Furse approved of those of his ancestors who shone in manly sports, and listed their accomplishments, for example at pages 30, 31, 43, 53, 55, 56, 67, 135-6.

Joseph Strutt collected information as The Sports and pastimes of the people of England in the early nineteenth century, and the specialist chapters in C.T. Onions Shakespeare's England (1917) are instructive, as is Christina Hole's English Sports and Pastimes. Richard Carew's Survey of Cornwall, 1602, gives contemporary accounts of archery and wrestling (pp. 75-6).

Statute law struggled to encourage those sports and activities which prepared young men for war, and to ban sedentary pursuits that went with gambling and dissipation. An act for the maintenace of artillery and debarring of unlawful games, 33 Henry VIII c. 9 (1541/2) forbade bowling, coyting, coysh, cayls, half bowls, tennis, dicing, tables or carding. Sir Thomas Elyot approved of wrestling, running and swimming because they could be useful in war, and of course riding and swordplay. Hunting was an imitation of battle. He thought dice mere idleness because it was a game of chance, cards and tables at least required a little wit, and chess much more. Use of the bow was essential for war, and he grudgingly approved tennis for young men, but was against ‘clash', bowls, quoits and football. ‘To ride cumlie: to run faire at the tilte or ring: to plaie at all weapones; to shote faire in bow, or surelie in gon’ were the ‘noble exercises’ of the Tudor period, and so too were running, vaulting, wrestling, dancing and singing, and all similar employments ‘conteining either some fitte exercise for warre, or some pleasant pastime for peace,’ wrote Roger Ascham. The Cotswold Games, held in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, included wrestling, leaping, cudgel playing, sword-and-buckler, pitching the bar, throwing the sledge(hammer), and tossing the pike. Leaping, often equated with vaulting, generally meant skilled moves, somersaults, leaping through hoops and so on. Sword and buckler was a dance-like combat regulated by music.

Wrestling, or wraxelling, was held in particularly high regard in the west country as a manly art. Devon wrestling was similar to Cornish, but kicking was allowed, with specially reinforced boots.

“Now there is in this gallant Country of Universe, a fair and delicate TOWN, a Corporation, called Mansoul : a TOWN for its Buildings so curious, for its Situation so commodious, for its Privileges so advantagious;. .”

If Bedford provided the basis of Bunyan's allegory in the ‘Holy War’, the antiquity of the town's privileges may have suggested the extent of the betrayal involved in the surrender of Mansoul. Antedating legal memory, Bedford's borough status rested on prescription and its first charter — that of Henry II — confirmed franchises enjoyed under Henry I.

The borough's constitution was as complex as its privileges were ancient.3 In the earlier 17th century the corporation proper — consisting of the mayor, aidermen, bailiffs, chamberlains and burgesses, with thirteen representatives of the freemen — emerged in clear distinction from the Court Leet. At the same time, the freemen resisted a growing tendency towards oligarchy. The period from 1647 to the Restoration particularly saw marked fluctuations in the relationship of the freemen to the common council, which, from acting as an executive of the Leet, had come itself to direct the affairs of the borough. The freedom — and the burgessdom — took effect through membership of the gild merchant, established originally by award of Richard I and still, in the 17th century, conferring on its members a monopoly of trade in the borough, though membership of the gild did not demand residence there. While their participation was limited, neighbouring gentlemen and those non-residents who wished to share in the commercial privileges of the borough were eligible for entry into the gild and would be liable to bear part of the expenses of the corporation, as, for example, the cost of a new charter.

Three divisions of the corporation had gradually assumed the powers of the Court Leet: the Common Hall, the Common Council and the Court of Aidermen. The first of these, comprising all the resident members of the Corporation except the mayor, aidermen and burgesses, met twice yearly, once to elect the mayor and other officers and again to elect the Representative, the Council of the Commonalty, which from 1650 onwards assumed the burgesses’ share of nominations for the mayoralty.

