A Sense of Place: The 'London' Cityscapes of BL, Royal MS. 13 A. III (original) (raw)
Related papers
Medieval Londoners: essays to mark the eightieth birthday of Caroline M. Barron
2019
Medieval Londoners were a diverse group, some born in the city, and others drawn to the capital from across the realm and from overseas. For some, London became the sole focus of their lives, while others retained or developed networks and loyalties that spread far and wide. The rich evidence for the medieval city, including archaeological and documentary evidence, means that the study of London and its inhabitants remains a vibrant field. Medieval Londoners brings together archaeologists, historians, art-historians and literary scholars whose essays provide glimpses of medieval Londoners in all their breadth, depth and variety. This volume is offered to Caroline M. Barron, Emeritus Professor of the History of London at Royal Holloway, University of London, on the occasion of her 80th birthday. Her remarkable career – over some fifty years – has revitalized the way in which we consider London and its people. This volume is a tribute to her scholarship and her friendship and encouragement to others. It is thanks to Caroline M. Barron that the study of medieval London remains as vibrant today as it has ever been.
‘Brut sett Londen Ston’: London and London Stone in a 14th-century English Metrical Chronicle
Transactions of London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 2018
Correction: the tradition that the body of Harold Harefoot was buried at St Clement Danes (p 175) was already known to Ralph de Diceto in the 12th century. Modern accounts of London Stone, the enigmatic landmark that has stood since at least the end of the 11th century (and probably much earlier) in Cannon Street in the City of London, usually refer to a ‘traditional belief’ that the stone was associated in some way with the well-being of the city, and quote an ‘ancient proverb’ that ‘So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish’. In a paper published some years ago (Clark 2007, 178), and later in a fuller paper in Folklore on the growth of traditions and myths about London Stone (Clark 2010, 45–52), this supposed saying was traced back to a first appearance in a note in the periodical Notes and Queries in 1862. The note was signed with the pseudonym ‘Mor Merrion’. This, more correctly ‘Môr Meirion’, was the Welsh Bardic name adopted by the Revd Richard Williams Morgan (c.1815–89), Anglican clergyman, Welsh patriot, co-organiser of the 1858 Llangollen Eisteddfod, and later the founder and first bishop of a revived ‘Ancient British Church’. ‘Môr Meirion’ claimed that there were ancient traditions that London Stone had been brought from Troy by Brutus, legendary founder of London as ‘New Troy’, and erected as the altar stone in the Temple of Diana, and that the ancient British kings had by custom sworn their oaths of office upon it. It was ‘the foundation stone of London and its palladium’. Moreover there was, Morgan asserted, a saying ‘So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish’. In the absence of evidence that these were legitimate ‘ancient traditions’ about London Stone, it is easy to assume that all were the inventions of Richard Williams Morgan, that imaginative and eccentric author. However, there is one medieval source that does indeed connect London Stone with Brutus and with a prophecy of London’s greatness – but it remains uncertain whether Morgan was aware of it: a narrative poem known as the Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle, composed in the early 14th century. One version of this text was written in London and clearly intended for a London readership, and among much unconventional and unlikely history it contains episodes and references of particular London interest, and probably reflecting local knowledge. One of these is the attribution to Brutus of the setting up of London Stone and a prophecy of London’s future greatness. This paper considers this episode alongside other apparently novel references, which may reflect ways in which medieval Londoners interpreted the past of their city.
Mediaeval Studies, 2017
In 1270 the London alderman, Arnold fitz Thedmar, acquired a manuscript belonging to the monks of the Priory of St Mary Overy at Southwark. In addition to holding political office in London, Arnold was also the first layman in the British Isles to compose a historical account of his time, and he used the Southwark manuscript to fashion an account of the years 1200-1225 in his book. After Arnold's death, the monks at Southwark Priory then sought out Arnold's chronicle which they used in a continuation of their annals. This article not only shows, for the first time, that Arnold and the monks at Southwark used each other's works, it also places both of these centres of historical writing into a much wider network of manuscript transmission and circulation across thirteenth-century England.
Scribes, Kings, and a Roll Chronicle: Dating and Provenance of British Library, Add. MS. 30079
eBLJ, 2019
Created in a period of political transition, as England moved from the end of Henry III’s reign towards that of Edward I, British Library Add. MS. 30079 is an important witness to the historical events of the late thirteenth century. This manuscript was one of the first chronicle rolls written in Latin recording the history of England through a genealogy of its kings, a model which would then acquire popularity in the Anglo-Norman world during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. An investigation surrounding the manuscript’s context of origin will show how Add. MS. 30079 can be a relevant source for a broader historical analysis of the period. This paper considers the dating and provenance of this chronicle roll, putting particular emphasis on the implications of scribal choices and of the circumstances of manuscript transmission.
