PART 1: INTRODUCTORY COURSES
- Introduction to Latin (tutor Andy Fear).
This course gives an overview of the Latin grammar and syntax that are encountered in basic Latin texts. Its aim is to give a solid foundation that will allow readers successfully to understand how words fit together in Latin sentences and how to decipher them successfully. For ease of understanding printed texts, not manuscripts, are used throughout (no palaeography is involved). No prior knowledge of Latin or any modern foreign language is assumed. The recommended course text is Collins Latin Dictionary and Grammar.
It is very much recommended that students acquire confidence in Latin before they attempt to decipher medieval handwriting, as knowing how a sentence is structured and what case endings to expect is an essential first step.
- Introduction to Medieval Documents (tutor Christopher Whittick).
This group concentrates on reading the kinds of Latin documents most frequently encountered by historians and others when they first explore medieval records, including land conveyances, manor court rolls, estate and financial accounts. Our documents will all be comparatively short but will contain a range of different handwriting forms, scribal abbreviations, and diplomatic conventions, so often considered a barrier to reading medieval texts.
As the emphasis will be on developing palaeographic skills, students ought already to have some familiarity with Latin grammar. Contact the tutor if you would like to discuss where you are in the learning process. Most students will experience a degree of difficulty with the documents if they have limited previous reading experience. But our sessions will be good-humoured and supportive. Everybody gets a turn at the wheel, reading a line or two; everybody will make mistakes and discover that someone else’s line is easier than the one in front of them. That is the point of participating in the summer school, and the tutor will go through the examples, highlighting the differences in letter-forms over time and the standard forms of abbreviations.
A few weeks before the summer school you will receive digital images of the documents that are going to be used, and students are encouraged to prepare draft transcriptions of those parts that they feel they can interpret. If there are documents on which you are already working do feel free to share them in advance. They may be suitable for the group, or there may be the chance to discuss them with the tutor one-to-one.
Also recommended for this course – because they have illustrations of original documents – are Denis Stuart, Manorial Records (Phillimore, paperback 2004), and Hilary Marshall, Palaeography for family and local historians (Phillimore, 2004). For words and phrases that you are likely to come across, a copy of Eileen Gooder, Latin for Local Historians (2nd edition, 1978) is worth having – although the 2013 Routledge reprint seems very expensive, so perhaps trying to locate a second-hand copy would be best).
PART 2: SUBJECT COURSES
- Inquisitions Post Mortem and Related Records from the Later Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (tutor Simon Harris).
Inquisitions post mortem (IPMs) are a class of records held predominantly at The National Archives at Kew (C 132). They are formal inquiries into the lands held by a specific group of landholders, tenants-in-chief, at the time of their deaths. Tenants-in-chief were those landholders who held their land, or some of their lands, from the king directly. This inevitably included all of those at the top of society – dukes, earls, barons etc. But it could also include much more minor figures such as townsmen and wealthy peasants. The inquisitions were produced so that the crown could protect its feudal rights, especially important if a tenant-in-chief died without an heir, or with an heir or heirs who were not of age. The documents in the class extend well beyond the inquisitions themselves. The class also includes the writs used to initiate the administrative process such as writs diem clausit extremum (literally meaning that a tenant ‘had closed his last day’) – and usually addressed to the escheator (the official responsible for the inquisition process); proofs of age – the means by which the heir or heirs could take possession of their estates; and extents – detailed surveys of estates. The inquisitions were usually completed county by county, so that more important individuals could have several inquisitions completed.
The class will look at a wide selection of the records in the class drawn from the reign of Edward III, Richard II and the Lancastrian kings. It will look at records for members of the nobility, but also those lower down the social scale. The class will develop an understanding of the administrative process and engage with the different types of documents that the class holds. There is a very useful website for IPMs – https://inquisitionspostmortem.ac.uk/ This gives background information about IPMs and related material, as well as case studies, and a guide to further reading, but also allows you to search the class for particular people and places and access English translations of the records. If you intend to register for this class, please do look at this website, and if there are any particular IPMs that you would like to look at then please let the tutor know.
This is a further class building on the course last year when records from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were examined. However, this should not preclude anyone who did not attend the course in 2024 from joining the class this year. The link above will give useful background information, and the tutor is willing to engage with new members to help bring them up to speed prior to the commencement of the school.
- The French of England (tutor Shelagh Sneddon).
Between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries Anglo-Norman French was one of the main languages of England. It was the spoken and written language of the aristocracy, surviving in numerous letters, and a literary language with texts ranging from saints’ lives to histories and Arthurian romances – but it was also a legal and administrative language, used for a wide variety of documents, including the records of parliament, petitions to the king, wills, diplomatic documents such as peace treaties, legal proceedings, military records and many others. This course aims to introduce students to these documents, putting them in their context: to make them confident readers of Anglo-Norman, and also to explore the richness of sources in that language.
For students with G.C.S.E. level French.