THIS book takes one of the largest cities in northern Europe as its subject and examines in detail some of its most important medieval churches and landmarks: the friaries. The friars were a new religious group of the early thirteenth century. The young merchant Giovanni di Bernardone (better known as St Francis of Assisi) formed a band of poor lay preachers in Tuscany in the first decade of the century. At almost exactly the same time, the Castilian priest Domingo de Guzmán (later St Dominic) established a more organised group of anti-heretical preachers in the towns of southern France. These small groups were quickly embraced by the Church hierarchy who saw their potential as religious recruits to help spread the word of God in the ever-growing towns of Europe.

One can, perhaps, judge the size and significance of a medieval town or city by the number of its friaries: small towns in southern England like Ware or Maldon had a single friary, large regional centres such as Bristol had four friaries and the major administrative and mercantile centre of Norwich had five. London had a record-breaking seven friaries in the thirteenth century, nearly as many as the greatest city of the north, Paris, which had the full range of nine mendicant houses.

Successive chapters of the book will consider the evidence for these London priories: Dominican, Franciscan, Carmelite, Augustinian, Crossed, Sack and Pied (Table 1; Figure 1). From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, medieval Londoners poured investment into these institutions in return for the spiritual services that the friars offered. The seven London friaries were reduced to five by the fourteenth century, once two orders – the Sack Friars and the Pied Friars – were closed down as part of the tidying up of the mendicant orders that followed the church council known as the Second Council of Lyon in 1274. Two and a half centuries later, English friars, like their religious colleagues the monks, nuns and (most) canons, had to ‘change [their] coats’ and seek work as ordinary secular priests with the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the late 1530s (Chapter 19: Dissolution). A brief revival of a single London friary under Mary in 1556 lasted less than three years (Chapter 3: The Third Black Friars at St Bartholomew's).

In our first chapter we delineated some of the broader frameworks for contextualising a history from below in Bristol during the long eighteenth century. We mapped out a social topography of the city in a period of solid demographic growth, and the slow emergence of elite suburbs in the upland areas. We suggested there was a conspicuous fusion of political and economic privilege at the centre of Bristol society, enough to make it a genuine urban patriciate, something we develop in our next chapter. And we offered some thoughts on whether the corporate privilege of that patriciate and its gentrification were responsible for the relative economic decline of Bristol after the American war, or whether Bristol's fortunes were determined by more impersonal structural factors in a rapidly changing industrial era. After the Napoleonic war, Bristol's loss of competitive advantage was visibly inscribed in bankruptcies, higher poor rates and deepening pauperism that generated critiques of the patricians who ran the city.

In this chapter we move to the voices in the crowd and its rules or conventions of engagement with authority. Pioneering studies of the crowd tended to ignore the interplay with authority. They were more interested in the faces of the crowd than the manner in which power was exercised. It was Edward Thompson's study of the ‘moral economy’ of provision that opened up investigations of the dialogue between rulers and ruled in a relatively unpoliced society: one that addressed not only the customary expectations of the poor but the theatre of the great, whose studied paternalism and spectacle strove for consensus rather than conflict, or at the very least, legitimations of rule. That model of eighteenth-century relations, of a field of force whose radiating centres were patrician and plebeian, has come under criticism for ignoring third-party middling players. Yet in Bristol's social formation, where the merchant class was patrician, where political and economic power overlapped conspicuously, it works rather well as an organising model of social action. While it does not ignore those middle-class actors who as voters, petitioners, jurymen, employers or charitable-aid professionals played their part in the life of the city – and we are alert to their contribution, as readers will discover in the chapters on politics in particular – it proves particularly pertinent to those visible social dramas where power, authority and reputation were at stake.

Cameralist historiography has provided us with an overview of the ideas advanced by the leading cameralist writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, cameralist ideas, proposals and solutions are not only to be found in contemporary published literature; they are also contained in the administrative documents of the same period. This latter perspective on cameralist reasoning, although much more closely related to governmental actions, has hitherto been largely neglected in the historiography. The omission can be traced back to the positions originally taken by Albion Small and Kurt Zielenziger, who were of the opinion that the officials of the Kammer could be counted as cameralists only if they expressed their thoughts in writings which distinguished them from other officeholders. Small called cameralist theorists ‘cameralists of the books’, and stressed that his ‘investigation does not go into the evidence about the cameralists of the bureaus’, i.e. the everyday administrative employees of governments who, according to Small, were ‘men of affairs rather than of theory’. Zielenziger labelled the latter ‘fiscalists, the pure practitioners’.

