Political Society in Later Medieval England

This collection of essays celebrates the scholarship of Christine Carpenter and her contribution to the history of late medieval Britain. As with the great K.B. McFarlane before her, Professor Carpenter’s role as a teacher, Ph.D. supervisor and mentor has been at least as influential, if not more so, in the field than her published work. In his introduction, the co-editor, John Watts (himself supervised by Carpenter), celebrates the intellectual rigour and the deep understanding of political and cultural structures and contexts that have characterised both her own work and that of her students. The following ‘Appreciations’ by her former students, friends and colleagues may be a little indulgent, but they do reinforce the impression that Carpenter’s legacy, and it will be a lasting one, will go beyond the printed word. The essays in this volume are testimony to the broad range of research interests that Carpenter has pursued, especially in the last decade or so. The bulk of the essays, naturally enough, concern the fifteenth century—the period on which her work and influence have made the most lasting impression. Andrea Ruddick’s essay revisits the topic of gentry religion, looking at the question of advowsons through the lens of the Paston, Plumpton and Stonor Letters and the Armburgh Dispute. She argues that the material, spiritual and legal aspects of disputes over advowsons need to be understood fully to appreciate their richness in illuminating gentry culture. The duality of material and ideological concerns to late medieval society, a central tenet of Carpenter’s own work, is also the theme of co-editor Benjamin Thompson’s essay. It explores the duality of the church’s role in local society, caught between the spiritual concerns of the soul and the very material concerns of property and livelihood. In this late medieval duality, Thompson sees, perhaps controversially, the logic of the Tudor supremacy. Jackson Armstrong’s essay ‘Concepts of Kinship in Lancastrian Westmorland’ is a good example of the type of detailed, archival research that Professor Carpenter and her students have used to flesh out their ‘big ideas’. Armstrong’s study of the ‘Surname’ groups of Westmorland reminds us of the complexity of local society and the links between the yeoman class on the one hand, with their ‘shallow and horizontally focused framework of kinship’ (p. 165), and the gentry, who shared much in common with their fellow landowners elsewhere in the realm. Ted Powell’s essay looks at the interplay of private and public in fifteenth-century England through the example of the duchy of Lancaster. It argues against the notion, famously put forward by Kantorowicz, that the 1461 Act of Incorporation marked an important stage in the development of the concept of the king’s two bodies. Instead, Powell argues, it was a ‘short-term fix’, designed to solve the problem of the Yorkist usurpation and Henry VI’s attainder by drawing on more widely held (by common lawyers at least) ideals of corporate government. Theron Westvervelt re-examines the various manifestos for rebellion in the fifteenth century, concluding (perhaps unsurprisingly) that rebels adapted their language within a broad rhetorical framework to suit the political situation. Similar themes are the subject of John Watts’s wide-ranging essay on the ‘New Men’ and the ‘New Learning’ in early Tudor England. Watts argues that, while the impact of Renaissance Humanism was keenly felt throughout late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England, the extent to which this facilitated a ‘New Monarchy’ should not be overdrawn. In many ways, the middle-class upstarts and men learned in the law who filled early Tudor government were not that different from the men who had served the Lancastrian and Yorkist kings, and their transformative effect on the English polity is little more than a historiographical mirage

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