Crown, city and guild in late medieval London
London and beyond. Essays in honour of Derek Keene, 2012
By the early seventeenth century it was common for the London livery companies to commission leading writers such as Anthony Munday and John Webster to design elaborate shows celebrating the election of their members to the office of lord mayor. in october 1605 it was the turn of the Merchant taylors, who commissioned Munday to write a show entitled The Triumphs of Re-united Britania for their lord mayor, sir Leonard halliday. The opening speech was to be given by an actor portraying Edward iii, who had given the company its first charter in 1327. This was linked explicitly to the overall theme of the pageant -the regaining and reuniting of kingdoms. two years after the accession of James i, the pageant placed themes, characters and stories that were familiar to the audience in a wider context, emphasizing the coming together of the British peoples. one of these stories, very popular in pageants and chronicles in this period, was the idea of London as the 'new troy', founded by the mythical Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas, a legend that first appeared in the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. The 1605 pageant presented Brutus as the father of Britain -the kingdoms of England, scotland and Wales were given to his three sons to rule, and to their descendants ever after. The 'reuniting' of these kingdoms thus provided a contemporary backdrop to this mayoral election, and placed London and its merchants at the heart of this alliance of nations and the emergence of the 'British state'. 1 The narratives present in such texts reflect strongly held notions of corporate history among London's livery companies, where connections with the crown and the monarch feature prominently. These connections, in turn, are part and parcel of debates concerning London's relationship to central government and to processes of 'state formation' in the middle ages and into the early modern period. Among Derek Keene's many contributions to the field of metropolitan history has been to emphasize the significance of this particular question for London historians of all periods, both in terms of how we perceive the city in relation to the state, and in terms of how we discuss it in comparison with other metropolises and capital cities 1 Anthony Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania (1605), stc 18279.
Arthur and Kingship as Represented by the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth
The present study investigates the representation of King Arthur in the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth (1343-1400). In doing so, it concentrates on specific historical contextearly Anglo-Saxon Englandand a specific form of authority-Anglo-Saxon kingship. The intention of the study is to show how Geoffrey of Monmouth used historical chronicles, not only for cataloguing the stories of various rulers of the island, but also for creating and shaping a single leader who can unify the kingdom. The study claims that the ideal kingship constructed around the figure of King Arthur in the Historia involved a reorientation of some of the more conventional norms of kingship; the heroic qualities of martial prowess, generosity and morality are quite essential in every conception of an ideal king. Geoffrey's conception of this ideal king was largely influenced by his personal aspirations, some of which have been outlined in the introduction of this article. The remaining parts of this study offer a historical as well as a literary analysis of the text, addressing the main qualities of kingship that were articulated in the text.
Parergon, 2018
Golden Middle Ages in Europe: New Research into Early-Medieval Communities and Identities. Edited by Annemarieke Willemsen and Hanneke Kik. Brepols. 2015. 168pp. €59.00. This volume represents a collection of studies first presented at the second Dorestad Congress, which accompanied the 2014 exhibition 'Golden Middle Ages: The Netherlands in the Merovingian World, 400-700 AD' held at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. The articles contained within all sit somewhere between the breadth suggested by the volume's title and the narrower focus suggested by the title of the congress and exhibition. Most of the articles are about either Dorestad itself (in the final section), or Frisia and the Low Countries area, and there are also articles on connections with the North Sea world, though nothing outside northwest Europe. This range serves to provide the volume with a coherent if slightly ill-defined focus, which is consolidated by the concentration of most of the articles on archaeological matters and the division of the book into three sections: 'Settlements and Cemeteries', 'Material Culture' and 'New Research on Dorestad'. While all the contributions are worthy of consideration, for reasons of space I shall focus only on two from each section here, before concluding with some thoughts on the volume as a whole. I should note at the outset of this review that I am not an archaeologist by training, and have approached this book primarily through the lens of assessing its accessibility to a literary historian. The first section, 'Settlements and Cemeteries', is the least cohesive of the three, and contains: an interesting survey of the evidence for linguistic diversity in the early medieval Low Countries by Michiel de Vaan (which, it must be noted, it about neither settlements nor cemeteries); two articles-by Annemarieke Willemsen and Johan Nicolay respectively-on the thorny subject of royalty in the early medieval Low Countries (and the Rhineland); and a multi-authored survey of the archaeological work undertaken at Borgharen, a listed monument near Maastricht containing a Roman villa and a Merovingian cemetery. Willemsen and Nicolay challenge, in different ways, perceptions and assumptions about early medieval 'royalty' and 'upper classes'. Willemsen demonstrates that there is often little to distinguish between graves which have been termed 'royal', 'princely' or simply 'high status', and that, in most cases, 'royal' graves cannot be linked to any rulers known from the literary record, with the grave of Childeric I representing an important exception. Nicolay, meanwhile, presents a response to the influential construction by Pieter Boeles of the idea of 'Frisia Magna', the
Medieval London: Collected Papers of Caroline M. Barron
2017
The papers we have selected are also meant to illustrate the way in which Professor Barron has expanded the chronological boundaries of her focus, having gone well beyond the troubled days of Richard II into those of his cousin-successor-usurper Henry IV, and then into the mid-fifteenth century and beyond. Her paper on Ralph Holland takes us to the London of Henry VI; the will of Thomas Salter (and his biography as she builds it around the will) carries us into and eventually through the vicissitudes of pre-Reformation days and on to those of the Reformation itself.