Among historians of pre-Conquest England, the life and career of Archbishop Wulfstan I of York (fl. 931–956) has long been overshadowed by those of other, more well-known clerics of the same name. Studies of the period often afford Wulfstan little more than a passing mention, typically as an example of the corruption and secularization that plagued the English church prior to the reforms of the later tenth century. This inattention is somewhat surprising given Wulfstan's participation in many of the most significant events of the mid-tenth century: his twenty-five year tenure – a term longer than that of any other occupant of the diocese between Wulfhere (854–896) and Ælfric Puttoc (1023–1051) – encompassed the collapse of the Viking kingdom of Jórvík, the invasion of Olaf Guthfrithson, the unification of England as a single political entity, and the reigns of kings Æthelstan, Edmund, Eadred, and Eadwig. His influence on the development of the northern Church and at the royal courts of both England and Jórvík made him, as Clare Downham writes, ‘a crucial figure in Northumbrian politics’ and potential ‘king-maker’ for nearly three decades. In large part, the absence of scholarship reflects the paucity of sources: the history of northern Britain during this period is poorly documented, forcing historians seeking even the most basic details of Wulfstan's career to depend primarily on the Worcester (D) recension of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the often unreliable narratives of twelfthand thirteenth-century historians. Moreover, these texts – many of which adopt a distinctively southern bias – frequently cast the archbishop's complex negotiations between the ascendant West Saxon dynasty below the Humber and the faltering Viking kingdom above it in a negative light, in large part influenced by his imprisonment for treason in 952. However, despite Wulfstan's unsavory reputation, those aspects of his episcopate that have attracted the most criticism, his shifting loyalties and entanglement in secular affairs, also make his career a useful lens through which to view the complications and intricacies of tenth-century insular politics.

It is important to understand that the two source-types – textual and material – always work in tandem to increase our understanding. It is only out of necessity to the format of a sourcebook that they are introduced in this manner. There are many instances where the documentary evidence is all that survives. For instance, there are – at present – no surviving arming doublets of the type used in Western Christendom from the fifteenth century. These fabric foundation garments were essential to the proper fitting of a full harness.

Another salient point is worth reiterating here: the choice of my sources is governed by my linguistic and palaeographical expertise. These volumes are in no way comprehensive, nor do I make any claim for them to be. My gauntlet remains to be taken up by colleagues in the field.

A Justified Sinner's Confession

It is only through the hard work of the eminent scholars who have gone before that I have been able to produce this work. By the process of hunting down footnotes, endnotes, quotations, and bibliographies in their publications, I have (true to my Reiver ancestry) ruthlessly plundered from the works of the likes of Meyrick, De Cosson, Dillon, ffoulkes, Laking, Mann, Norman, and Blair. Many references appear multiple times in succeeding works, and thus the strands of the web spread and entwine into a near-impossible tangle. Readers of the grizzled-veteran variety will certainly recognize some auld acquaintances amongst the sources: Sir John Cressy's Milanese harness (97) and a very rudely-named dagger-type bequeathed by a York draper (93) being good examples. A great many of the sources can ultimately be traced to the exhaustive labours of such glossarists and lexicographers as Du Cange in the 1600s and Godefroy and Gay in the nineteenth century. These scholars sometimes drew directly from original manuscripts or, for many entries, from printed editions. It is of paramount importance that due respect is shown to this valuable research – especially as it was undertaken in a pre-digital age.

Whenever feasibly possible, I have endeavoured to source the original document. Loss, damage, or difficulty of access have, at times, hampered progress. By providing detailed references it is hoped that many originals might yet be tracked down.

One Monday at the very end of the fourteenth century, John Green, the perpetual vicar of the prebendal church of Wistow, and John Keleby, the chaplain and parish clerk of the same church, were saying the verses of the day. Then Green stumbled over his words, Keleby laughed, and Green threw his psalter at the clerk. This unseemly incident may well have gone unrecorded, except for the fact that the book ‘slightly broke the skin of his [Keleby’s] head, so that a little blood appeared on the surface, but slight in quantity’. Consequently, the two men went together to Cawood to tell the archbishop of York what had happened. Archbishop Richard Scrope determined that the church had been polluted by the violence committed therein; it must therefore be reconciled.

