Richard Wilson

Carole Rawcliffe

Norwich is an important city today, but in Medieval times it was our second city and a centre of government power. Here is its story.

Medieval Norwich

This book traces the often complex relations between the three Stafford Dukes of Buckingham and the Crown.

1394-1521

The Staffords, Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham

Norwich remained the second largest city in England until the eighteenth century. Its history over the last 450 years is one of exceptional interest. Norwich since 1550 is a full acount of the post-medieval history of the city and covers all aspects of Norwich life, including its population, housing, churches and chapels, politics, work, education, arts, architecture and medical care. It brings out Norwich's individuality and shows how it became the city it is today. While Norwich changed and developed in many ways over the centuries, its textiles could not compete compete with those of the northern boom towns of the Industrial Revolution. Instead it found a role as a regional and banking capital.

Norwich Since 1550

Claire Weeda

Tapping into a combination of court documents, urban statutes, material artefacts, health guides and treatises, Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe offers a unique perspective on how premodern public authorities tried to create a clean, healthy environment. Overturning many preconceptions about medieval dirt and squalor, it presents the most outstanding recent scholarship on how public health norms were enforced in the judicial, religious and socio-cultural sphere before the advent of modern medicine and the nation-state, crossing geographical and linguistic boundaries and engaging with factors such as spiritual purity, civic pride and good neighbourliness.

Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe

Linda Clark

Described as "a golden age of pathogens", the long fifteenth century was notable for a series of international, national and regional epidemics that had a profound effect upon the fabric of society. The impact of pestilence upon the literary, religious, social and political life of men, women and children throughout Europe and beyond continues to excite lively debate among historians, as the ten papers presented in this volume confirm. They deal with the response of urban communities in England, France and Italy to matters of public health, governance and welfare, as well as addressing the reactions of the medical profession to successive outbreaks of disease, and of individuals to the omnipresence of Death, while two, very different, essays examine the important, if sometimes controversial, contribution now being made by microbiologists to our understanding of the Black Death.

Carole Rawcliffe

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