The Customs of Old England

A work purporting to deal with old English customs on the broad representative lines of the present volume naturally sets out with a choice of those pertaining to the most ancie...

Not wholly aloof from the subject treated in the previous chapter is the custom that prevailed in the Middle Ages for widows to assume vows of chastity. The present topic might...

It was pointed out as one of the distinctions between vowesses and members of the third orders of the Dominican and Franciscan brotherhoods that the latter were pledged to the o...

The fact may not have escaped notice that Domina Alicia Seynt Johan de Baggenet "took the vow of widowhood in the chapel of the Lord of Amberley." Possession of a private chapel...

Mention has been made of Hugh Rhodes and his "Book of Nurture." It is pretty evident that this master of music was attached to the older form of faith, since he published in Que...

There is a palpable resemblance between the subject just quitted and that most characteristic product of the Middle Ages--the miracle play. It may be observed at the outset that...

We wound up our first part with a draft on parochial records; and we enter on our second part with a further taxation of the same fruitful and unimpeachable source. Those famili...

While money and books were the twin bases on which the fabric of the University reposed, it is plain that a great institution of the sort would involve the employment of numerou...

We have expounded with some particularity the conditions of University life; we have now to deal with University life in its more intimate relations. And first we must say somet...

Between the Universities and the Judiciary of England in ancient times there existed a close link, which is to be found in the _serviens ad legem_ or Serjeant-at-Law. He was at...

Ancient judicial theory and practice comprehended not merely trials before a regular tribunal, in which the merits of a case were duly ascertained by the joint efforts of judge,...

Many of our ancient ballads and lyrics, such as the cycle of Robin Hood and that exquisite love-poem "The Nut-Brown Maid," are based on the custom of outlawry. One of the most c...

Just as the Universities and the Judiciary were found to have a common link in the Order of the Coif, so we find that the Judiciary and the City were bound each to each by the e...

Blount's "Ancient Tenures," a meritorious seventeenth-century work which has been edited by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, contains a description of the military and civil functions perform...

Were we obliged to sum up the difference between town and country in one word, that word would be "trade." In mediæval, far more than in modern, times country places had their f...

In the course of the preceding chapter reference was made to the illiteracy of our ancestors in its bearing upon trade usages. In the present chapter we propose to supplement th...

Urban customs appear of more interest and importance than rural usages by reason of the greater complexity of relations implied by the interdependence of members of a populous c...

The state of things exhibited in the previous chapter is essentially transitional. What we have there seen is the town emerging out of the country, or, to put it another way, th...

At the conclusion of the previous section allusion was made to retinues as constituting a danger to the industrious members of the body politic. In this, our final section, we t...