Lordship and Learning: Studies in Memory of Trevor Aston

The exercise of lordship in England is examined in relation to personal and tenurial dependence, estate management, and changing social and economic conditions. There are papers on the formation of kingdoms and national identities in early medieval Britain and Ireland, on Anglo-Saxon lordship, and on lords and peasants in Byzantium. In contributions on medieval education the institutions of late medieval Oxford are reassessed; the provisions made for their archives by medieval corporations, and the practical importance of muniments explained; and, at the other end of the spectrum, material from across western Europe is deployed to show how images were used to convey non-verbal messages to the non-literate. Contributors MARGARET ASTON, TREVOR ASTON, PAUL BRAND, JEREMY CATTO, T.M. CHARLES-EDWARDS, PETER COSS. RALPH EVANS, ROSAMOND FAITH, I.M.W. HARVEY, P.D.A. HARVEY, JAMES HOWARD-JOHNSTON, ERIC JOHN, N.E. STACY, MALCOLM UNDERWOOD.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - Ralph Evans The making of nations in Britain and Ireland in the early middle ages - T M Charles-Edwards Social change in early medieval Byzantium - James Howard-Johnston The annals of St Neots and the defeat of the Vikings - The late Eric John Cola's tun: rural social structure in late Anglo-Saxon Devon - Rosamond Faith The ancestry of English Feudalism - What's in a construct? the `gentry' in Anglo-Saxon England - Peter Coss The state of the demesne manors of Glastonbury Abbey in the twelfth century - Neil E Stacy The manorial reeve in twelfth-century England - Paul D A Harvey Stewards, bailiffs and the emerging legal profession in later thirteenth-century England - Paul A Brand Whose was the manorial court? - Ralph Evans Poaching and sedition in fifteenth-century England - I M W Harvey `Laymen's books': medieval images in theory and practice - Margaret Aston The triumph of the hall in fifteenth-century Oxford - Jeremy Catto The defences of a college: the law's demands and early record keeping in St John's College, Cambridge - Malcolm Underwood Muniment rooms and their fittings in medieval and early modern England -

Review :
Here are fundamental papers worthy of Aston's own Past and Present.