It can be questioned whether approaching cameralism in such a restricted sense remains justified, especially when studying the impact of cameralism on governmental policy and practice. Early modern governments conducted different kinds of projects, and constantly received proposals from below (often outside the administration) that reflected the understandings of the economic ideas of the time. If an officeholder was affected by ‘cameralist’ ideas then he could design ‘cameralist’ solutions for the government, which might be quite independent of the theoretical literature of the time.

Population was a central issue that preoccupied early modern governments, and cameralism here had a strong influence on state policy and action. From the second half of the seventeenth century cameralists devoted a great deal of attention to what was termed Peuplierung in German (borrowing from the French), and which we can translate as ‘peopling’. Cameralist Peuplierungspolitik presupposed that larger populations produced greater wealth (‘ubi populus, ibi obulus’). This idea was not, of course, original to cameralist teaching; we can find it in the Proverbs of Solomon, ‘A large population is a king's glory, but without subjects a prince is ruined’ (Proverbs 14:28). Since the Middle Ages efforts had been directed to attracting new settlers and seeking to populate the land.

In June 1852 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, then canon of Canterbury Cathedral, site of the Black Prince's tomb, gave a lecture on the Black Prince's life and legacy which was later published in his popular Historical memorials of Canterbury. Stanley argued that Edward's last heroic act occurred not on the battlefield but during the Good Parliament. There, in 1376, the prince trumpeted the cause of the English people and defended their rights against a corrupt court. To clarify Edward's importance to the English people, Stanley asked his listeners to recall their fathers’ anguish at the death of Princess Charlotte, the beloved heir to the throne, or their own sadness during the funeral of the hero of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Nelson. Stanley argued that readers must combine all these feelings of grief to fully appreciate the extent of the people's loss as Edward was both their beloved heir and their protector.

It may seem peculiar that a medieval hero known for his victories in war at Crécy and Poitiers would be lauded as a champion of the people's rights in the nineteenth century. Yet, at this time, the image of Edward as a hero of the people and their protector in parliament became as important to the prince's heroic identity as his battles. As a hero of popular reform, the Black Prince was celebrated alongside such men as the thirteenth-century magnate Simon de Montfort, parliament's supposed founder. The fourteenth century was reimagined both as the zenith of chivalry and as a turning point when the people, under Edward's guidance, exerted their power in parliament.

By the mid-1850s, the representation of Edward as a hero of the English people was firmly entrenched. This image owed itself to a focus on constitutional history from the early nineteenth century and to a new interest in the history of parliament that reached its peak in the mid-Victorian era.

1667: Roger Boyle, 1st earl of Orrery, Two new tragedies: The Black Prince, and Typhon, first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London.

1750: William Shirley, Edward the Black Prince; or, The Battle of Poictiers: an historical tragedy, first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London.

1771: David Garrick, The institution of the Garter; or, Arthur's Round Table restored, first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London.

1795: William Pearce, Windsor Castle; or, the Fair Maid of Kent, first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London.

1807: Anon., Edward the Black Prince: or, The Battle of Cressy, & c. & c. (A serious pantomime), first performed at Astley's Olympic Pavilion, London.

1822: George Macfarren, Edward the Black Prince; or The glories of England in 1356, first performed at the Royal Coburg Theatre, London.

1828: F. Reynolds, Edward the Black Prince; or, she never told her love, first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London.

1836: Christopher Godmond, The campaign of 1346, ending with the Battle of Crecy: an historical drama, no known performances.

1839: Anon., The victories of Edward the Black Prince; or, The battlefield, first performed at Astley's Olympic Pavilion, London.

1846: Sir Coutts Lindsay, The Black Prince: a tragedy in three acts and in verse, no known performances.

1862: Anon., Edward the Black Prince; or, Harlequin and the magic feathers, first performed at the Victoria Theatre, London.

1874: Paulin Huggett Pearce, King Petri and the Black Prince: a tragedy, no known performances.

1886: Douglas Sladen, Edward the Black Prince: an epic drama, no known performances.

1903 [1902]: Maurice Baring, The Black Prince and other poems, no known performances.

1914: T. C. Porter, Pageant entitled Edward the Black Prince, performed at Trematon Castle, Cornwall.

c. 1947: Mayre Lawson, The Black Prince: a play, no known performances.

IN HER PIONEERING BOOK, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein suggests the term ‘emotional communities’ to describe ‘groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions’. She notes that such emotional communities are not mutually exclusive, but may co-exist and change over time. None of these communities will have been fixed and stable – any more than such ideological systems ever are – but they will nevertheless have provided a frame of reference to give credence and significance to emotional behaviour and have subtly shaped emotive responses. Rosenwein coins the term to identify and categorise the presumed emotions exhibited and felt by people in the Middle Ages; that is emotions that can be deduced from their artefacts.

