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The Black Death reaches England. The summer of 1348 was abnormally wet. Grain lay rotting in the fields due to the nearly constant rains. With the harvest so adversely affected it seemed certain that there would be food shortages. But a far worse enemy was set to appear. It isn't clear exactly when or where the Black Death reached England. Some reports at the time pointed to Bristol, others to Dorset. The disease may have appeared as early as late June or as late as August 4. We do know that in mid-summer the Channel Islands were reeling under an outbreak of the plague. From this simple beginning the disease spread throughout England with dizzying speed and fatal consequences.

Leges Henrici Primi:all facts at a glanceThe Leges Henrici Primi or Laws of Henry I is a legal treatise, written in about 1115, that records the legal customs of medieval England in the reign of King Henry I of England. The Leges Henrici Primi or Laws of Henry I is a legal treatise, written in about 1115, that records the legal customs of medieval England. It was written during the reign of King Henry I of England, and was part of a ... (Source: Wikipedia: Leges Henrici Primi)

Helen Castor and The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth. This segment of the BBC 4's Women's Hour radio program was broadcast on 4 October 2010. In Chapter 4 of the program, Jane Garvey interviews Dr. Helen Castor, Fellow in History at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, about her new book, She-Wolves. From the synopsis by the publisher, Faber 6 Faber: "In 1553, England was about to experience the 'monstrous regiment' - the unnatural rule - of a woman. But female rule in England also had a past. Four hundred years before Edward's death, Matilda, daughter of Henry I and granddaughter of William the Conquerer, came tantalisingly close to securing her hold on the power of the crown. And between the 12th and the 15th centuries three more exceptional women - Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, and Margaret of Anjou - discovered, as queens consort and dowager, how much was possible if the presumptions of male rule were not confronted so explicitly."

"Abstract: The Bayeux Tapestry is a complex visual history of the Norman Conquest of England. Its creation and the story it weaves were defined by its dichotomous authorship, its physical form as textile art and its analogous narrative imagery. An examination of each these aspects of the Tapestry allows us to move closer to identifying the purpose of the unknown author in creating a textile narrative of the Norman Conquest of England. It is argued that the Tapestry was created on the commission of Odo of Bayeux, however authorship resided with his designer and artisans, who wove a story that befitted their patron. In form and narrative, the Tapestry served the purpose of advancing the position Odo of Bayeux, and the Norman claims to England. Though the narrative is not without ambiguity, the message of the moral and political victory of the Norman elite over a perjurious usurper is a constant refrain throughout the Tapestry."

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

The Domesday Book is the result of a survey carried out in England and parts of Wales in 1086. The book is one of the first and therefore oldest public records in England and therefore serves as a great resource for geographers, genealogists and historians. The Open Domesday Book is the first free online copy of the Domesday Book. It also includes a great Google Maps interface that allows users to search for locations and quickly find references in the Domesday Book to the location and places nearby. If you search for a location you can view on a Google Map the places mentioned in the Book in that area. If you click through on any of the referenced locations you can view an image of the original text and a breakdown of the data recorded in the Domesday Book.

"Story of medieval England 15/36 The Anarchy of Stephen's Reign" VIDEO

"Story of medieval England 19/36 Richard the Lionheart and the Third Crusade" VIDEO

"Story of medieval England 16/36 Henry II-Law and Order" Video

"Story of medieval England 20/36 King John and the Magna Carta" VIDEO

" We created this short quiz about Kings of Medieval England, focusing on those between 1066 and 1500. We hope you will try it out and if you like it, let us know if you have some suggestions for future quizzes."

The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE) is a database which aims to cover all of the recorded inhabitants of England from the late sixth to the end of the eleventh century. It is based on a systematic examination of the available written sources for the period, including chronicles, saints' Lives, charters, libri vitae, inscriptions, and coins.

