Lost Letters of Medieval Life
Lost Letters of Medieval Life: English Society, 1200-1250
Martha Carlin
David Crouch
Series: The Middle Ages Series
Copyright Date: 2013
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Pages: 360
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhdkp
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Book Info
Lost Letters of Medieval Life
Book Description:

Everyday life in early thirteenth-century England is revealed in vivid detail in this riveting collection of correspondence of people from all classes, from peasants and shopkeepers to bishops and earls. The documents edited here include letters between masters and servants, husbands and wives, neighbors and enemies, and cover a wide range of topics: politics and war, going to fairs and going to law, attending tournaments and stocking a game park, borrowing cash and doing favors for friends, investigating adultery and building a windmill. While letters by celebrated people have long been known, the correspondence of ordinary people has not survived and has generally been assumed never to have existed in the first place. Martha Carlin and David Crouch, however, have discovered numerous examples of such correspondence hiding in plain sight. The letters can be found in manuscripts called formularies-the collections of form letters and other model documents that for centuries were used to teach the arts of letter-writing and keeping accounts. The writing-masters and their students who produced these books compiled examples of all the kinds of correspondence that people of means, members of the clergy, and those who handled their affairs might expect to encounter in their business and personal lives. Tucked among the sample letters in these formularies from popes to bishops and from kings to sheriffs are examples of a much more casual, ephemeral kind of correspondence. These are the low-level letters that evidently were widely exchanged, but were often discarded because they were not considered to be of lasting importance. Two manuscripts, one in the British Library and the other in the Bodleian Library, are especially rich in such documents, and it is from these collections that Carlin and Crouch have drawn the letters and other documents in this volume. They are presented here in their first printed edition, both in the original Latin and in English translation, each document splendidly contextualized in an accompanying essay.

eISBN: 978-0-8122-0756-9
Subjects: History
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Table of Contents
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-xii)
  3. List of Illustrations
    List of Illustrations (pp. xiii-xiv)
  4. PREFACE
    PREFACE (pp. xv-xviii)
  5. List of Abbreviations
    List of Abbreviations (pp. xix-xxii)
  6. A NOTE ON MONEY
    A NOTE ON MONEY (pp. xxiii-xxvi)
  7. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. 1-25)

    This is a book about everyday life in early thirteenth-century England, as revealed in the correspondence of people from all classes of society, from peasants and shopkeepers to bishops and earls. While examples of the letters of wealthy and powerful people of this period have long been known, not only has the correspondence of ordinary people not survived, it has been generally assumed by historians that it never existed in the first place. In fact, numerous examples of such correspondence were hiding in plain sight. They can be found in the handbooks of form letters and other model documents, known...

  8. CHAPTER 1 Money
    CHAPTER 1 Money (pp. 27-98)

    This document provides a small snapshot of life on an English manor in the first half of the thirteenth century. The lord of the manor in an unnamed vill¹³ is evidently in need of cash. To get it, he has pledged a “capital messuage” (a building plot containing a high-status dwelling) and its appurtenances, together with additional specified economic assets. That is, the lord has pledged the manor house (which he may or may not have used as a personal residence) and all other buildings and other things attached to it, together with ten acres (4.05 ha.) of land, the...

  9. CHAPTER 2 War and Politics
    CHAPTER 2 War and Politics (pp. 99-136)

    This text gives us an unparalleled glimpse into the military organization of medieval England. Very few texts survive that record the procedures for summoning an army in the twelfth or thirteenth century, which has led many scholars to assume that written summonses were rarely issued. This text, however, clearly shows the king’s summons to a lord being transmitted down the chain of command in the form of a private writ (formal order), in Latin, to the lord’s military tenants (that is, those who held land of him by knight service).

    Like Document 2, which may be based on a genuine...

  10. CHAPTER 3 Lordship and Administration
    CHAPTER 3 Lordship and Administration (pp. 137-218)

    This letter, like Document 29, provides a rare glimpse of the personnel who had responsibility for local administration and law and order in medieval England. The office of constable was an ancient one, going back in origins to the households of the Merovingian kings of the Franks, where the constable (comes stabuli, “count of the stable”) was a high official in charge of the horses and mounted attendants of the king. As the idea of a princely household evolved in France in the eleventh century, the conestabularius and his colleague, the marshal, became the officers who commanded the household guards.⁶...

  11. CHAPTER 4 Family and Community
    CHAPTER 4 Family and Community (pp. 219-277)

    In the thirteenth century, the word “serjeant” (serviens) was used to refer to someone who “served”—for example, as an officer, servant, assistant, or manorial bailiff (see Document 50). The serjeant in this letter serves in an unnamed knight’s household, and he has gotten into trouble in the knight’s absence for refusing to obey the orders of the knight’s wife. Someone—either the lady herself, or another senior member of the household—evidently has complained about him to the knight, and now the serjeant sends the knight a very formal letter to defend his actions and to proclaim his entire...

  12. CHAPTER 5 A Knight’s Correspondence: Building a Barn and a Windmill
    CHAPTER 5 A Knight’s Correspondence: Building a Barn and a Windmill (pp. 278-292)

    This is the first of a collection of seven model letters (Documents 94–100) included in the formulary in Fairfax MS 27 (c. 1230). They all concern the proposed construction of a windmill, and also discuss various other administrative, professional, and personal matters. The correspondents are a knight of the king’s household, a royal forester, the forester’s serjeants (assistants), a carpenter, the knight’s manorial serjeant (bailiff), and the knight’s wife. No original collection of correspondence of this kind among such a group of ordinary people of widely varying status has survived for this period, but the character of the letters...

  13. BIBLIOGRAPHY
    BIBLIOGRAPHY (pp. 293-320)
  14. GENERAL INDEX
    GENERAL INDEX (pp. 321-327)
  15. SUBJECT INDEX
    SUBJECT INDEX (pp. 328-333)
  16. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. 334-334)
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