While Rosenwein seeks the historicised emotions of medieval peoples I would like to posit a slightly different concept, one that is not focused on the actual emotions experienced by peoples inhibiting those communities, but rather on the emotive coding apparent in the literary products produced by those medieval communities, which I shall refer to as ‘emotive literary identities’. Admittedly, historians seeking the emotive life of medieval men and women will by necessity seek it through source materials, including texts, but the emphasis and the goal of the historian differ from that of the literary analyst. While my approach is based on Rosenwein's concept of emotional communities, it departs from it in its specific focus on literary products, i.e. on narrative material and the potential evidence that those materials may provide of literary emotive coding. Like Rosenwein's communities, such literary identities are based on established perceptions of emotional behaviour or expression, except that these are specific to literary works or narrative material rather than actual historical communities of people.

Emotive literary identities dictate the framework of emotional values and behavioural codes that guide the reader in the interpretation of a character's emotional behaviour or in deciphering the emotive subtext. These identities obviously reflect the emotional communities out of which they grow, but they are not restricted by them. A text's emotive coding may defy its relevant emotional community, it may subvert it or parody it or even impact it, leading to changes across time in the emotional behaviour of its readers and audiences.

After Rodríguez de Montalvo's romances were published, different authors heeded the cyclical call at the end of Sergas. Accordingly, the Amadís cycle developed extensively. Yet not all those who wielded the pen enjoyed the same editorial success as Montalvo. The two branches of the Amadís cycle illustrate the different fate of the sequels. On the one hand, those romances that compose the heterodox branch enjoyed little or no favour from sixteenth-century audiences. Conversely, the romances of the orthodox branch, written almost exclusively by Feliciano de Silva, became a favourite of the public and printers. Despite being overlooked by literary scholars, Feliciano was one of the most influential writers of his century. For example, Cervantes's Quijote never mentions the romances of the other branch of the Amadís cycle, but it constantly refers to and mocks Feliciano's works, implicitly recognising their importance and success (Cervantes 1998: 40).

The dissimilar reception of the branches is linked to their relationship with their hypotexts, Montalvo's romances. Both branches took the cycle in new directions, but the difference in their narrative projects explains the dissimilar editorial fate. From a narrative perspective, the heterodox branch diverged considerably from Montalvo's Amadís. On the other hand, the orthodox branch developed aspects from the narrative universe described by Montalvo in a more consistent way, though this did not preclude considerable innovation. Therefore, the reception of Montalvo's romances is the core difference in the poetics of the two branches and the intertextual relations portrayed in them explain their failure or success. The complex intertextual development of the Amadís cycle offers significant insight into the poetics of rewriting and continuation of the libros de caballerías.

The heterodox branch

The first sequel of Sergas and the foundation of the heterodox branch is Ruy Páez de Ribera's Florisando (Book VI of the Amadís cycle), which was later continued in Juan Díaz's Lisuarte de Grecia (Book VIII). Of the corpus studied here, these two romances have received the smallest amount of critical attention. However, these remain essential to understand the development of the Amadís cycle and Feliciano's works.

Florisando by Ruy Páez de Ribera

Ruy Páez de Ribera, in all likelihood a cleric, was the first to write a sequel of Sergas, with his Florisando, published in 1510 (in Salamanca and Toledo) and 1526 (in Seville).

BACH'S SIX SUITES for solo cello are - understandably - often referred to as ‘the cellist's bible’; but actually, our bible, like the other, somewhat older one, consists of two books. The second comprises Beethoven's sonatas for cello and piano (or - much though it pains me to admit this - for piano and cello, to be more strictly accurate). It would be logical, for chronological reasons, to refer to the Bach suites as the Old Testament, the Beethoven as the New; but curiously, in musical terms, it is rather the other way around. The Bach suites can be seen as a musical portrait of the life of Christ (well - I see them that way, anyway); whereas the Beethoven sonatas are packed with thoroughly old-Testament-like fire, thunderbolts and mystical prophecy. There the analogy ends, however; both sets of masterpieces, sacred though they may be to us, are essentially human documents, full of humour, vulnerability, and boisterous joy. One salient feature of Beethoven's sonatas for piano and cello (which the Bach suites certainly do not offer us) is that they present a coherent biographical portrait of the composer. Listening to the cycle, we can hear the composer transforming in every way - in language, aspiration, and spirit. The early sonatas are creations of the fiery young virtuoso, revolutionising the concert platform. They rattle the cage of classicism, radically altering the world of chamber music - not just the cello sonata - in the process. Who before Beethoven would have thought to enter the genre with a sonata that is essentially a virtual concerto for two instruments (complete with written-out cadenza)? And then - even more startling - to follow this up with a second sonata that seems to take us into the world of opera, with all the dramatic violence that implies? Moving on to the third sonata, however, we encounter an absolutely different Beethoven: a master of classicism who at one stroke offers us perfection of form and of texture, achieving absolute equality between the two instruments - a feat that was never to be surpassed. And then, as we reach the fourth and fifth sonatas, written a mere seven years after the third, we are ushered into another sphere entirely: the mystical, radiant, uncharted world of late Beethoven.