The idea that a church could be contaminated by bodily fluids was an old one, with its roots in Levitical prohibitions; the idea that a polluted church should be ritually reconciled probably derived from the same source, specifically the ritual for purifying a leper's house. During the course of the Middle Ages, such ideas became firmly entrenched in canon law: the early eleventh century Excerptiones Ecberti Eborcensi archiepiscopi (which were probably written by Wulfstan of York) specify that reconsecration was necessary if a church was polluted by murder or adultery, and the idea that emissions of blood and semen (along with fire and the burial of an infidel or excommunicate) could contaminate a church or churchyard was restated by all the major canonists, including Gratian.

By the later Middle Ages, the main concerns seem to have been bloodshed and sex, both of which could be deeply problematic, and not just because of cultural taboos about bodily fluids. Once a church had been consecrated (that is, as William Durandus put it, once it had been ‘dedicated in a ceremony by the hands of a bishop, and sanctified by God’), it became a sacred space, suitable for activities such as praising God and administering the sacraments. Moreover, as Daniel Thiery has argued, only God was entitled to enact violence in such a place; consequently, prohibitions on violence formed an important part of the consecration ceremony, and acts that would be licit in the secular world were sinful here.

Household accounts of Louis, Duke of Orléans, Paris, 20 May 1394–15 April 1402

London, British Library, Additional Charter 2916 [20 May 1394]

[Christ]ofle [sic] de la mer marchant genneuoys demour’ a par’ neuf Cens quatre vins deux frans dor pour vne arbalestre ou il y a trois dyamanz quatre Rubiz et dix grosses perles que madame la duchesse dorleans fist acheter de luj pour donn’ au dit mons’ le duc

London, British Library, Additional Charter 2588 [9 May 1400] Je Colart de laon paintre et varlet de Chambre de mon s’ le duc dorleans Confesse auoir Receu Cinquante & huit frans pour et a cause dun harnoys de Joustes fait pour mon s’ le duc en la mani[er]e quil sensuit Cest assauoir selle pissi[er]e chanfraing & escu dorez dor et semiz de porc espy de paniture Et pardessus toutes ces choses ont este couu[er]s f ‘ en mani[er]e de haubregie ou dor gippe Et sur le heaume de mon s’ vn timbre de pl’ leue au Ront yssant dun Rosier Et sur la croupe du ch[ev]al de mon s’ vn porcespy […] au long et p[ar] dessus la maille dessus d[i]te tout seme de grans fueilles dorees a[…] celleme[n]t la croupi[er]e du dit ch[ev]al fa[it]e a maille lesquelles choses dessus d[i]ts ont es[t par] moy fa[it]es pour la so[m]me de iiij xx fr’

The statue in the central niche over the West Door of York Minster is a modern rendering of William Melton, the archbishop of York from 1317 to 1340 and the prelate under whom the great rebuilding of the West End of the cathedral church was undertaken. It is fitting to begin this paper with this ecclesiastical image, since it helps us to point up Melton's strong identity both with the Church at large and with the episcopal see of York in particular. Melton's career followed a pattern that was common in England throughout the high and later Middle Ages, whereby clerics who served conspicuously and loyally in the royal administration were rewarded, in the course of time, with episcopal sees. The consequences of such shifting foci, from state service to leadership in the Church, normally guaranteed that the king's interests would be well served both on the bench of bishops in parliament and in the inner workings of the dioceses and of the two ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York.

But it was not always so. The most celebrated case of changed priorities came in the twelfth century with Thomas Becket, who transformed from a friend and minister of Henry II to an ideologically driven defender of the liberties of the Church and, of course, lost his life in the process. There were others who did the same, even if they did not always come to the same gruesome end as Becket. We think here of a series of archbishops of Canterbury, including Stephen Langton, Robert Winchelsey and John Stratford. Closer to home, the tradition of former royal servants turning into champions of the Church was just as strong and self-conscious in the Northern Province. Archbishop Thoresby of York resigned the office of royal chancellor in 1356 as a result of a major row with Edward III over the treatment of the wayward bishop of Ely, Thomas de Lisle; and in 1405, of course, Archbishop Richard Scrope was summarily executed for his leadership of an armed uprising against King Henry IV. In all of these various stands taken by archbishops of Canterbury and York during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there was an element of martyrdom, built sometimes quite self-consciously on the cult of St Thomas Becket, whose tomb at Canterbury Cathedral was of course the premier and most visited shrine in the whole of England.6

