Books
MEDIEVAL PIRATES: Pirates, Raiders and Privateers, 1204 - 1453.
Jill Eddison
The History Press, Paperback, 192 pages, fully illustrated in colour and with 16 maps.
The author brings us a highly original study of a specific aspect of maritime history. Its focus is principally, although not exclusively, on the Channel from the early thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, and deals with a period initiated by the loss of Normandy in 1204 from a very substantial Anglo-Norman Angevin empire.
The lack of strong political controls on either coast bordering the Channel made it vulnerable to disorder, at times anarchy, and in particular privateering. This vulnerability is set against a backcloth which effectively draws out the allure to privateers of English trade, both through the eastern end of the Channel with Flanders and through the Western Approaches with Gascony and northern Spain. Sailing techniques and maritime technology exposed ships to great risks in open water, inclining mariners to hug the coastline on their voyages and so exposing them to attack from privateers who could identify them from coastal vantage points.
Merchants, so intimately involved in seaborne trade, supplemented their income by resorting to privateering. It is powerfully revealed how there was no clear demarcation between legitimate trade and illegal piracy. Indeed, too many persons in authority had an interest in the proceeds of piracy since English and French monarchs were quick to use such individuals (some assessed in detail in this book, such as Eustace the Monk or John Hawley) to supply them with vessels for their fleets in times of warfare.
This book weaves together knowledge of maritime geography and environments with that of international trade and state development to create a very novel account of the inherent instability of maritime life over two and half medieval centuries. The final chapter makes some highly perceptive comparisons between piracy in the medieval Channel and that occurring in the contemporary Indian Ocean.
THE LIBRARY OF THE SIDNEYS OF PENSHURST PLACE CIRCA 1665
Edited by Germaine Warkentin, Joseph L. Black and William R. Bowen
University of Toronto Press
ISBN 9780802042934
Online price currently $129.50
For two centuries (1540 – 1740) the Sidney family of Penshurst Place, Kent, produced poets, courtiers, collectors, and at least one revolutionary. Increasingly aware of the cultural ideal of the learned nobleman and of libraries as representations of that ideal, the Sidneys massed one of the largest gentry libraries in England of their period. This edition of their library catalogue provides a vivid portrait of the birth, growth, and eventual demise of the distinguished family’s library collection. Comprising nearly 5,000 entries, the catalogue is presented with a full introduction describing the Sidneys’ intellectual world and life, their reading and collecting, the women collectors of the family, and the dispersal of the library in 1743. The editors employ all the resources of contemporary bibliography, print and digital, to identify the titles in the catalogue, and where possible to locate the Sidneys’ own copies still extant. In addition, architectural analysis has been employed to identify and describe the library room at Penshurst, now lost to nineteenth-century renovations.
An elegant introduction presents the history of the manuscript catalogue and intellectual biographies of the owners of the books, in particular the second Earl of Leicester, about whom relatively little is otherwise known.
The project has taken nearly thirty years, as Germaine Warkentin uncovered the manuscript in the (then) Kent Archives on March 19, 1984.
THE ROYAL CHARTERS OF FAVERSHAM
Peter Tann
The Faversham Society
ISBN: 978-1-900214-68-1
210 (+vii) pages, A4, hardback, fully illustrated in colour
Faversham has a magnificent collection of town charters dating from 1252 to 1685, many of which came to the town as a member of the Cinque Ports. It includes the copy of Magna Carta, acquired independently by the town in 1300. This is undoubtedly the finest collection of any town in Britain still in the physical possession of the Mayor and Council.
The charters have never been published, but this handsome, large format, hardback edition remedies the situation. New translations of each document are reprinted here in full and the text is written in an easy style accessible to as wide a readership as possible. The KAS supported the book with a grant from the Kent History Fund.
Each charter is accompanied by an analysis of its context - who, what, and why? A useful box gives ‘the bigger picture’ of events in the wider world. Intersperse and narrative essays, bringing in other sources, give a coherent history of the town for the period. Because so much of the resulting story involves the town’s relationship with the abbot of Faversham Abbey, the book begins with chapters on its foundation in 1148, (also by royal charter) and dissolution (1538).
The Royal Charters of Faversham will interest a far wider readership than those who live in the town and those interested in the Cinque Ports; the dogged and heroic efforts of the townsmen to protect and defend their independence will interest all those engaged in the growing field of early urban history.
Price £30 (by mail: £36.50 inc. p+p). Available from: Fleur de Lis Heritage Centre, 10-13 Preston Street, Faversham ME13 8NS
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