A cupboard of coins at Leufsta bruk

In 1739 the 19-year-old Charles De Geer travelled from Stockholm to Leufsta bruk to claim his inheritance. Nine years earlier he had inherited from a childless uncle the largest iron-making estate in Sweden, with Leufsta as its centrepiece. For nine years the estate had been run by a group of guardians, including his father Jean Jacques and his older brother Louis. In charge of the day-to-day business was the Directeur at Leufsta, Eric Touscher, and it became his task to prepare Charles De Geer, his master and the future brukspatron at Leufsta, for the life that lay ahead of him, an assignment Touscher took seriously.

De Geer's arrival was the beginning of a new era at Leufsta, a new brukspatron taking possession of his estate, and a poem was written for the occasion: ‘Rejoice, those who make all his work, those who make his iron … your master will arrive. Welcome our Master, our father … to your estate, inheritance and table, we long to obey your commands.’ De Geer was also presented with two hand-written manuscripts, nicely leather-bound as books, by Touscher, and a newly drawn-up plan of the bruk. The first manuscript was a directory of a collection of coins, medallions, books, scientific instruments, etc., assembled for the new master. Touscher noted that he had always had an inclination to collect ‘Historical’ things, but his lack of wealth had prevented him to do so. However, in a deferential mood he had ignored these constraints and established a small collection for his master; the manuscript and the items were a sign of this ambition. It was a foundation on which De Geer, with his exquisite taste and knowledge, could create a collection worthy someone as ‘well-born’ as the new owner of Leufsta.

Some features of this catalogue should be emphasised. One is Touscher's deferential tone. He made sacrifices in order to present his master with a collection and expected some kind of recognition; he acted in accordance with the poem, of obeying, but also as the highest official in the estate's hierarchy. Another feature is the emphasis upon utility; books and scientific instruments should ‘serve … as an edifying pleasure, in one or the other science’.

ON 24 October 1500 John Smith, gentleman of Coventry, made his will in which he asked to be buried in the Coventry Grey Friars:

Smith specified a monument ‘lyke to a tombe’ he had already seen during an earlier visit to the Franciscan convent in London. The Maryner tomb was, we know, a tumba elevata, that is a raised tomb. This probably consisted of a canopied tomb chest which contained a brass effigy of Maryner and his two wives, Agnes and Juliana, accompanied by an inscription. Smith had seen this, liked it and commissioned a London marbler to make one just like it to go over his own grave in Coventry. Within forty years almost all of the tombs from London's mendicant houses were destroyed but it is still possible to gain some impression of the lost landscape of these houses and to learn who chose to be buried in the five friaries of the city.

There are a number of written accounts which record London's lost tombs. The earliest manuscript was written c. 1500 and is now College of Arms MS CGY 647.3 The Tudor herald Sir Thomas Wriothesley, Garter King of Arms, later came to illustrate some of the tombs from London's mendicant houses and his account survives in British Library Add. MS 45131. This is known as the ‘Book of Funerals’ and was made during the 1520s.

THE final London friary to consider is that of the Friars of the Blessed Mary (fratres beate Marie), also known as the Pied friars. The order began in Marseilles in the mid thirteenth century and the bishop soon granted them a chapel in the area of the city known as Aren in 1259, thus giving the order one of their (many) Latin names of fratres de Areno. These friars were the least successful of the thirteenth-century mendicant orders, ending up with about seven houses in France and another half dozen elsewhere in Europe. They arrived in England in 1267 where they became known as the Pied friars (fratres de pica), a playful reference to their magpie-like appearance with a black outer scapular over their white mantle. After founding their first English house in London, they had established a second house in Norwich by 1274. The London friary housed about twenty friars in the 1270s and ‘80s: the order was clearly quite successful in its early days in England. However, like the Sack friars, the Pied friars were in effect killed off at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, which prevented the lesser mendicant orders from recruiting new members. The number of friars, unsurprisingly, declined, with twelve living at the London friary in 1297 and a sole survivor, Hugh of York, collecting his royal alms in April 1317.

