A case study examining the history of a house of English Augustinian canons, this book reveals the ways in which Plympton Priory formed connections with the laity, the episcopacy, the secular clergy, and the Crown in the late Middle Ages.

Walter Stapeldon, fifteenth bishop of Exeter, was the founder of Exeter College, Oxford, and the greatest of Edward II's treasurers of the Exchequer. As Edward's regime crumbled in 1326, he paid the price of his master's rapacious policies, of which he was the chief instrument. This study shows how the Plantagenet revolution in government, the most massive overhaul of the Exchequer ever undertaken in medieval England, was shaped with a clear financial purpose. On the basis of his extensive research in the Exchequer archives, Dr Buck reveals for the first time the extent and severity of the government's action on the levying of debts to the Crown, which, although initiated earlier, was exacerbated in the early 1320s when parliament and the clergy were refusing the king supply. Placing the policies of Stapeldon's treasurership in their political and parliamentary context, he argues that the Exchequer was Edward's most powerful weapon against the aristocratic opposition and in the process reassesses the accepted interpretation of these years of turmoil.

Union list catalog of the lithographic views of cities and towns made during the 19th century.

This book is the first detailed examination on a comparative basis of the economic and political relations between the bishops and their cathedral clergy in England during the century and a half after the Conquest. In particular, it is a study of the structure and historical development of the mensal endowments and the redistribution of wealth which led, in the course of time, to the establishment of the chapter as a largely independent body with substantial political power. A description of the constitutional importance of the mensa and its treatment in recent scholarly writing is followed by a discussion of property rights and liberties in the church and the role of the bishop in ecclesiastical and civil government. The core of the book consists of an analysis based on contemporary sources of the episcopal and capitular organisation in each of the ten monastic and seven secular sees.

William II, better known as William Rufus, was the third son of William the Conqueror and England’s king for only 13 years (1087–1100) before he was mysteriously assassinated. In this vivid biography, here updated and reissued with a new preface, Frank Barlow reveals an unconventional, flamboyant William Rufus—a far more attractive and interesting monarch than previously believed. Weaving an intimate account of the life of the king into the wider history of Anglo-Norman government, Barlow shows how William confirmed royal power in England, restored the ducal rights in France, and consolidated the Norman conquest. A boisterous man, William had many friends and none of the cold cruelty of most medieval monarchs. He was famous for his generosity and courage and generally known to be homosexual. Licentious, eccentric, and outrageous, his court was attacked at the time by Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, and later by censorious historians. This highly readable account of William Rufus and his brief but important reign is an essential volume for readers with an interest in Anglo-Saxon and medieval history or in the lives of extraordinary monarchs.

This is the first detailed comparative study of patronage as an instrument of power in the relations between kings and bishops in England and Normandy after the Conquest. Esteemed medievalist Everett U. Crosby considers new perspectives of medieval state-building and the vexed relations between secular and ecclesiastical authority.