Law, laity and solidarities

Essays in honour of Susan Reynolds

Pauline Stafford, Janet L. Nelson, Jane Martindale

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780719058363
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526148285
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The primary focus of this collection by leading medieval historians is the laity, in particular the ideas and ideals of lay people. The contributors explore lay attitudes as expressed in legal cases, charters, chronicles and collective activities. Highlights the centrality of kinship, whilst stressing its limitations as an all purpose social bond. Ranges chronologically and geographically from the seventh century to the eve of the Reformation, from Western Britain to papal and urban Italy, from Carolingian dynastic politics to the decline of medieval pilgrimage in the sixteenth century, and from the courts of twelfth-century France to the fifteenth-century wards of London.

Table of contents

• Front matter
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Writing about Charles Martel
• Peers in the early Middle Ages
• Stepmothers in Frankish legal life
• Political ideas in late tenth–century England: charters as evidence
• Medieval mentalities and primitive legal practice
• The problem of treason: the trial of Daire le Roux
• Between law and politics: the judicial duel under the Angevin kings (mid–twelfth century to 1204)
• Local custom in the early common law
• ‘Slaves of the Normans’? Gerald de Barri and regnal solidarity in early thirteenth–century England
• Kinsmen, neighbours and communities in Wales and the western British Isles, c.1100–c.1400
• Lay kinship solidarity and papal law
• Laity, laicisation and Philip the Fair of France
• Lay solidarities: the wards of medieval London
• Language, laughter and lay solidarities:an inquiry into the decline of pilgrimages and crusading
• Lay/clerical distinctions in early India
• A bibliography of Susan Reynolds’s work (to 1999)
• Index of topics