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Summary

On 2 April 1593, a month into his frustrating stint as Lieutenant of the North, George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal, signed the foundation charter of what became Marischal College. A little over a year later (20 September 1594) this document, now ratified, was handed to the first principal, Robert Howie, completing the process. Marischal College is the best known of the earl's achievements, and the most visible, its grand Gothic Revival building being the centrepiece of modern Aberdeen. As such, the creation of the college has been relatively well discussed compared to the rest of Marischal's life. Yet the existing interpretations of the college largely fail to understand Marischal's own motivations and especially his motivations as a nobleman. It is within this context, of Scottish lordship and patronage, that the foundation and subsequent history of Marischal College makes the most sense. Marischal College is thus an excellent and well-documented case study of how the Earl Marischal approached matters of lordship.

That said, the work that has been done on the creation of Marischal College is very important. The college's creation was first understood as a reaction to Aberdeen's other university, King's College in Old Aberdeen. The idea that Marischal College was somehow a Protestant tank on the lawn of Catholic King's has been thoroughly debunked – King's was Protestant by the time Marischal College came into being. However, a refinement of this initial idea is that Marischal College was a result of the failure of King's to modernise. First set forward by Robert Sangster Rait in 1895, this interpretation sees the college as a direct response to the failure of King's College to adopt its nova fundatio ‘new foundation’, a series of teaching and administrative reforms inspired by Andrew Melville's successful re-establishment of Glasgow in 1577. This would have rejected Bishop Elphinstone's original ambitious foundation of 1495 and turned King's into a liberal arts college on the Genevan model. The Earl Marischal had been involved with these failed reforms and is therefore seen as seeking to address this failure through founding a new institution.

Others have turned away from this idea and sought to see the founding of Marischal College as the result of the earl's other preoccupations.

Summary

With a few exceptions, those listed in this chapter were either members of the Regent's family or well-born dependents such as wards and were of high rank by birth or marriage. Due to the relatively small number of women in the Accounts, the distinction between women and girls “of the court” and others is fairly easy to make.

Unfortunately, the stories of the women and girls below are told largely with reference to the men to whom they were daughters or wives. The Regent was the catalyst for all expenditures via the Accounts, so each recipient's relationship to and with him is important to provide context for the clothing they were granted. In addition, the published peerages that are the best source of biographical information for most people in the Accounts were written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and tended to consider all women in view of their relationships to men.

In a few cases, the Accounts shed additional light, either on those relationships or on other aspects of the lives or personalities of the women and girls who appear in them. In particular, it is possible to discern patterns in the types and quantities of clothing given to certain classes of women. Women and girls “of the court” tended to wear good-quality wool gowns, often trimmed in velvet, with wool or silk kirtles. Some had silk gowns trimmed with strips of silk fabric or passementerie and, for special occasions, long trains. Most of their clothing was black or tawny or gray, but many had a few accents or even whole garments of white, purple, red, yellow, blue, or, in one case, orange. They wore hoods—usually of black velvet—or hats, and had other accessories ranging from sleeves to necklaces to knives. For keeping warm, there were cloaks—usually of wool trimmed in velvet—and petticoats of red wool which were sometimes trimmed in or lined with fur. For riding, there were cloaks and safeguards.

The only other women and girls who dressed in a similar fashion were in service as maidens of the chamber or ladies-in-waiting to the women of rank. They were either wellborn themselves or devoted in part to keeping up the appearances of their mistresses.

Summary

Herbert of Bosham often complained that he was unappreciated. But how can one properly appreciate someone who advised Thomas Becket and rebuked Henry II to his face, who wrote a Life of Becket that is unlike any contemporary work of hagiography or history, whose theological expertise and ambition led him to produce one of the most visually arresting illuminated Bible books of his age and who also happened to be one of the most skilled Christian Hebraists of the Middle Ages?

