Dr Matt Townend (Department of English) was recently a guest on Melvyn Bragg’s Radio 4 series The Matter of the North, discussing Invasion: Vikings and Normans.

On Monday 20 June 2016, we held our annual CMS Summer Party on the lawn at the King’s Manor. Blessed by a unprecedented splash of sunshine, we gathered for strawberries, prossecco and ice creams provided by Paul and his truck!

During the party, we were delighted to announce that Stephanie Montieth is this year’s winner of the £150 Garmonsway Prize for the best academic performance in the first half of the MA in Medieval Studies, as well as the Viking Poetry Essay prize.

We also had the sad task of saying goodbye to Andy and Dawson, two great friends of the CMS who are leaving as the university makes radical changes to the portering arrangements at the King’s Manor. We are very sorry to see them go.

And many thanks to Heidi Stoner for taking the photographs at the event!

Jennifer Caddick is a student on the MA in Medieval Studies and is currently writing a dissertation on Sermons and the Painted Chamber during the Opening of English Parliaments, 1399-1484. At the end of April, she was shown round the Palace of Westminster by Martyn Atkins, Senior Clerk at the House of Commons. Here she reflects on that visit.

For the past couple of years, I’ve enjoyed studying a few different aspects of late-medieval English parliaments. Despite this interest, I’d only ever accessed them through the parliament rolls and had never managed to visit the Palace of Westminster as it stands today. Until the end of April, that is. Martyn Atkins was kind enough to take time out of his day to show me around, and I was able to see and learn a great deal about the history of the Palace of Westminster, and hear some interesting stories about parliamentary proceedings today! While I was able to see a large amount of the Palace of Westminster (including the Lords and Commons chambers, and the committee rooms), the visit was incredibly useful in providing me with a better perspective on the site for my MA dissertation on opening sermons and the Painted Chamber between 1399 and 1484.

Westminster Hall has been central to (what is now) the parliamentary estate since the 11th century. In 1399 during the first parliament of Henry IV’s reign, members gathered for the opening of parliament in “the Great Hall of Westminster” (PROME online). With quite a nice sense of continuity, Westminster Hall is still used for political purposes, and the opening ceremonies for conferences of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, and the North Atlantic Assembly have been held there.

From Westminster Hall, we next walked to the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft, which is beautiful and definitely worth checking out! Admittedly, it was restored in the second-half of the 19th century, when there were attempts to recreate its medieval decorations in a neo-gothic style. Adjacent to the Chapel as well is a broom cupboard with a plaque inside dedicated to the Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, who hid in there overnight during the 1911 census.

While Westminster Hall provided a brilliant sense of the architecture of the medieval palace, St Stephen’s Hall was useful in terms of getting a better idea of the dimensions of the Painted Chamber. The current St Stephen’s Hall was built upon the foundations of St Stephen’s Chapel, which was lost in the 1834 fire, but which during the medieval period was parallel to the Painted Chamber. Seeing St Stephen’s Hall, however, has made more real for me a problem I was encountering when considering the audience of the opening sermons. The rolls of parliament seem to suggest that everyone involved in parliamentary proceedings would gather before the King. Yet this doesn’t seem to be entirely plausible when considering the dimensions of the building.

When the Painted Chamber panels were uncovered in the early 19th century, copies were made by Stothard and Crocker, whose works were then used by Tristram to reproduce the images. These reproductions were tucked away together away from what I believe is the normal visitors’ groups (we’d definitely gotten away from the school groups at that point at least), and I may not have had the chance to see them otherwise. Although they are reproductions, it was again rather wonderful to be able to see the scale on which these images may have been produced, and the details that may have been implemented.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to take pictures at that point, but I was able to snap another picture on the terrace.

And then, one final picture – Martyn and I with Westminster Hall in the background (it had just started raining…).

Thank you again to Martyn for his time and for the opportunity to visit the Palace of Westminster, and thanks also to Craig Taylor for contacting Martyn and making this visit possible.

Usha Vishnuvajjala presented the 2015 Fair Unknown Award to Jennifer Bartlett on behalf of the selection committee. The citation read:

“Jennifer Bartlett’s 2015 Kalamazoo paper, titled Arthur’s Dinner: Or, Robert Thornton Goes Shopping, reads the Alliterative Morte Darthur‘s early feast scene for what it can tell us about the material world depicted in the text and the material world of the scribe Robert Thornton. Bartlett demonstrates that the seemingly exotic foodstuffs at Arthur’s feast would have been quite available to Thornton in fifteenth-century York, and that familiar, quotidian objects like herbs and spices were regularly imported from so-called “exotic” locations.

The resulting article, published in Arthuriana, 26.1, argues convincingly for rethinking Thornton’s view of the “Oryent.” Just as Arthur imports foreign foodstuffs and domesticates them. Bartlett argues, he must draw on resources from outside Britain to sustain his seeming peerless status in the Alliterative Morte. Not only does the article re-orient the Alliterative Morte‘s relationship to the east, it also gives us a fascinating look at the details of the really weird food served at Arthur’s feast.

Jennifer received her PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of York in 2015.

Congratulations, Jennifer!”

Just over 25 years ago the Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of York launched a new interdisciplinary MA pathway ‘Women and the the Later Medieval World’ and at much the same time hosted an international conference entitled ‘Medieval Women’.

