The Salt of Common Life: Individuality and Choice in the Medieval Town, Countryside, and Church ed. by Edwin Brezette DeWindt (review)

HUMANITIES 171 not cite have delmonsl:ral;ed accounts. of the accession of Tacitus's real details from accession of Nero in 54 which have been pn)lecte'Ci in 14. Since these details include the use£>.,.......,....0·..,..,.... to secure the succession of her 'H,,\'tA,...,....N"on son, this \Q:rJLooina did indeed Claudius to aeJmE~atJlOn of her which denies this orc:OtlrSI~, aware that oursources ~"'''o.......nt- to assess individual items and ep},SO(1es Edwin Brezette lnctwu1ua,(ztl/ and Choice in the Medieval Town, Presented to J. Ambrose Raftis LJUlbllc:atlon, Western M:il:hi~;an Universiirv 1995. xvii, US $20.00 trustn:.ttlGm or 172 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 led Mauncell Tailor's servant, Lucy, with accomplices, to beat to death another woman who was competing with her in the sale of home brewed ale? That was in London, in 1276. Eleven years later, at the international trade Fair held at St Ives, Alice of Lincoln was fined sixpence for engaging in prostitution at the back of a property held by Simon Woodreeve. Two years earlier it was Simon who had been fined for maintaining a brothel. Had he no alternative for the use of his back room? Greater poverty is a probable answer, for he held his tenancy from the abbot of the ancient Benedictine abbey of Ramsey 'and the abbot retained the right to rent out the front ofthe premises during the Fair. These are but two examples of the wealth of detailed information about the individual which can be gleaned from the records of English manorial courts. A methodology for the study ofthese records, or court rolls, was developed by Professor Ambrose Raftis of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto nearly half a century ago. Many of the essays contained in this handsomely produced volume and written by students and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic in honour of Professor Raftis's seventieth birthday draw upon these and numerous other contemporary sources to identify individuality and change in medieval society from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The great challenge for the historian is to determine how documents prepared for a particular purpose can be used to analyse totally different aspects of the society which produced them. Thus, in the case of Lucy, the fact that she had done in her neighbour was less significant for the author Oudith Bennett) than that she was described as a servant engaged in the brewingindustry rather than a spouse. Similarly, Ellen WedemeyerMoore, who writes on small-town poverty, is more interested in the economics of indigence than she is in the occurrence and control of prostitution. The range of subjects treated in the volume is wide and consequently provides the reader with a broad survey of the kinds of research which can be carried out using the sources available. Thus, Maryanne Kowaleski discusses the grain trade in Exeter, Anne Reiber DeWindt the economic development of Ramsey town and F. Donald Logan the last days of the abbey and the fate of its monks, James Masschaele an early fourteenthcentury partnership between two businessmen of unequal probity, Alexandra F. Johnston and Robert Tittler the bloody pursuit by a victim's agent of a well-known forger across a snowbound English countryside and through the crime-ridden streets of London, Bruce Campbell pastoral husbandry and the preponderance of dairying in Norfolk, Ian Blanch9-rd the opportunities for individualistic behaviour in rural Chewton on Mendip, David N. Hall two Northamptonshire manors belonging to Ramsey Abbey and Sherri Olson case histories of a dozen families living in the Ramsey village of Ellington, and Denis Brearley the life of Richard Depyng, vicar of Fillongley. The nature of the surviving late medieval HUMANITIES 17) sources provide what at least three contributors refer to as a 'snapshot' of a given place, or person, at a given time. Kathleen A. Biddick takes the medium literally and advances the technology to the cinema in an attempt 'to trace a history of the cultural status of the pastoral' through an imaginative personal interpretation of two Hollywood versions of the story of Robin Hood. Her critique, which incorporates the psychological affects of the English...