This interest stands in contrast, as Hatcher points out, to the view of the Black Death taken by historians at mid-century and it may be that the social and economic history of late medieval English society has emerged from the shadow of historians such as Postan and Levett, where the Black death was seen as a catalyst, not a prime mover. Colin Platt's King Death. The Black Death and its aftermath in latemedieval England is a work of synthesis which continues this trend. Written in a fairly chatty style (phrases such as 'Mickey Mouse numbers' and 'rich old ladies' abound) with a liberal sprinkling of modern marketing-speak ('shopping blight', 'customer base' and 'market spread', for example), it is a personal tour through a great deal of the recent secondary literature, largely generated by historians of town and countryside; the book also offers a brief survey of postplague art and architecture.

The Harrying (or Harrowing) of the North was a series of campaigns waged by William the Conqueror[1] in the winter of 1069-1070 to subjugate Northern England, and is part of the Norman conquest of England. It effectively ended the quasi-independence of the region through large-scale destruction that resulted in the relative "pacification" of the local population and the replacement of local Anglo-Danish lords with Normans. The death toll is believed to be over 100,000, with substantial social, cultural, and economic damage.[2][3] Because of the scorched earth policy, much of the land was laid waste and depopulated, a fact to which Domesday Book, written almost two decades later, readily attests.[4]

"The story of the Norman Conquest was told by more than a few medieval chroniclers, including William of Jumièges, William of Poitiers, Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester. For a more visual account, one can turn to the Bayeux Tapestry to see how the events of 1066 were depicted. Historians trying to reconstruct the events of the invasion of England and the Battle of Hastings generally make use of these sources. However, there are other lesser-known accounts of the Norman Conquest. Here we present two of these works, both written over a hundred years after the Battle of Hastings."

historical biography England in the Viking Age The first full biography of Queen Emma In 1002, a beautiful eighteen-year-old named Emma, the half-Danish sister of the Duke of Normandy and the descendant of the Vikings, sailed to England to be the queen of Ethelred the Unready, who needed a Norman alliance against Viking raiders. The political and marital career on which Emma embarked was to be unique for an English queen. Before it was over she would have married two kings, Ethelred and the Danish Canute, and would have given birth to two more, Edward the Confessor and Hardecanute.

Medieval England experienced few revolts but the most serious was the Peasants' Revolt which took place in June 1381. A violent system of punishments for offenders was usually enough to put off peasants from causing trouble. Most areas in England also had castles in which soldiers were garrisoned, and these were usually enough to guarantee reasonable behaviour among medieval peasants. An army of peasants from Kent and Essex marched on London. They did something no-one had done before or since - they captured the Tower of London. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the King's Treasurer were killed. The king, Richard II, was only 14 at the time but despite his youth, he agreed to meet the peasants at a place called Mile End. What were the peasants angry about and why had they come to London ?

The Conqueror and His Sons For the next four lectures, I will diverge from my usual chronological plan. I will be talking about the policies of William and the two sons who followed him as king of England in a topical manner. The first of these lectures concerns the relations that obtained between England and Normandy under these Norman kings.

"Introduction: A visitor to the Empress Matilda's tomb at Rouen might be mistaken in believing that its occupant had never sought the English throne in her own right. Yet in the long struggle which engulfed the kingdom after her father's death in 1135 this is exactly what she did. Matilda may indeed have been the greatest English heiress of the twelfth century to fail to secure her inheritance. Charles Beem remarks that Matilda's epitaph 'described the summit of earthly achievement to which a twelfth-century aristocratic woman could aspire, according to the dictate of a male-dominated feudal society'. Matilda's rule lasted less than seven months before she was unceremoniously driven out of London in the spring of 1141. Even so, her lordship bore many of the typical characteristics of royal administration, and with King Stephen imprisoned by her supporters Matilda for a time was recognised as the sole source of royal authority in the kingdom."

THE TREASURY The Winchester Pipe Rolls, the annual accounts of the bishop's extensive estates, and the bishop's money were once stored at the palace gatehouse. The bishops derived their wealth from vast landholdings, one of the richest estates of medieval England. The yearly income and expenditure on the estates was recorded in great detail in the Pipe Rolls, an astonishing surviving series of documents covering the years from 1208-9 until 1710-11.