Since that time the study of medieval women has evolved considerably, though interest in the study of gender and particularly masculinity has raised questions as to how we now relate to and engage with the study of women’s lives and experience in the medieval past. Recent scholarship has moreover returned to some of the questions that were pioneering a quarter of a century ago, particularly in relation to the ‘status’ of women after the Black Death. By revisiting the theme of medieval women, this conference seeks to explore where scholarship, particularly scholarship first inspired by the ‘Women and the Later Medieval World’ has taken us.

This then is both an exploration and a celebration. It is also an opportunity to welcome scholars from Central Europe who a quarter of a century ago saw their world transformed by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution and the collapse of authoritarian communist regimes. We are delighted that the conference is supported by the Department of History of the Palacky University, the Czech Republic.

Thurs 16 June, 6.30pm to 7.30pm, KG07, King’s Manor, Exhibition Square

Free tickets: www.york.ac.uk/english/news-events

Every day we hear the media talking about ‘us’ and the Islamic World as if there are two societies with little or nothing in common. Many public commentators seem unaware that both societies developed to a large extent from Roman and Greek roots. Roman and Greek art and architectures laid the foundations for both Islamic and Western creative developments. Greek philosophy and science was translated into Arabic with the West often learning about these works from Arabic texts. Join Michele Campopiano of the University of York as he addresses this shared cultural heritage. He will explain how English scholars in the age of the Normans travelled east to learn about the advancements of their Muslim contemporaries. Christian theologians discussed the works of Muslim philosophers and their reflections about God and Religion developed along the same lines as their Arab and Persian contemporaries. Europe and the Islamic World shared legends and myths of the great heroes of Antiquity – Alexander, Caesar and others. As Roman ruins stand in their magnificence in our city of York, so they stood and stand in Syria, Egypt,Libya and other countries in North Africa and the Middle East.

About the speaker

Dr Michele Campopiano is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Latin Literature at the University of York. He has studied and worked in several countries in Europe and the Middle East. He has also published extensively on the history of the Islamic World.

The Development of Borough Customary Law in Medieval Britain

Esther Liberman Cuenca (Fordham University)

Tuesday 31 May 2016, 5.30pm in KG/84

This lecture explores the development of borough customary law, or customary practices that took on the force of law within English towns and cities, as it began to appear in royal charters and custumals (or collections of customs) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Compared to the abundant scholarship on medieval common law and canon law, both of which generated extensive treatises and commentaries by medieval contemporaries who were professionals formally trained in schools, publications on medieval English customary law have been few and far between. Law merchant and manorial customary law have received some attention, but fewer studies have focused on borough customary law, with the notable exception of Mary Bateson’s seminal Selden Society volumes, collectively entitled Borough Customs (1904-6), which focused mainly property rights and the jurisdiction of the borough courts. Building on Bateson’s work, this talk grapples with how borough officials began to develop their own set of customs as both prescriptive guidelines and as laws that helped them intervene in the pressing concerns of their communities. An examination of over fifty charters from the boroughs of Beverley, Bristol, Colchester, Dublin, and Southampton—as well as six stand-alone custumals from Exeter, Ipswich, Lincoln, Newcastle, Northampton, and Winchester— show that the majority dealt with the procedures and jurisdiction of the borough courts, bearing directly on the source of legal power for the urban elite, but that this focus shifts markedly over time to the requirements and particular challenges of holding political office.

This change in focus reveals three crucial features of the development of borough customary law in this early period. First, the appearance of independently produced custumals embodied a shift in the way borough customary came to be conceptualized. Borough customs were not only seigniorial privileges that granted rights, but also a set of laws that ensured officials could exercise these rights with sufficient responsibility, restraint, and consistency. Second, the increasing emphasis in later charters and custumals on the duties, character, and qualifications of holding political office exemplifies a broader trend in the development of customary law, one that signals the maturation and ever-growing influence of towns as loci of power and the power of men tasked with their governance. Lastly, the discourse of borough customary law combined two, inextricably linked conceptions of custom that depended on both seigniorial charters, with privileges handed down or renewed over time, and collections of practices and traditions that were rooted in local context and concerns.

Centre for Medieval Studies & York Festival of Ideas Lecture

Passion, Mystery and Performance: The First Two Centuries of the York Play

Jeremy Goldberg (York)

Tuesday 7 June
6:00pm – King’s Manor K/133
Free Admission. Booking Required

York’s multi-pageant Creation to Domesday cycle for the feast of Corpus Christi – popularly the York mystery plays – is first noticed early in the reign of Richard II. It lasted almost two centuries until its effective suppression by the then Dean of York following its last performance in 1569. The cycle represented a significant devotional and cultural phenomenon, but also a major medieval tourist attraction. Its nature and meaning was not fixed from the time of its first notice and the changing relationship between the crafts that performed the cycle and the city governors who increasingly came to control it is an important part of the story.

This lecture will consider in particular the origins of the cycle, the role of crafts and groups of artisans and traders in relation to individual pageants, and questions to do with the nature of the production. It will ask to what degree spoken text was part of performance before the 1470s and will explore issues relating to performance, in particular how far women were excluded from or included in productions. Finally it will offer some thoughts about the last years of the cycle and its demise before its revival in the modern era.

Jeremy Goldberg is a Reader in the Department of History and a member of the Medieval Urban Household Research Project. A native of Hull, he has been passionate about the Middle Ages since childhood. He joined the department in 1988 having previously been a research fellow at Clare College, Cambridge and before that a temporary lecturer at the University of Keele. His research focuses upon later medieval English social and cultural history; women’s and gender history.