Date/Time
Date(s) - 22 Mar 2012
4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Rutgers University Alexander Library Teleconference Lecture Hall
Category(ies) No Categories
The Rutgers British Studies Center is pleased to announce forthcoming lecture with Professor Barbara Hanawalt (Ohio State) titled “Rebellion and Submission in Late Medieval London.”
In establishing a civic culture that permitted the governing of late medieval London, the mayor and aldermen had to enforce codes of behavior for citizens, apprentices, strangers and foreigners. The expected behavior was already recorded in civic and gild ordinances and in oaths that apprentices, gild members, and citizens took. Transgressions, however, were to be expected and the authorities moved quickly to enforce their power and punish the rebellious. Show cases of the transgressors were a way of underscoring the limits of behavior in London’s civic society. Slanderers of authorities, people who resisted reprimands and arrests, unruly apprentices and journey men, committers of frauds, bawds and prostitutes all had to be punished publically as exemplars to the population. The threat that hung over the civic officials was not only their own loss of power within the city, but also the possibility that the king would revoke the city charter and take the governance of London into his own hands. In addition to the concern of enforcing the elite’s power, the city ordinances and the language used in passing judgments expressed strong censure of obstreperous behavior. The rebels were not revolutionaries. The major rioters, usurpers, and revolutionaries are not part of my story. The people considered here were often just individuals or groups of people who were, as we would now say, pushing the envelope. Their punishment and, perhaps, a subsequent exoneration depended on their social status and the degree to which they threatened civic and gild officials or the liberty and reputation of the city.