This comprehensive study makes a unique source accessible to historians of the later medieval nobility. Household accounts contain invaluable evidence on daily life, diet, hospitality, etiquette, travel, the arts, politics, as well as on medieval finance generally.
In Part 1, Dr Woolgar's detailed introduction discusses these documents as a coherent body of records, and places them in the context of the administrative systems for which they were created. Their diplomatic forms and development are analysed and compared with those on the Continent, and an extensive glossary is provided to assist scholars in the study of these sources.
Dr Woolgar has also carefully selected and edited the accounts of 28 households, to illustrate the full variety of texts that have survived. Diet accounts of 14 households are printed in Part 1, ranging from those of knights and earls to those of the higher clergy.
Part 2 will contain texts from 14 more households - diet accounts (ii), cash, corn and stock accounts, wardrobe accounts - and a complete catalogue of extant medieval English household accounts.
- ISBN10 0197261124
- ISBN13 9780197261125
- Publish Date 29 October 1992
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Oxford University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 446
- Language English