Few can have been the occasions when the fruits of labour in the archives of the medieval Church have graced the London stage. During the final month of 2019, however, sell-out audiences were treated to just such a spectacle in the form of a Christmas musical – ‘Joan of Leeds’. Written by Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens and performed at the New Diorama Theatre by Breach Theatre, a young and innovative company, the play told the story of a nun – Joan – who escaped her convent, faked her own death and attempted to live a secular – sexually liberated – life in fourteenth-century, and later, twentieth-century, Yorkshire. Combining elements of the medieval mystery play, as performed by local amateurs, with a modern message, the writers of this hysterically funny piece also re-imagined Joan's character as one of devotion, but now with the message of a later discovery of self and sexuality. The production was based on a single entry, couched in forbidding, heavily abbreviated, rather florid ecclesiastical Latin, taken from the original register of William Melton, archbishop of York (1317–40), now held at the Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York. Published in a full Latin transcript (with no translation) as recently as 2011 by Dr David Robinson in the sixth volume of the long-running edition of Melton's Register by the Canterbury and York Society, this entry, from 11 August 1318, records an order from Archbishop Melton to the dean of Beverley to issue a monition, or warning, to Joan of Leeds (Johanna de Ledis), a nun of the Benedictine priory of St Clement or Clementhorpe, York, to return to her house, and an order to pronounce a sentence of excommunication on her and to discover the names of her accomplices. The entry records that Joan had left her convent and travelled to Beverley, where she attempted to bring about her escape from the religious life.

Apostasy – in the monition, Joan is described as ‘apostatantem’ (‘apostatising’) – a breach of the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience that she had purportedly professed, involving casting off the habit of religion and wandering at large in secular society without authorisation and so risking excommunication, was not, as Donald Logan and Elizabeth Makowski have shown, an uncommon occurrence, and is a phenomenon regularly reflected in the records of the medieval English Church.

The reign of Eadred has long been presented as the conclusion of the West Saxon struggle for England. His contemporary Eric, son of Harald, is usually called the last of the old rulers of Northumbria. According to a passage incorporated into the Anglo-Latin annals of thirteenth-century St Albans, Eric, along with his son and brother, died on Stainmore, ‘slain by a nobleman named Macon’ through ‘the treachery of Earl Oswulf [of Bamburgh]’. The event's significance for northern England could hardly have been stated more grandly, the chronicler adding that ‘after this Eadred reigned in those parts’. There is an extended version of this passage in the thirteenth-century compilation associated with the name of ‘John of Wallingford’, and here the author doubled down, telling his readers that ‘from that time to the present, Northumbria has been subject to the Southenglish (Suthangli), and has been grieving through want of a king of their own and the liberty they once enjoyed’. Readers may recall how, over film of rolling moorland dramatically intensified by synthesizer music, the historian and documentary-maker Michael Wood repeated these accounts in In Search of the Dark Ages: Erik Bloodaxe, assigning them to ‘the lost York chronicle’. Despite the obscurity of Eadred's reign, it is this presentation of the end of both Northumbria and Scandinavian England that underlies his claim to be the son of Edward the Elder who really unified England.

There are some significant interpretational issues with the presentation outlined above that will be explored below. Firstly, one of the oddities about the historical memory of future centuries is Eric's relative insignificance, at least when compared to another contemporary, Óláfr Sigtryggsson. In Ireland, Óláfr appears with the nickname cuarán, referring to a type of manufactured footwear produced in Dublin (and perhaps other Insular Norse cities) in the 940s. The appellation is reminiscent of caligula, ‘little boots’, once applied to the (at the time future) Roman emperor Gaius (r. 37–41) by Roman soldiers, by which he became best known.