This book contains essays written over the past 25 years about medieval urban communities and about the loyalties and beliefs of medieval lay people in general. Most writing about medieval religious, political, legal, and social ideas starts from treatises written by academics and assumes that ideas trickled down from the clergy to the laity. Susan Reynolds, whether writing about the struggles for liberty of small English towns, the national solidarities of the Anglo-Saxons, or the capacity of medieval peasants to formulate their own attitudes to religion, rejects this assumption. She suggests that the medieval laity had ideas of their own that deserve to be taken seriously.
Chapter 1. Social mentalities and the case of medieval scepticism
Chapter 2. Medieval origines gentium and the community of the realm
Chapter 3. What do we mean by “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxons”?
Chapter 4. Eadric Silvaticus and the English resistance
Chapter 5. Magna Carta 1297 and the legal use of literacy
Chapter 7. English towns of the eleventh century in a European context
Chapter 8. Towns in Domesday Book
Chapter 9. The rulers of London in the twelfth century
Chapter 10. The farm and taxation of London, 1154-1216
Chapter 11. Decline and decay in late medieval towns: a look at some of the concepts and arguments
Chapter 12. The forged charters of Barnstaple
Chapter 13. 1483: Gloucester and town government in the middle ages
Chapter 14. Medieval urban history and the history of political thought
Chapter 15. The writing of medieval urban history in England
Chapter 16. Space and time in English medieval towns
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