet Barker provides an account of the first great popular uprising in England and a fascinating study of medieval life in English towns and countryside. She tells how and why an unlikely group of ordinary men and women from every corner of England united in armed rebellion against church and state to demand a radical political agenda.
Justice places the English peasantry within a public discourse from which historians, both medieval and modern, have thus far excluded them. He recreates the imaginative world of medieval villagers—how they worked and governed themselves, how they used official communications in unofficial ways, and how they produced a disciplined insurgent ideology.
Richard II is one of the most enigmatic of English kings. Shakespeare depicted him as a tragic figure, an irresponsible, cruel monarch who nevertheless rose in stature as the substance of power slipped from him. By later writers, he has been variously portrayed as a half-crazed autocrat or a conventional ruler whose principal errors were the mismanagement of his nobility and disregard for the political conventions of his age.
This work reexamines the political and military aspects of the Revolution of 1399. It argues that Henry of Lancaster was not the "all-conquering" hero of 1399 and that Richard II worked with all his faculties to outmaneuver his cousin politically rather than simply accept his fate and deposition with resignation.
Richard II (1377-99) has long suffered from an unusually unmanly reputation. Over the centuries, he has been habitually associated with lavish courtly expenditure, absolutist ideas, Francophile tendencies, and a love of peace, all of which have been linked to the king's physical effeminacy.
The Hundred Years War (1337–1453) dominated life in England and France for well over a century. It became the defining feature of existence for generations. This sweeping book is the first to tell the human story of the longest military conflict in history.
The status of prisoners of war was firmly rooted in the practice of ransoming in the Middle Ages. By the opening stages of the Hundred Years War, ransoming had become widespread among the knightly community, and the crown had already begun to exercise tighter control over the practice of war. This led to tensions between public and private interests over ransoms and prisoners of war.
The Hundred Years War embraced warfare in all aspects, from the grand set pieces of Crecy and Agincourt to the pillaged lands of the dispossessed population. What makes this book different from previous studies emphasizing the great battles is its use of less familiar evidence - such as administrative records, landscape archeology - to gain a truer picture of the realities of medieval warfare.
The conflict that swept over France from 1337 to 1453 remains the longest military struggle in history. A bitter dynastic fight between Plantagenet and Valois, The Hundred Years War was fought out on the widest of stages while also creating powerful new nationalist identities.
Seats of Power in Europe is a major new study of the residences of the crowned heads and the royal ducal families of the countries involved in the Hundred Years' War.