Not that Herbert made it easy on himself. His stance on church–crown relations was sometimes so intemperate that Thomas Becket had to rein him in. When the church sought reconciliation with Henry II after Becket's murder, Herbert continued to rail against both king and ecclesiastics. While others who knew Thomas much less well were writing Lives of the saint amid the glow of martyrdom, Herbert was writing a work in honour of Peter Lombard just at the time that Peter's work was being condemned as heretical. When Herbert finally wrote a Life of St Thomas, a decade and a half later, he ignored the miracles that still drew crowds to Thomas's tomb at Canterbury, and focused on the cause for which he had died, thus reopening wounds that others had chosen to soothe. Though a learned and inventive theologian, Herbert never wrote a full-length work of theology. Instead he buried his proofs of the existence of God and his disquisitions on mystic theology in the middle of the Liber Melorum, a celebration of the concordances between Christ and St Thomas that has remained largely unread to this day. Herbert's letter collection, apparently put together by his own hand, does not include any correspondence between the mid-1170s and the late 1180s, a period of his life about which we have hardly any information from any source. And we would not have known that Herbert apparently had a better grasp of Hebrew than any known western Christian contemporary, were it not for the discovery in the middle of the twentieth century of a work written in obscure exile at the end of his life.

Herbert presents other problems for those who seek to approach his work today. The scholarly, linguistic and cultural challenges that face anyone who seeks to grapple with the world of a twelfth-century intellectual are compounded by the erudition, originality and range that he displays.

Summary

In the early seventeenth century in Huy (present-day Belgium), one or more anonymous Carmelite nuns embarked upon a piece of theatrical translation. Using a medieval vernacular playbook which had been copied in Walloon French within their own convent around a hundred years before, in the second half of the fifteenth century, they set about adapting two of the short plays they found in it (which together cover the narrative of the Nativity, Epiphany, Rage of Herod, and Purification of the Virgin) into a single, new French-language play. They, or two of their sisters collaborated to copy this play into a separate manuscript. The Huy convent's medieval playbook is now owned by the Musée Condé at Chantilly (Chantilly, Condé MS 617); however, the early-seventeenth-century play has remained in the convent's archive, alongside their surviving administrative and financial documentation (Liège, Archives d'Etat, Fonds Dames Blanches de Huy [hereafter ‘Fonds DBH’], doc. 386bis). 386bis's play (hereafter the Huy Nativity) translates, reworks, and expands the material comprising the first play in Chantilly 617 and the first part of that manuscript's second play. It thus presents the Nativity, Epiphany, and part of Herod's Rage, omitting the Purification and other non-Biblical episodes found in Chantilly 617's Play Two. (We provide a detailed synopsis of the Huy Nativity as an appendix.) However, the script breaks off unfinished, suggesting that it might well have gone on to include – in another copy, or in performance – further material from Chantilly 617's second play, and/or from elsewhere.

Minor alterations include changes of spelling or grammatical construction, that reflect changes in linguistic and orthographic practice (e.g. les anges du ciel for les angle de ciel); more major revisions include for example, the addition of entirely new characters. Sometimes, however, the script is much more radically revised at a structural level, including, for example, the addition of entirely new characters. One such character is the Sibyl, who does not appear at all in the medieval play, but who is sent for by Herod in the Huy Nativity to confirm his pre-eminence. In an episode which was certainly known as far back as the Middle Ages (it appears in the Golden Legend) the Sibyl experiences a vision of a virgin holding an infant in her arms. In the play, this vision enables her to confirm the birth of Jesus and deny that Herod is all-powerful.

Summary

But the dignyte of a prince requirethe vche office must haue oon

To be rewlere in his rome a seruand hym waytynge on.

Moore-ower hit requirethe euerich of them in office to haue perfite science,

For dowt and drede doynge his souereyn displicence,

Hym to attende, and his gestis to plese in place where they ar presence,

That his souereyn through his seruice may make grete congaudence.

The households – both the physical space and the personnel – of Tudor England and Wales were meant to uphold and maintain the ‘dignyte of a prince’, as John Russell, the mid-fifteenth-century Usher of the Chamber and Marshal of the Hall for Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, put it. For John Russell, late medieval households, particularly the servants, should perpetuate and magnify the noble status of the lord through the physical and visual reinforcement of the social hierarchy. Russell comments on the physical stress of serving in a great household: a servant should be with the lord, ‘waytynge on [him]’, and the spatial closeness of the servant and their lord and lady is reflected in the layout of many residences. The personnel and the arrangement of space within the castle were constantly adapting in order to best serve the head of the household. Servants might take on roles both in the bedchamber and the great hall, and the function of spaces changed depending on the activity taking place within them. For example, the great hall could host feasts and judicial hearings or even act as a space to sleep for servants. Moreover, the household could frequently change geographical locations: the head of the household continued to travel between properties, bringing their households, at least in part, with them. At the same time, visitors and estate officials moved widely through the countryside, staying at the residences of their employers and peers.

