Abstract
When nonspecialists ask me about the topic of this book, usually I begin with an admittedly imperfect analogy: the Mob. “Imagine that you’re in Chicago in the 20s or 30s,” I say, “and the Mob is everywhere.” I point out that the Mob may own the police or the judges in your area, leading some to receive “more” justice than others. However, your corner grocer may have connections, too, and so his store is better stocked than those in other neighborhoods. Maybe you face less street crime in your neighborhood than some because the Mob’s watching your area. From your perspective, the Mob does bad things: it kills people, and it corrupts government and law. But at the same time you recognize that the Mob does good things as well: it can make obtaining goods and social services easier and less expensive, and may curtail some kinds of crime.1 “Now imagine,” I tell my listeners, “that the Mob is everywhere, and that there’s not just one, but many, throughout the cities and across the countryside. That’s medieval England. That’s what this book is about.”
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Notes
Anthony Musson uses the term “Mafiosi,” but does so in arguing against it as an effective analogy in Public Order and Law Enforcement: The Local Administration of Criminal Justice 1294–1350 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1996), p. 264.
Barbara Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300–1348 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 221.
Abbot-monk was the other recognized analogy. The gravest proof of the currency of these analogies was the codification of a law of petty treason in the 1352 Statute of Treasons, where a servant killing a master, a wife a husband, or anyone his prelate were all considered traitors: see 5 Stat. EdwIII c. 2. For examples of these relationships used as analogous, see 14 EdwIII, case 49 where the legal prejudice of a canon is directly related to that of a femme couvert: “celuy qest obedient navera jammes accion si il ne soit de corporel trespas fait a luy mesme, et unqore ceo coveynt estre fait ovesqe son sovereyn” [one who is in obedience shall never have an action except in respect of corporal trespasses committed against himself, and even then it must be undertaken with the Head of his House] Alfred J. Harwood, ed. Year Books of the Reign of King Edward the Third. (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1896).
L.C. Hecher and Michael Hecher, eds. Year Books of Richard II. 8–10 Richard II 1385–1387 (London: Ames Foundation, 1987)
Elizabeth Fowler, “Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman” Speculum 70 (1995): 760–92
J.H. Baker also provides a legal introduction to coverture in, An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th ed. (London: Butterworths, 2002).
Isobel Thornley, ed. Year Books of II Richard II 1387–1388 (London: Spottiswood, Ballantyne, & Co., 1937)
MED, “maintenaunce.” OED, “maintainer,” “maintenance.” Frances McSparran, chief ed. The Electronic Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001)
John Simpson, chief ed. Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2007).
For one consideration about the importance of friends among gentry networks, see Philippa Maddern, “‘Best Trusted Friends’: Concepts and Practices of Friendship among Fifteenth-century Norfolk Gentry,” in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Nicholas Rogers (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1994), pp. 100–117.
Richard Kaeuper and Philippa Maddern are notable exceptions here, see for example Philippa Maddern, Violence and the Social Order: East Anglia 1422–1442 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)
Richard Kaeuper, War, Justice, and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
In the interest of precision, I will generally use the term “autonomy” throughout this book to the more commonly seen “agency.” Carolynn Van Dyke asks some provocative questions about literary critics’ use of the term agency in Chaucer’s Agents: Cause and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), pp. 13–26.
K.B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973)
For examples of just how complex these networks could be, in McFarlane’s view, see Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972)
Chris Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England, 1360–1413 (New York: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 203.
J.M.W. Bean, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 179.
Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 335–36.
Simon Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361–1399 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. 1.
Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (New York: Longman, 1995), p. 8.
J.G. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1973), pp. 21–22.
J.G. Bellamy, Bastard Feudalism and the Law (Portland, OR: Aeropagitica Press, 1989), p. 80.
David Gary Shaw, Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England (New York: Palgrave, 2005)
Raluca Radulescu, The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003).
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© 2009 Kathleen E. Kennedy
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Kennedy, K.E. (2009). Introducing Medieval Maintenance. In: Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621626_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621626_1
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