The Fifteenth Century XXI

Essays exploring life during the fifteenth century under the pressures of war, political upheaval, and social change.


This twenty-first volume in The Fifteenth Century series focuses on the pressing concerns of those who lived in extremely troubled times. It begins with a comprehensive overview of the many publications in which historians have attempted to identify the conflicting interests and interactions of different levels of society, and how their views have been modified over the last fifty years. At the core of the next four articles are wars. They consider warfare in and around the Irish Sea in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries; the fraught relationships between the English and the French in Gascony; and, following England's loss of Normandy, the French attack on Sandwich in 1457; while a different viewpoint emerges from an examination of civil war as the royal house of Lancaster gave way to that of York on battlefields in the north. Armies needed to be supplied with equipment and particularly armour, the subject of another essay which shows how knights and their followers acquired their protective clothing, its provenance, cost and how those who wore it chose to be depicted on their tombs. Different themes emerge in the rest of the volume. One essay treats the role of women in offering medical care to their families, by looking after the sick, old and dying, providing practical recipes and encouraging cleanliness, while another considers the souls of those who adopted the heresy of Lollardy, by examining the spread of Wycliffite texts and teachings in Surrey and Sussex. The sudden death of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, at Bury St Edmunds in 1447 leads to an examination of Richard Fox's chronicle and the network of his associates at St Albans. The final article traces how the rivalry between Henry VI's establishment at Eton and Edward IV's desire for a new foundation at nearby Windsor eventually led to St George's College at Windsor acquiring St Anthony's hospital and school in London and the building of a grand new chapel in the castle.