The early Tudor great household was the administrative and judicial headquarters of the lord's estates, and ensured landed income was collected through rents. As Mark Girouard argues, it ‘supplied the hard core of physical force through which he [the lord] exercised his authority’. Aside from these basic functions, the household also provided the setting for many aspects of gentle life, such as political discussion, literature, drama, architecture, music, and the conduct of personal relationships, and was thus composed of many different, ever-changing elements.

Summary

By the turn of the eighteenth century the stage was set for the emergence of the term ‘mysticism’ to mean an enthusiastic and melancholy practice, one which was extravagant, deluded and fantastical. In a stark contrast to earlier periods of Western Christianity, mystical experience was no longer viewed as having any possible role to play in the formation of doctrine. It was now viewed with a mixture of both suspicion and pity, for those who believed in mysticism were either of a ‘lively fancy’ or ‘gloomy mind’ and were likely suffering from some form of medically explainable bodily imbalance. Semantically, the evolution of ‘theologia mystica’ in early Christianity into ‘mystical theology’ in the early modern period, and finally into ‘mysticism’ in the 1730s, reveals the slow decline and marginalization of what was once vital to the nexus of early Christian beliefs. We can also view this through snapshots of opinion on figures who held enormous spiritual authority in the medieval period. Bridget of Sweden, for example, has been described as ‘one of the most charismatic figures in the late medieval mystical tradition’. Yet this positive reputation soon declined; we see arguments against her mysticism in the early fifteenth-century works of Jean Gerson, in Martin Luther's condemnation of her as ‘mad Bridget’ in the sixteenth century, and in Edward Stillingfleet's denunciation of her as a promulgator of ‘illusions and fancies’ in the late seventeenth century.

This book has explored how this transformation took place across the early modern period in England, tracing how mysticism came under attack from mistrusting critics of sectarianism, radicalism, enthusiasm, pagano-papism and Catholicism. The positive engagements with mysticism we discussed in the first two chapters of this book were largely negated by the scholarly criticisms we explored in Chapters 3 and 4. As we saw in our final chapter, this decline made it almost impossible for groups such as the Philadelphians to survive long in the public sphere in the face of the immense criticism and scepticism placed on the concept of mysticism. Yet this process was not only taking place in England. The condemnation of Quietism and the doctrines of the Spanish mystic Miguel de Molinos by the papacy in 1687 ensured that mysticism had already ‘had its day in France’.

Summary

Introduction

There is a long tradition in economics that argues that manufacturing industry is critical for economic growth, particularly at relatively low income per capita (Weiss 2011). This ‘engine of growth argument’ rests on several features of the sector:

Summary

The Welsh chronicler and ‘soldier of Calais’, Elis Gruffydd (1490–1552), observes in his world history (Creation–1552) that the English criticize the Welsh for taking excessive pride in Arthur and, in defense of his countrymen, he delivers this riposte:

Ac etto j mae yn vwy j son wyntt [sc. y Sayson] amdanno ef [sc. Arthur] no nnyni [sc. y Kymru]; kanis j maentt twy [sc y Sayson] yn dywedud ac yn koelio yn gadarn j kyuyd ef [sc. Arthur] dracheuyn j vod yn vrenin. Yr hrain yn i hoppiniwn a ddywaid j vod ef ynn kysgu mewn googoff dan vryn garllaw Glasynbri. Ac yn wir pe gellid hroddi koel j ai[r] ymrauaelion bobl o'r ardal hwnw, yvo ymddangoses ac a ymddiuannodd a llawer o bobyl mewn llawer modd hryuedd er ys trychant o vylnyddoedd.

(And yet they [sc. the English] talk much more about him [sc. Arthur] than we [sc. the Welsh] do; for they [sc. the English] say and firmly believe that he [sc. Arthur] will rise again to be king. They in their opinion say that he is sleeping in a cave under a hill near Glastonbury. And indeed, if credence could be given to the word of various people of that region, he has for three hundred years been appearing to and conversing with many people in many a marvellous way.)

Gruffydd's observation seems to have been as true for the twelfth century as it was for the sixteenth. We do not have any early Welsh, Cornish, or Breton statements of belief in King Arthur's survival, but, beginning with the Gesta regum Anglorum (c. 1125) of William of Malmesbury, we encounter a series of claims made by Anglo-Norman and Continental writers that the Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons believed Arthur had never died and would return.

