Books by Christian Liddy
The Urban Family: marriage, kinship and lineage in the Middle Ages, 2021
La presente monografía aporta una nueva perspectiva a los estudios sobre las familias de las ciud... more La presente monografía aporta una nueva perspectiva a los estudios sobre las familias de las ciudades europeas medievales. Se ha afirmado que las familias eran instituciones básicas de producción y reproducción de las sociedades medievales; sin embargo, hoy día, sabemos que esto no fue así, sino que la mayor parte de las familias se dividieron o simplemente desaparecieron a lo largo de la Edad Media. Solo una minoría se reprodujo con mayor o menor éxito, aquellas que se sustentaban en grupos de parentesco más amplios.
Esta monografía reúne estudios de caso del norte y el de Europa con el objetivo de buscar una explicación transnacional a las diferencias regionales entre las familias urbanas del norte y el sur de Europa en la Baja Edad Media.
Papers by Christian Liddy
The English Historical Review, 2003
This article examines the causes of the serious disturbances in the city of York, which came to t... more This article examines the causes of the serious disturbances in the city of York, which came to the attention of the Crown during a meeting of Parliament at Northampton in the autumn of 1380. On 26 November 1380, the Crown was told, the commons of York rose up and forced the mayor, John de Gisburn, to flee the city, before besieging the guildhall and compelling another member of the civic elite, Simon de Quixley, to be their mayor. Further unrest followed, particularly around the time of the Peasants' Revolt. The disorder in York has proved difficult to interpret because historians have approached it primarily in terms of local issues and local factions. In fact, the conflict in York in 1380-1 can be best understood in the context of the city's financial and political relations with the Crown in the period after the renewal of the Hundred Years War in 1369. Approaching the city's internal politics from this national perspective suggests that the disturbances in York of 1380-1 had much more in common with the uprisings which took place in other parts of England at this time.
Historians regard the growth, consolidation and entrenchment of urban oligarchy as the defining f... more Historians regard the growth, consolidation and entrenchment of urban oligarchy as the defining feature of the political history of towns in late medieval England. The issue of oligarchy has dominated historical inquiry to such an extent that, although there has been debate about the appropriateness of the term and differences of opinion about the relative importance of its ideological and material foundations, there is agreement about the ultimate triumph of a form of government in which pow..
Social History, Oct 2, 2021
ABSTRACT The prosaic records of town council meetings are an essential, if problematic, source fo... more ABSTRACT The prosaic records of town council meetings are an essential, if problematic, source for historians of late medieval European towns. They are a window on the concerns, fears and ambitions of urban authorities, yet they have proved especially intractable to historians interested in the social history of urban politics. They seem to present a monotonously harmonious picture of civic unity, social solidarity and political unanimity. Looking outside the town hall for evidence of the social divisions and political discord that characterized town life, urban historians have uncovered an unstable world of ‘contentious politics’, in which revolt was only one possible means of dissent. This article argues that historians should return to the town hall and to the council chamber, to reassess the value of town council minutes. Placing the rich, and still relatively little-used, civic archive of the English city of Norwich within a wider European context, it focuses on the meaning and significance of the records of non-attendance at council meetings. It locates official anxieties about non-attendance not within a narrowly legal or institutional framework, but within a contemporary culture of urban citizenship, which was performative and disputatious. The article identifies a form of ‘consensus politics’ that involved – indeed, promoted – conflict.
