Group items tagged

Chartres Cathedral is among the best preserved of the major French cathedrals, with extensive programmes of sculpture and stained glass.  It was a major site of pilgrimage in honour of the Virgin Mary, to whom the cathedral is dedicated. This website provides access to a comprehensive collection of images and detailed descriptions of Chartres Cathedral.

"Recent work has brought together what we know of the Anglo-Saxon and medieval cathedrals beneath and around Wren's St Paul's, the City of London's most important historic building and monument. Now the little-known medieval cathedral, destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, can be revealed as of European importance. It dominated the City and should be compared with other cathedrals - Ely, Norwich and Winchester."

gothic cathedral and church construction - cathedrals in France

"One of the questions we're most frequently asked at the British Library is: why is there more than one manuscript of Magna Carta? The simple answer is that, when the Great Charter was first granted by King John in 1215, numerous copies were made so that its terms could be distributed more easily throughout the kingdom of England. Four of those 1215 manuscripts survive to the present day, one of which is owned by Lincoln Cathedral, another by Salisbury Cathedral and the other two being held at the British Library in London."

Major setbacks occurred at the end of the thirteenth century and continued into the fourteenth, when population expansion and declining crop yields coincided with a devastating and widespread plague, the Black Death (1348-1349). This had a major impact on population numbers-which dramatically declined-and on both society and economy. Immediately following an economic crisis, a period of crop failure, and an intensification of criminal activity (which may, perhaps, have been linked to fluctuations in food prices), the plague was devastating in its effects, and forms a turning point in the history of medieval England. Nor was the Black Death an isolated event; further pestilence struck in the 1360s, accentuating the problems. Read more: Medieval Britain - Documentation, Norman Period, Feudal Period, Economic Recovery, Cathedrals, Churches, and Monasteries, Impact of Protestantism - England, Castles, Century, Period, Norman, and Built - JRank Articles http://www.jrank.org/history/pages/5958/Medieval-Britain.html#ixzz1Z3mRCdHa

So much death could not help but tear economic and social structures apart. Lack of peasants and laborers sent wages soaring, and the value of land plummeted. For the first time in history the scales tipped against wealthy landlords as peasants and serfs gained more bargaining power. Without architects, masons and artisans, great cathedrals and castles remained unfinished for hundreds of years. Governments, lacking officials, floundered in their attempts to create order out of chaos.

From the 1360s, however, English architecture became simpler, moving to the more perpendicular style seen in Winchester Cathedral, which saw work on its west gate begin in 1360. The flamboyant masonry of major buildings was replaced by straight lines, partly due to the new shift towards austerity, but also because of the depleted workforce available.

The Way of St. James or St. James' Way (Galician: O Camiño de Santiago, Spanish: El Camino de Santiago, French: Chemin de St-Jacques, German: Jakobsweg) is the pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain, where tradition has it that the remains of the apostle Saint James are buried.

In 1176 a delegation from Sicily came to the English court, asking for Joan's hand in marriage on behalf of William II of Sicily. Joan's parents agreed to the proposal, and the betrothal was confirmed. On the 27th of August, Joan, together with a large group of people consisting of ladies-in-waiting, knights, clergy and various retainers, laid out to sail for Sicily. The trip began with the short stretch from Winchester to Southampton, escorted by the archbishops of Canterbury and Rouen, the bishop of Evreux and her father's brother Hamelane. Then Prince Henry, her oldest brother, accompanied her across the Channel and into France to Poitiers. There she was met by another brother, Richard, who escorted her through the Duchy of Aquitaine, across the allied County of Toulouse to Saint Gilles Port, where Bishop Richard Palmer welcomed her in the name of the King of Sicily. Twenty-five Sicilian ships awaited the young princess to sail her to her husband-to-be. The last part of the journey left Joan seasick, but she finally arrived at the end of January and married William at Palermo Cathedral on the 13th of February 1177 at the tender age of eleven while her husband was twenty-three! She was crowned, and was now queen consort.

"Medieval libraries in England were assembled in many places and for different purposes. Monastic libraries supported both theological education and the advancement of learning, and provided the seeds for later university libraries. Cathedrals and their schools likewise collected books and encouraged their reading. Royal libraries gathered both practical and artistic books, with illuminated manuscripts given and received as signs of wealth and power. However, our knowledge of these libraries can be described as limited at best. The majority of manuscripts have been lost over time, their greatest enemies being fire, war or insurrection, theft and neglect. So what can we know about the manuscripts contained in these medieval libraries? And how and where were these manuscripts produced?"

"In the summer of 1797 a group of workmen in Worcester Cathedral caused a sensation, locally if not nationally, by discovering the body of King John."

"An entry in the Inventory of the Bayeux cathedral treasury records that in 1476 the church owned the following: Item une tente tres longue et estroicte de telle a broderie d'ymages et escripteaulx, faisans representation du Conquest d'Angleterre,"

restoration of the Cathedrale of Bayeux with artisans using medieval techniques and tools

" These seven short videos explore topics around stained glass and its use in medieval churches."