The English and Continental formulation of exspectare Arthurum, which was exploited by the court writers of Henry II, implies that Arthur escaped the way of all flesh and was a special messianic figure for his Brittonic kinsmen. This idea is at odds with the fundamental Christian teaching that Jesus Christ is the one true messiah and that salvation comes through him alone.

Summary

Arthur of Brittany and the discovery of Arthur's bones

The competition for Arthur's legacy during Henry II's reign manifested as a contest of ideas involving rival interpretations of history and political prophecy. Was Arthur primarily a Brittonic resistance fighter or a conquering sovereign? Did Arthur die? Was he destined to return and, if so, how? As Henry's reign drew to its close, the political exploitation of the figure of Arthur in the Plantagenet world moved beyond hermeneutics in two notable ways. First, at Easter (29 March) 1187, the posthumous son of Geoffrey Plantagenet by Constance of Penthièvre, duchess of Brittany, was born at Nantes. He was christened Arthur and acclaimed the longawaited Arthurus redivivus. Second, around the year 1191, Arthur's remains were ‘discovered’ and excavated at the Benedictine abbey of Glastonbury in Somerset. Both events had major implications for the Arthurian tradition. The birth of the new Arthur, who was of Plantagenet and Breton stock, was heralded as the fulfillment of the Breton Hope. The discovery of Arthur's bones, if genuine, stood as positive proof that King Arthur had truly died, was buried, and would not rise again in fulfillment of the prophecy – at least in his original body.

These two real-life developments in the Arthurian tradition are the focus of this chapter. The genesis of these events has considerable implications for our understanding of Arthurianism in Plantagenet England. For instance, if the Crown orchestrated the Glastonbury discovery, then it is reasonable to conclude that the Plantagenet kings perceived the Breton Hope as an enduring threat to their rule. Henry II's stance in relation to the naming of his grandson Arthur is also consequential. If Henry approved of the name choice, then we are observing a heightened appropriation of King Arthur for the hegemonic interests of the Plantagenets: Henry was making his grandson the new focalization of the Breton Hope. On the basis of his lineage, Arthur of Brittany had unique potential in this regard. Not only was his maternal grandfather, Conan IV, a native duke of Brittany, his maternal grandmother, Margaret, was sister to two successive kings of Scotland: Malcolm IV (r. 1153–65) and William I (r. 1165–1214).

Summary

This book argues that the early modern period was a vital juncture in the history of mysticism. It seeks to reposition the seventeenth century especially as a key period of distrust, suspicion and derision towards mystical experience in the West, one which still has significant ramifications for scholars today. This ‘twilight of the mystics’ witnessed the final separation of mysticism from the major institutional churches of the West. Gone was the privileged position mysticism commanded in the medieval period, along with any authority mystical experience had in shaping the doctrinal elements of Christianity. Instead, mysticism was now understood to be a personal and private spirituality, a ‘way of knowing’ which was ‘experimental’, ‘experiential’ and ‘extraordinary’, an ineffable experience an individual mystic ‘felt’. Critics of mysticism constantly reasserted that such private, subjective and emotional experiences could never be validated as legitimate sources of authority, nor be trusted as a basis of doctrine. This significant development has been theorized by several scholars but never given the full attention it deserves. The most astute, if perhaps too brief, description of this process was made by Bernard McGinn a decade ago when he commented that mysticism, as a creative aspect within the major institutional Western churches, was ‘moribund, if not quite dead’ by the end of the seventeenth century.

This problem was only compounded when mystical authors sought to defend themselves. Their immediate response was the creation of a ‘mystical tradition’ of authors who set a historical precedent for their experiences. But this development only further segregated mysticism as a separate and esoteric ‘way of knowing’, one with its own language, terminology, rhetoric and style. Through this, mysticism became a modus loquendi, a manner of speaking, as well as manner of writing; a separate literary genre with a language of its own. Scholars are only just beginning to realize that their own formulations of a ‘mystical tradition’, and their insistences on certain figures within that canon, is the repetition of a process initially undertaken in the early modern period in light of fierce criticism. This separate canon faced renewed attacks from critics, who now sought to prove the entire tradition was either unnecessary, delusional, heretical or anti-Christian (i.e. pagan). Equally, these defences produced ‘endless vocabularies’ of mysticism which aimed to clear up difficulties and inconsistencies in the terminology.

