One important strand in historical writing on the peoples of the medieval British Isles has been the image that those peoples had of each other.¹ A particular focus has been on the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when ecclesiastical authors such as Gerald of Wales propagated an overwhelmingly disparaging view of the Welsh, Irish and Scots.² The ‘Celtic’ neighbours of the English, according to this view, still needed to be taught how to make the most of the economic potential of their countries; they led a largely pastoral existence; they were intensely warlike societies of freemen given to violent feuding...

It is perhaps inevitable that the public and personal piety of Scotland’s thirteenthcentury kings should appear unremarkable in contrast to that of the long-reigning Henry III of England and Louis IX of France. Henry’s consuming investment at Westminster Abbey in the cult of his ancestor, Edward the Confessor, and, from 1247, the veneration at that house of a Holy Blood relic, were but the most outward signs of a deep personal faith wedded tightly to Plantagenet political ends. A number of recent studies have revealed in Henry a commitment to a varied and costly round of religious building as well...

If ever there was a pipe roll you did not want to lose, among the strongest candidates would be the one covering the 1213 financial year, which ran from Michaelmas 1212 and concluded twelve months later. So, rather obligingly, at some point over the last eight centuries, this is exactly what a long-forgotten clerk of the Exchequer did. At least we can be sure that the Public Record Office or The National Archives did not accidentally dispose of it. No pipe roll, or indeed corresponding chancellor’s roll, has ever appeared in a modern listing for either series, suggesting that the...

Research into public debate does not loom large in medieval studies. In fact, the term ‘public debate’ is often seen as an anachronistic imposition of a phenomenon only emerging in the early modern period. From one side, this reluctance to deal with public debate – and the related concepts of ‘public sphere’ and ‘public opinion’ – is not difficult to understand, since the work that established the point of departure for public sphere studies to a large extent neglected the Middle Ages. The work in question is Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, originally published in 1962.¹ According to Habermas, the medieval public...

Around the time of the feast of St Marcus the Evangelist in 1263, Simon de Montfort, the earl of Leicester, returned to England from his self-imposed exile in France.² Shortly after his arrival, he began building a broad but fragile coalition against the king, Henry III. This alliance’s first appearance can be traced to Oxford, where several long-term reformists and other more recent converts gathered. Having renewed their oaths to the Provisions of Oxford, they demanded in a letter that the king should actively enforce them. Furthermore, they denounced those who opposed the reintroduction of the Provisions as ‘mortal enemies’.³...

The object of this paper is to study, through the rich material conserved at The National Archives (London) and in a manner that takes us beyond diplomatic negotiation, the personal lines of contact between the French and English royal courts during the reign of Philippe III (1270–85), the contemporary of Edward I (1272–1307). Numerous exchanges and responses between the French and English kings, who were closely related by blood, exist. Letters of recommendation and litterae de statu (concerning the state of health of the correspondents) reveal the existence of a less formal correspondence than that found in the...

The year 1297 witnessed a sundering of the political consensus that Edward I had painstakingly built up over the previous quarter of a century, and a splintering of the community of the realm in a way not seen since the Barons’ Wars. Edward faced opposition from both the church and the laity on a very large scale, and the crisis has rightly received a good deal of attention from historians.¹ For all this, however, we still do not know very much about those who formed an opposition that the chronicler Walter of Guisborough estimated at 1500 mounted men.² Beyond the...

For anyone encountering it for the first time, the roll of crown pleas from the London eyre of 1321 (JUST 1/547A) must have a fair claim to be the single most alarming medieval document to be found in The National Archives, a remorseless catalogue of lurid vice and crime.¹ Two men take a prostitute to a latrine in London wall, where a quarrel as to who shall possess her first in this salubrious spot leads to one man striking the other dead.² Another latrine is found to contain a man’s head; whose it was and how it came there no-one...

Named after those highwaymen who brandished ‘trailbastons’, or clubs, with which to beat their victims, Edward I’s great commissions into crime, issued in 1305, achieved notoriety almost immediately, meriting a mention in a number of the chronicles of the period.² Historians, too, have frequently commented on them, though there has been little research on disorder in this period or on the ‘trailbaston’ commissions directly, which is surprising given their fame.³ My aim here is to evaluate the historiography of ‘trailbaston’, and to offer some new thoughts on the origins, revelations and impact of what were, at the time of their...