Books with title Medieval People

In this classic of social history, noted medieval scholar Eileen Power recreates the lives of six ordinary people who lived during the Middle Ages. Drawing upon account books, diaries, letters, records, wills, and other authentic historical documents, she brings to vivid life Bodo, a Frankish peasant in the time of Charlemagne; Marco Polo, the well-known Venetian traveler of the 13th century; Madame Eglentyne, Chaucer's prioress in real life; a Parisian housewife of the 14th century; Thomas Betson, a 15th-century English merchant; and Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall, an Essex clothier in the days of Henry VII. Largely untouched by fame (with the exception of Marco Polo), the lives and activities of these common people offer a unique glimpse of various aspects of the medieval world — peasant life, monastic life, the wool trade, Venetian trade with the East, domestic life in a middle class home, and more. Enlivened with charming illustrations and touches of humor, this scholarly, yet highly readable work "possesses a color, a dramatic touch that humanizes the dry bones of charters and documents." — New York Tribune. Students, teachers of history, and anyone interested in medieval life will be delighted with this spirited account that is sure to capture the imaginations of general readers as well.

In this classic of social history, noted medieval scholar Eileen Power recreates the lives of six ordinary people who lived during the Middle Ages. Drawing upon account books, diaries, letters, records, wills, and other authentic historical documents, she brings to vivid life Bodo, a Frankish peasant in the time of Charlemagne; Marco Polo, the well-known Venetian traveler of the 13th century; Madame Eglentyne, Chaucer's prioress in real life; a Parisian housewife of the 14th century; Thomas Betson, a 15th-century English merchant; and Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall, an Essex clothier in the days of Henry VII. Largely untouched by fame (with the exception of Marco Polo), the lives and activities of these common people offer a unique glimpse of various aspects of the medieval world — peasant life, monastic life, the wool trade.

In this classic of social history, noted medieval scholar Eileen Power recreates the lives of six ordinary people who lived during the Middle Ages. Drawing upon account books, diaries, letters, records, wills, and other authentic historical documents, she brings to vivid life Bodo, a Frankish peasant in the time of Charlemagne; Marco Polo, the well-known Venetian traveler of the 13th century; Madame Eglentyne, Chaucer's prioress in real life; a Parisian housewife of the 14th century; Thomas Betson, a 15th-century English merchant; and Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall, an Essex clothier in the days of Henry VII. Largely untouched by fame (with the exception of Marco Polo), the lives and activities of these common people offer a unique glimpse of various aspects of the medieval world — peasant life, monastic life, the wool trade.

In this classic of social history, the author describes the lives of five lesser-known men and women of the Middle Ages, as well as one famous one. She draws on account books, records, letters, diaries, and wills to make the life of those times as concrete and comprehensible as our own. There are full-length portraits of Bodo, a Frankish peasant in the time of Charlemagne; Marco Polo, the celebrated Venetian traveler-only one of many-of the thirteenth century; Madame Eglentyne, the prioress of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, whose life can be copiously filled out from the records of the nunneries of fourteenth-century England; the young wife of a fourteenth-century Parisian bourgeois; and two English merchants of the fifteenth century, Thomas Betson of the wool trade and Thomas Paycocke, an Essex clothier. This is an informative yet entertaining look at an era through the eyes of people that lived it.

Social history sometimes suffers from the reproach that it is vague and general, unable to compete with the attractions of political history either for the student or for the general reader, because of its lack of outstanding personalities. In point of fact there is often as much material for reconstructing the life of some quite ordinary person as there is for writing a history of Robert of Normandy or of Philippa of Hainault; and the lives of ordinary people so reconstructed are, if less spectacular, certainly not less interesting. I believe that social history lends itself particularly to what may be called a personal treatment, and that the past may be made to live again for the general reader more effectively by personifying it than by presenting it in the form of learned treatises on the development of the manor or on medieval trade, essential as these are to the specialist. For history, after all, is valuable only in so far as it lives, and Maeterlinck's cry, 'There are no dead', should always be the historian's motto. It is the idea that history is about dead people, or, worse still, about movements and conditions which seem but vaguely related to the labours and passions of flesh and blood, which has driven history from bookshelves where the historical novel still finds a welcome place. In the following series of sketches I have tried to illustrate at the same time various aspects of social life in the Middle Ages and various classes of historical material. Thus Bodo illustrates peasant life, and an early phase of a typical medieval estate; Marco Polo, Venetian trade with the East; Madame Eglentyne, monastic life; the Ménagier's wife, domestic life in a middle-class home, and medieval ideas about women; Thomas Betson, the wool trade, and the activities of the great English trading company of Merchants of the Staple; and Thomas Paycocke, the cloth industry in East Anglia. They are all quite ordinary people and unknown to fame, with the exception of Marco Polo. The types of historical evidence illustrated are the estate book of a manorial lord, the chronicle and traveller's tale, the bishop's register, the didactic treatise in household management, the collection of family letters, and houses, brasses, and wills.