Summary

We have already seen Marischal's major conflicts with the earl of Huntly and Chancellor Maitland, both of which were intimately tied to court politics and resolved by 1595. Beyond these major disputes, which encompassed court and locality, Marischal pursued a series of lesser local clashes with several individuals right up until his death. Whereas most studies of feuding and conflict in Scotland concentrate on larger specific feuds, or explore one particular type of conflict, few have considered the individual perspective, which puts the larger struggles in context and gives a greater sense of the full spectrum of dispute. So, while Marischal's feud with Huntly up to 1595 is the most sensational conflict, the underlying root of that struggle being the jurisdiction of the Lieutenant of the North, it can be better understood if we look to Marischal's lesser disputes, in terms of both their underlying principles and the resulting conduct. These feuds cast useful light on the running, exercise and priorities of his lordship, as they show what kinds of issue provoked the earl into action. In particular, they show the severe problems arising from disputed boundaries of varying sorts: not only those of land and property, but also of jurisdiction and authority.

Defining and categorising conflict in this period is difficult. Keith Brown highlighted how contemporary definitions of feuding were unhelpfully vague, so bloodfeud is best thought of as being only one facet of a range of disputes and modes of dispute resolution. Marischal conducted his quarrels within the context of a transitional period, when the informal framework of the Scottish bloodfeud – essentially ritualised violence supported by a kin network to achieve dispute settlement – gave way to a more legalistic court-based system of dispute settlement and corrective justice. Whether Marischal's case corresponds to this decline in violence and out-of-court mediation in favour of legal recourse is inherently difficult to answer; the evidence is naturally skewed towards the latter owing to the records it generated. No doubt there were several confrontations, meetings and settlements throughout the earl's life that went unrecorded. The major problem in assessing Marischal's feud with the earl of Huntly in the previous chapters was the lack of detail; from contemporary reports we know that it was happening, but we do not know exactly how.

Summary

In 1577 Raphael Holinshed published a history of the British Isles in two volumes entitled The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Within it was included William Harrison's most famous work, A Description of England, a treatise dedicated to describing England's geographic, economic, social, religious, and political events. For example, Chapter 14, ‘Of castels and holds’, tells an illuminating tale of the history of the castle in England. Harrison begins:

There haue beene in times past great sotre of castels and places of defense within the realme of England, of which some were builded by the Britons, manie by the Romans, Saxons, and Danes, but most of all by the barons of the realme […].

The tale continues with King Stephen, Henry II, and Henry III, after which we reach Henry VIII:

The most prouident prince that euer reigned in this land, for forticiation thereof against all outward enimies, was the late prince of famous memorie, king Henrie the eight, who, beside that he repared most of such as were alreadie standing, builded sundrie out of the ground.

For Harrison there was a clear connection between threats – internal and external – and the building of castles. Similarly, for many modern scholars this link between conflict and defensive architecture was straightforward. Moreover, however – and which is more relevant to the pages that follow – Harrison constantly refers to the people who built them, expressing the intimate relationship between castles and those who built and occupied them. This association is the crux of this book.

This study takes a firmly interdisciplinary approach to the socio-cultural understanding of castles in the early Tudor period. Its central focus is not on the architectural prototypes or the typological features of the early Tudor castle, nor does it make much comment on architectural form. Instead, working from the assumption that both space and objects are meaningful, and that their meanings both affected people and were affected by the people who interacted in the built environment, it focuses on the people and everyday activities that were associated with the castle in early Tudor England and Wales. It explores how the spatial organisation of the castle influenced the interactions between the different groups of people who lived in, worked in, and visited these buildings, and thereby illuminates the semiotics and the socio-cultural associations of people, objects, and space.

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Index B - Index of People and Professions

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Frontmatter

8 - Marischal College, 1593–1623

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6 - Women and Girls of the Court

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Contents

Editorial Preface

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The Huy Nativity from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century: Translation, Play-Back, and Pray-Back

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3 - The Household

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Conclusion

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9 - Competitiveness in African Manufacturing: Some Evidence from Tanzania

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Conclusion

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List of Illustrations

2 - Arthurianism during the reign of Richard I, 1189–1199

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Introduction

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Contents

4 - Defending the Borders of the Earldom, 1595–1623

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Introduction: Architecture as a Story

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Glossary

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