This book brings together twelve outstanding articles by eminent historians to throw light on the evolution of medieval towns and the lives of their inhabitants. The essays span the period from the dramatic urban expansion of the thirteenth century to the crises in the fifteenth century as a result of plague, population decline and changes in the economy. Throughout the breadth of current debates surrounding the history of urban society is fully explored.

Chantries were religious institutions endowed with land, goods and money. At their heart was the performance of a daily mass for the spiritual benefit of their founders, and the souls of all faithful dead. To Church reformers, they exemplified some of medieval Catholicism’s most egregious errors; but to the orthodox they offered opportunities to influence what occurred in an unknowable afterlife. The eleven essays presented here lead the reader through the earliest manifestations of the chantry, the origins and development of ‘stone-cage’ chapels, royal patronage of commemorative art and architecture, the chantry in the late medieval parish, the provision of music and textiles, and a series of specific chantries created for William of Wykeham, Edmund Audley, Thomas Spring and Abbot Islip, to the eventual history and the cultural consequences of their suppression in the mid-16th century.

This series provides a forum for the most recent research into the political, social and ecclesiastical history of the 14th century.

The period covered here saw dramatic alterations in the state of the economy; and this account begins with the forming of villages, towns, networks of exchange and the social hierarchy in the ninth and tenth centuries, and ends with the inflation and population rise of the sixteenth century.".

Their task was to locate a lost grave in an obliterated church. The ‘Looking For Richard’ team of historians and researchers spent many years amassing evidence. Now for the first time they reveal the full story of how that evidence took them to a car park in Leicester.

In the preface, the author concedes that he is using a loose definition of the word 'medieval' because his research covers some time both before and after the strict definition. The book is divided into chapters of information about places, and then people and stories. There is a final chapter about the destruction of the medieval city.