Skip to main content

IMC 2020: Sessions

Session 346: Burgesses and Gentlemen: Material Culture at the Boundaries of Status

Monday 6 July 2020, 16.30-18.00

Sponsor:Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York
Organiser:Jeremy Goldberg, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York
Moderator/Chair:Rachel Delman, University College, University of Oxford
Paper 346-aProbi homines: Identities, Bodies, and the Material World of Medieval English Merchants
(Language: English)
Christopher King, School of Archaeology & Ancient History, University of Leicester
Index terms: Archaeology - General, Architecture - Secular, Daily Life
Paper 346-bArms at the Border: Armour and Weaponry in Late Medieval Burgess and Gentry Houses
(Language: English)
Sarah Hinds, Department of History, University of York
Index terms: Archives and Sources, Daily Life, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Social History
Paper 346-cThe Gentleman and His House
(Language: English)
Jeremy Goldberg, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York
Index terms: Architecture - Secular, Archives and Sources, Daily Life, Social History
Abstract

This session uses material culture and documentary evidence for material culture to think about how buildings and their furnishings reflected and were used to project social rank in the English later Middle Ages. In particular it seeks to explore the imagined boundary between the ‘bourgeois’ society of merchants and that of the lower ranks of the aristocracy usually referred to as the gentry. Do merchants seek to emulate the aristocracy or do they project a distinctive cultural identity? Can the same be asked of gentlemen who gain their rank through service rather than bearing arms? The session seeks to stimulate debate as much as to answer questions.