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Medieval London, like all premodern cities, had a largely immigrant population-only a small proportion of the inhabitants were citizens-and the newly arrived needed to be taught the civic culture of the city in order for that city to function peacefully. Ritual and ceremony played key roles in this acculturation process. In Ceremony and Civility, Barbara A. Hanawalt shows how, in the late Middle Ages, London's elected officials and elites used ceremony and ritual to establish their legitimacy and power.
In a society in which hierarchical authority was most commonly determined by inheritance of title and office, or sanctified by ordination, civic officials who had been elected to their posts relied on rituals to cement their authority and dominance. Elections and inaugurations had to be very public and visually distinct in order to quickly communicate with the masses: the robes of office needed to distinguish the officers so that everyone would know who they were. The result was a colorful civic pageantry.
Newcomers found their places within this structure in various ways. Apprentices entering the city to take up a trade were educated in civic culture by their masters. Gilds similarly used rituals, oath swearing, and distinctive livery to mark their members' belonging. But these public shows of belonging and orderly civic life also had a dark side. Those who rebelled against authority and broke the civic ordinances were made spectacles through ritual humiliations and public parades through the streets so that others could take heed of these offenders of the law.
An accessible look at late medieval London through the lens of civic ceremonies and dispute resolution, Ceremony and Civility synthesizes archival research with existing scholarship to show how an ever-shifting population was enculturated into premodern London.
List of contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: The Urban Environment
- Chapter 2: The City and the Crown
- Chapter 3: Civic Rituals and Elected Officials
- Chapter 4: Rebellion and Submission
- Chapter 5: Gilds as Incubators for Citizenship
- Chapter 6: Civic Lessons for the Masses
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Barbara A. Hanawalt is King George III Professor of British History Emerita, Ohio State University. Her books include The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (1986); Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (1993); Of Good and Ill Repute: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (1999); and The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and the Economy in Late Medieval London (2007).
Summary
In Ceremony and Civility, Barbara Hanawalt shows how London's elected officials and elites in the late Middle Ages used ceremony and ritual to establish their legitimacy and power. In a largely immigrant population, the official appearances helped instruct the newly arrived about the power structure of the city, as did humiliating, public parades of offenders of laws through the streets.
Additional text
Barbara Hanawalt's book is an excellent synthesis on London, exposing vividly nearly every aspect of urban life from the Guildhall to the ill-famed taverns. Her approach of the importance of the didactic nature of the ceremonies and rituals concerning the values and the power of the oligarchy is also very stimulating. Besides, it is well written and accessible to students and even a larger public, all the more so that it contains a glossary and an index of the notions, institutions and so on, explained in the book... This 'final book' of a fine historian is a great one and largely deserves to be read if one wants to understand the life of the most important city of late medieval England.