The main source for the London house is an order recorded on the Close rolls and resulting from an inquisition into the former house after the death of Hugh in August 1317. The royal order – which recounts the history of the house – returned the property to the original owners, Westminster Abbey, and it became part of the abbey estate that supported the sacrist; the sacrist's accounts and leases therefore contain a number of useful references to the former friary. No archaeological work has been carried out within the area of the friary, which lies between Covent Garden and the Strand (Figure 61).

The friary

Henry III granted the newly arrived Pied friars the right to establish an English friary in October 1267.

IN 1904 THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS in London exhibited a compelling painting of Beethoven by the German artist Carl Bernhard Schloesser, featured as an engraving on our cover. Unlike portraits of Beethoven executed during his lifetime, which tended to capture him looking back into the eyes of the painter, Schloesser's image of ‘Beethoven in His Study’ (ca. 1885) presented the musician in the act of composing. Dressed in a long robe and seated at his Broadwood, he stares into the distance, as if absorbing inspiration or, perhaps, gauging the effect of a chord just struck. Surrounding the composer are books and piles of manuscripts. Indeed, taken as a whole, the scene echoes the reminiscences of the Baron de Trémont, who paid the composer a visit in 1809 and then recorded these impressions:

Schloesser's vision also features a large, open window at the back, allowing the scene to be naturally lit and suggesting that the artist was familiar with Johann Nepomuk Hoechlene's well-known sketch of Beethoven's Schwarzspanierhaus studio, made shortly after the composer's death in March 1827. Hoechlene's image, of course, radiates emptiness, as it only could without Beethoven's presence. Schloesser's vision, by contrast, offers a scene rich in symbolism, even if romanticized. Behind the composer hangs a portrait of his grandfather Ludwig van Beethoven, an object noticed by other visitors to his quarters,2 and to the right of the keyboard rests a bust of a Greek figure, perhaps Homer, of whom the composer remained particularly fond. At the bottom of the frame a cello leans almost carelessly against a trunk, again surrounded by reams of manuscripts. Unlike Hoechlene's study, which casts the fortepiano as the central subject, Schloesser's image places Beethoven at the center, yet also affords the cello a position of significance (a violin, by contrast, lies all but undetected behind the ink well on the piano).

The nestor of Swedish economic history, Eli F. Heckscher, rightly drew attention to the important influence of Justus Christoph Dithmar's 1731 Einleitung in die Oeconomische- Policey- Cameral-Wissenschaften on the first Swedish-language textbook, written by Anders Berch and published in 1747 as Inledning til almanna hushalningen, innefattande grunden til politie, oeconomie och cameral wetenskaperne. Berch had become professor in Jurisprudentia, oeconomiae et commercium at Uppsala University in 1741, the first ever Swedish chair for economic subjects. Dithmar had likewise become professor in the newly created chair for Kameral-Okonomie und Polizeiwissenschaft in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1727, also the first chair of its kind at this university. It must however be said that Heckscher's comparison of the two manuals was sketchy, and by no means systematic. All the same, he emphasised their similar structure, dividing up their subject matter into three parts: oeconomy, police (Policey) and cameralistic sciences. He also pointed out that anything that might resemble ‘analysis’ in the modern sense of the word was absent from both texts. Instead, they might better be described as manuals prescribing or giving advice on how to become an economic (and moral) householder. Dithmar primarily addressed future landowners or state administrators, while Berch also included students from mercantile and manufacturing families among his potential readers.

Heckscher was mainly interested in the differences between the two textbooks, perhaps thinking that they indicated something about the socioeconomic contexts of the two countries. First he pointed out that Berch's book was more advanced than Dithmar's, being placed intellectually ‘on a much higher plane’. Berch had divided up his subject, almanna hushalningen, into two parts, enskild (individual) and almann (general) householding. General householding was a synthesis including oeconomy, Policey and Cameralism. By contrast, Heckscher considered that Dithmar's division between a Stadt (town) and Land (agriculture) economy was more traditional. At the same time he did distinguish between the individual and general levels, the former detailing technicalities of husbandry and related matters, while the economy as a whole was dealt with in a broader fashion. Secondly, he pointed out that, while both Berch and Dithmar should be considered as conservative proponents of a highly regulated economy, they differed on one vital point: that of the wider aim of regulation.