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Course | History of the World to 1500 CE This course presents and at the same time critiques a narrative world history from prehistoric times to 1500. The purpose of the course is to convey an understanding of how this rapidly growing field of history is being approached at three different levels: the narrative textbook level, the theoretical-conceptual level, and through discussion sections, the research level.

The fight for Senlac Ridge on October 14th 1066 is probably the only battle date that most Englishmen can be expected to remember. Nearly a thousand years after the event, the memory of the resounding defeat of the last native Saxon King and his army rings down the centuries. But why did the battle take place? Why did William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, think that he had a claim to the English throne in the first place. Or was it just an adventure; an enormous gamble that paid off and changed the course of world history in the course of an autumn day?

This site provides materials for Harvard University's Chaucer classes in the Core Program, the English Department, and the Division of Continuing Education. (Others of course are welcome to use it.) It provides a wide range of glossed Middle English texts and translations of analogues relevant to Chaucer's works, as well as selections from relevant works by earlier and later writers, critical articles from a variety of perspectives, graphics, and general information on life in the Middle Ages. At the moment the site concentrates on the Canterbury Tales, but the longer-term goal is to create a more general Chaucer page.

Welcome to Old English Literature: A Hypertext Coursepack. This site is designed to help you study several of the primary texts that have been included in many Old English Courses. A range of resources are available including primary texts with a running glossary and notes, reading lists, translations, contextual information and sources of the poem. There is also a facility to allow you to add comments or additional notes to each of the texts via an online discussion forum. Just select the text you are interested in on the right hand side.

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Related resources for Medieval Economic course from MIT

Dr David Starkey's complete history of the British Monarchy, which reveals the epic and bloody stories of our Kings and Queens and charts the course of the oldest surviving political institution in Europe

Dr David Starkey's complete history of the British Monarchy, which reveals the epic and bloody stories of our Kings and Queens and charts the course of the oldest surviving political institution in Europe

Understand Islam

Welcome to The History Guide's Lectures on Ancient and Medieval European History. These lectures were written over the past ten years and served as the basis for my western civilization and upper level European history courses at Florida Atlantic University (Davie, FL), Broward Community College (Coconut Creek, FL), Vance-Granville Community College (Henderson, NC), Meredith College (Raleigh, NC) and Wake Technical Community College (Raleigh, NC)

This course presents Jack E. Maxfield's "A Comprehensive Outline of World History" with an alternative organization of material by region and across eras within a region.

Course description for THE MILITARY ORDERS, 1100-1320, - page includes links to resources,

The many thousands of surviving medieval manorial accounts (sometimes known as compotus rolls and in their enrolled form as Pipe Rolls) contain all the information necessary for the precise calculation of the yields of specified crops, on named demesne farms, in dated years. Each account enumerates the cash and stock received and expended on a single demesne farm managed by or on behalf of a manorial lord over the course of an agricultural year, usually from Michaelmas (29 September) to Michaelmas. Typically, each account records the amount of grain (both threshed and as yet un-threshed) received from the previous year's harvest and the quantity of seed sown in preparation for the next harvest (see 'Woodhay 1254-5 grange account'). The information is hand-written on parchment in abbreviated Latin using Roman numerals and the form of the entries is usually formulaic so that with a little practice they are not difficult to interpret. The following extract recording the amounts of barley (Ordeum) received and expended in 1378-9 on the Battle Abbey manor of Alciston in East Sussex (East Sussex Record Office, SAS/G44/34) is an example of one of the more enigmatic types of entry that can be encountered.

In addition to the siegecraft for assault and battery there were weapons used in artillery. These were, of course, available to defenders and besiegers alike. The mangonel was really a corrupted form of the onager, the simplest of Roman siege machines. 

"Despite the quality of the primary sources, almost everything about Hastings is up for debate: the course of the action, the numbers on each side and, famously, whether or not Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye. As one of the foremost experts of the previous century, R. Allen Brown, once ruefully observed, sometimes the only certainty about Hastings seems to be that the Normans won."

The Black Death  - background, description

Art Through Time: A Global View examines themes connecting works of art created around the world in different eras. The thirteen-part series explores diverse cultural perspectives on shared human experiences.

Art has been a medium through which people have not only documented, but also shaped history-both past and future. Periodically, individuals, groups, and societies have also drawn on or appropriated artistic forms of the past to make statements in and about the present. Art can commemorate existence, achievements, and failures, and it can be used to record and create communal as well as personal memories.

TMS - God Wills It, Understanding the Crusades - Thomas F. Madden Download the lecture