Routledge eBooks, Nov 25, 2016
The sheriffs, wrote John Carpenter in his 1419 book of the customs of London, 'are called "the ey... more The sheriffs, wrote John Carpenter in his 1419 book of the customs of London, 'are called "the eyes of the mayor"'. They are 'the eyes of the mayor, watchful and supportive of the responsibilities which the said mayor, as one person, is not able to bear on his own' (Sunt quoque Vicecomites Majoris oculi, conspicientes et supportantes partem sollicitudinis quae dicti Majoris personae singularitas portare non sufficit). 2 At first glance, Carpenter's metaphor does not seem at all surprising: the inhabitants of late medieval English towns were accustomed to think of their communities as urban bodies. The organological metaphor was so familiar that it could serve multiple and, sometimes, conflicting functions. It informed contemporary attitudes towards public health and animated far-reaching social, moral, and environmental policies. 3 Politically, organic imagery could appeal for a state of reciprocity between the limbs of the urban body politic. More contentiously, it could demand the subordination of the various members of the body to the chief magistrate, the 'head'. Carpenter's appropriation of the metaphor was unusual because of his interest not only in the 'head', but also in the 'eyes'. If the 'head' represented intellect and reason, and was the source of wisdom, the 'eyes' were the senses. The burden of office in London was too great for any one man, Carpenter suggested. The mayor could not do everything; he needed help to discharge his official duties. The sheriffs were there to share the heavy weight of public responsibility. They were the mayor's 'eyes'; they could see what he could not. 2 Carpenter was not the first writer to approach the practice of government as a sensory experience. In Book 5 of the Policraticus, John of Salisbury deployed his classical learning to imagine the twelfth-century kingdom of England as a human body, in which the king was the head, and the judges and sheriffs-'provincial governors' in the language of the Roman Empirewere the eyes, the ears, and the tongue. These three organs endowed the prince's judicial officers with the faculties of sight, hearing, and taste. Exercised by others on his behalf, these senses joined body and mind, increased the prince's cognitive powers, and enabled him to administer justice through greater knowledge and understanding. 4 Carpenter's description of the London sheriffs differs in three respects. First, where Salisbury is concerned with princely virtue and with the positive role of the prince, Carpenter's tone is less confident and more apprehensive. Secondly, where Salisbury's framework is multi-sensory, Carpenter's attention is exclusively to the eyes. And thirdly, Carpenter's conception of the sheriffs' vision is much more literal. The nineteenth-century editor of the London custumal translated the participle conspicientes as 'ever on the watch'. 5 Against whom were the sheriffs to be vigilant? Who were they to watch? Which areas of the city were they to watch? The short passage from Carpenter's Liber albus helpfully introduces the theme of this essay: the relationship between surveillance and urban disorder. Carpenter's choice of the noun sollicitudo, which could be translated not only as 'duty', but also as 'anxiety', conveyed the general uneasiness that surrounded the mayoral office in early fifteenth-century London. The memory of the 1380sof confrontations on the streets of the capital between the supporters of rival claimants to the London mayoralty, John of Northampton and Nicholas Brembrehad not dimmed by the late 1410s, when Carpenter completed his book. 6 But in prioritizing the eyes over the ears, Carpenter's
Studies in European urban history, 2017
The English Historical Review, 2013
The city of York, England’s self-titled ‘second city’ in the late middle ages, was the site of pe... more The city of York, England’s self-titled ‘second city’ in the late middle ages, was the site of persistent political conflict from the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The Flemish city of Bruges experienced a series of revolts in the same period. This article compares the patterns of popular politics in the two cities. Although dissimilar in governmental context, population size and commercial significance, their constitutional arrangements were much more comparable. The urban commons, organised and mobilised by the crafts, were at the centre of the major disturbances in each city. They had a distinctive reading of the urban constitution, which was nurtured in a guild environment among craftsmen and citizens. In York and Bruges, the crafts engaged in similar forms of collective action (petitioning, collective assembly and the occupation of public space), and revolt was the consequence of a pattern of corporate politics. The shared forms, goals and mentalities of popular protest...
Historical Research, 2001
The discovery among the class of ancient petitions in the Public Record Office of two documents c... more The discovery among the class of ancient petitions in the Public Record Office of two documents containing lists of members of two parliamentary committees throws new light on the role of the urban element in the medieval English parliament, about which the parliament rolls say very little. This article places the two lists, undated but almost certainly of 1381, in the immediate context of the response of the political community to the Peasants' Revolt, and explores the idea of an estate of merchants meeting in parliament in the second half of the fourteenth century.
Section: Main session Period: Medieval/Early modern Until the second half of the twentieth centur... more Section: Main session Period: Medieval/Early modern Until the second half of the twentieth century, historians believed that the great majority of the people in late medieval and early modern towns lacked not only political participation, but also political consciousness. Urban uprisings were seen as brutal actions against legitimate power holders, such as state officers, clerics, and urban elites. However, in more recent decades, historical research has re-evaluated popular protest and it has gained new insights in the politics of late medieval and early modern citizens. Influenced by contemporary psychological, anthropological and sociological research on human behaviour, and a more critical scrutiny of sources, historians now see urban revolts no longer as irrational behaviour caused by uncontrollable feelings or by untamed reactions to stimuli. Investigating crowds in eighteenth-century and modern history, George Rudé, Eric Hobsbawn and others have discovered a self-confident po...
The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, ... more The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.
Urban History, 2012
The most striking feature of this year's publications is the large number of articles about t... more The most striking feature of this year's publications is the large number of articles about the economic, financial and business history of medieval towns. ‘What was the Hanse?’ (Was war die Hanse?) sounds like the sort of question that might be asked in an undergraduate examination, designed to elicit a wide range of responses, from the purely descriptive to the more analytical. The question has, in fact, generated a substantial, if rather problematic, historiography, as two studies of the Hanse make clear. The tendency to define the Hanse as a ‘state’ or to see it as endowed with ‘state-like’ qualities does not do justice to the complexity of a more loosely framed and highly adaptable commercial and urban network.
