Medieval People

by Eileen Power

King Chilperic,

Sedulius,

internecine

fête

Auvergne

Symmachus

patrimony

Minervius

Anastasius

Attius Tiro Delphidius,

Exuperius,

Ricimer

Porsenna,

Brennus,

castigate

Salvian

Orosius,

despoiled

Ambrose,

Euric,

Rhône;

pusillanimous

panegyric

Clovis

as Dill puts it, the barbarian might rule the land, but the laws of polite society would be administered as before.

proscription

tallage,

Chilperic

Fredegond,

King Gu...

foederati

hypocausts

Caerleon?

How could they imagine that anything so solid might conceivably disappear? Their roads grew better as their statesmanship grew worse and central...

douceur de la vie.

epigones

villeinage

We still praise famous men, for he would be a poor historian who could spare one of the great figures who have shed glory or romance upon the page of history; but we praise them with due recognition of the fact that not only great individuals, but people as a whole, unnamed and undistinguished masses of people, now sleeping in unknown graves, have also been concerned in the story. Our fathers that begat us have come to their own at last.

Irminon,

might know exactly what lands belonged to it and who lived on those lands, very much as William I drew up an estate book of his whole kingdom and called it Domesday Book. In this estate book is set down the name of every little estate

fisc

These tributary lands were divided into numbers of little farms, called manses, each occupied by one or more families.

If you had paid a visit to the chief or seigniorial manse, which the monks kept in their own hands, you would have found a little house, with three or four rooms, probably built of stone, facing an inner court, and on one side of it you would have seen a special group of houses hedged round, where the women serfs belonging to the house lived and did their work; all round you would also have seen little wooden houses, where the household serfs lived, workrooms, a kitchen, a bakehouse, barns, stables, and other farm buildings, and round the whole a hedge carefully planted with trees, so as to make a kind of enclosure or court. Attached to this central manse was a considerable amount of land--ploughland, meadows, vineyards, orchards, and almost all the woods or forests on the estate. Clearly a great deal of labour would be needed to cultivate all these lands. Some of that labour was provided by servile workers who were attached to the chief manse and lived in the court. But these household serfs were not nearly enough to do all the work upon the monks' land, and far the greater part of it had to be done by services paid by the other landowners on the estate.

seigniorial

it. In return for these holdings the owner or joint owners of every manse had to do work on the land of the chief manse for about three days in the week. The steward's chief business was to see that they did their work properly, and from every one he had the right to demand two kinds of labour. The first was field work: every year each man was bound to do a fixed amount of ploughing on the domain land (as it was called later on), and also to give what was called a corvée, that is to say, an unfixed amount of ploughing, which the steward could demand every week when it was needed; the distinction corresponds to the distinction between week work and boon work in the later Middle Ages.

a smith would have to make lances for the abbey's contingent to the army,

Villicus,

Villaris,

Bodo

Ermentrude