Oxford Scholarship Online
The political narrative of late medieval English towns is often reduced to the story of the gradu... more The political narrative of late medieval English towns is often reduced to the story of the gradual intensification of oligarchy, in which power was exercised and projected by an ever smaller ruling group over an increasingly subservient urban population. This book takes its inspiration not from English historiography, but from a more dynamic continental scholarship on towns in the southern Low Countries, Germany, and France. Its premise is that scholarly debate about urban oligarchy has obscured contemporary debate about urban citizenship. It identifies from the records of English towns a tradition of urban citizenship, which did not draw upon the intellectual legacy of classical models of the ‘citizen’. This was a vernacular citizenship, which was not peculiar to England, but which was present elsewhere in late medieval Europe. It was a citizenship that was defined and created through action. There were multiple, and divergent, ideas about citizenship, which encouraged townspeople...
The Historical Journal, 2016
Few would argue against the intimate relationship between citizenship and speech in early modern ... more Few would argue against the intimate relationship between citizenship and speech in early modern England. Historians of political thought and literary scholars have explored the cultural and political impact of the English Renaissance, which turned subjects into citizens and which produced a learned, humanist, and oratorical model of citizenship, centred upon the virtues of the ‘articulate citizen’. But the English Renaissance did not give birth to citizenship. There was an older, vernacular, urban-based concept of citizenship, which was grounded in social practice rather than in intellectual tradition. This citizenship was shaped by multiple, competing, and conflicting impulses: inclusive, yet exclusive; participatory, yet discriminatory; a mixture of rights and duties. Speech both exposed and amplified these different senses of citizenship: who could speak and act against authority, and were there limits on what citizens could say and do? The tensions between urban citizenship and...
... 11 In these straightened circumstances, there can be little doubt that the need for 'goo... more ... 11 In these straightened circumstances, there can be little doubt that the need for 'good ... 43 DH Sacks, The widening gate: Bristol and the Atlantic economy, 1450-1700, Berkeley 1991, 1 ... of the central government.44 Nevertheless, according to Sacks, it was in the late fifteenth and ...
Liddy C D Britnell R H North East England in the Later Middle Ages Woodbridge England Boydell Brewer Pp 75 95 Regions and Regionalism in History, 2005
English Historical Review Vol 118 Pp 1 32 Peer Reviewed Journal, Feb 1, 2003
Archaeological Journal, 2010
This paper reconstructs and reinterprets a sequence of monuments which was installed in the paris... more This paper reconstructs and reinterprets a sequence of monuments which was installed in the parish church at Chester-le-Street in County Durham in the 1590s by John Lord Lumley, who is probably best known today for his status as one of the most important collectors of books and paintings in the reign of Elizabeth I. The monuments consisted of retrospective effigies of his ancestors in the direct male line and traced the family's roots to the pre-Conquest period. The paper explores the purpose of the church monuments and argues that they should not be understood in terms of changing ideas about memory and commemoration or about the nature and basis of nobility in the second half of the sixteenth century. Rather, they were designed to serve specific functions and addressed pragmatic and perennial aristocratic anxieties about power, lordship and the succession, which remained untouched by the Reformation.
Past & Present, 2014
The process of enclosure, in which hedges, ditches and gates were erected to extinguish or inhibi... more The process of enclosure, in which hedges, ditches and gates were erected to extinguish or inhibit common rights to land, is usually associated with agrarian society. The enclosure riot, in which hedges were uprooted, ditches levelled and gates destroyed, has been regarded therefore largely as a rural phenomenon. 2 It has generated considerable interest from those working at the interstice between social and political history, in the increasingly productive field of popular politics in early modern England. The enclosure riot has been singled out as 'the pre-eminent form of social protest' from the 1530s to the 1640s. 3 A generation or so earlier, the enclosure riot left its mark upon the urban landscape. There were five major enclosure riots in York:
Urban History, 2002
In the late medieval period several English cities claimed the distinction of being a royal chamb... more In the late medieval period several English cities claimed the distinction of being a royal chamber: London and York referred to themselves as the…
Uploads
Books by Christian Liddy
Esta monografía reúne estudios de caso del norte y el de Europa con el objetivo de buscar una explicación transnacional a las diferencias regionales entre las familias urbanas del norte y el sur de Europa en la Baja Edad Media.
Papers by Christian Liddy
Esta monografía reúne estudios de caso del norte y el de Europa con el objetivo de buscar una explicación transnacional a las diferencias regionales entre las familias urbanas del norte y el sur de Europa en la Baja Edad Media.