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Course No. 8410 © 2010 The Teaching Company. PB8410A

The Story of M

edieval England

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kCover Image: © Fer Gregory/Shutterstock; Hemera/Thinkstock.

The Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur to the Tudor ConquestCourse Guidebook

Professor Jennifer PaxtonGeorgetown University

Medieval HistorySubtopic

HistoryTopic

Professor Jennifer Paxton, an expert in medieval English history, is Professorial Lecturer in History at Georgetown University and Visiting Assistant Professor in History at The Catholic University of America. Her research has appeared in a wealth of volumes and journals, including Anglo-Norman Studies. A regular public lecturer on medieval history, Professor Paxton has spoken at the Smithsonian Institution, the Shakespeare Theatre, and other prestigious organizations.

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i

Jennifer Paxton, Ph.D. Professorial Lecturer in History

Georgetown University

Professor Jennifer Paxton received her undergraduate training at Yale University, where she earned honors in History and

received the Henry Ellsworth Prize for her senior essay. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1987 and was awarded a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities to pursue her

doctorate at Harvard University, where she worked under the supervision of Professor Thomas N. Bisson. She did her dissertation research at the University of Cambridge under the support of a Frank Knox Memorial Traveling Fellowship. She taught at Harvard University and at The Catholic University of America before completing her Ph.D. in 1999. For over a decade, she has been a Professorial Lecturer in History at Georgetown University. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of America as well.

At Georgetown, Professor Paxton has taught both halves of the medieval European survey, and she designed a course on medieval Irish history that regularly draws high enrollments. She also teaches the history of Western monasticism from the 3rd to the 13th centuries, and she lectures regularly in both the freshman research seminar program and the core humanities course for the doctorate in Liberal Studies. At Catholic University, she teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in medieval English and Irish history.

Professor Paxton’s research focuses on England in the period between the reign of King Alfred and the late 12th century, particularly the intersection between the authority of church and state and the representation of the past in historical texts, especially those produced by religious communities. She is currently completing a book entitled Chronicle and Community in Twelfth-Century England (under contract to Oxford University Press), a study of how monastic historians shaped their narratives to project present polemical concerns onto the past. She has published articles in various edited volumes

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and journals, including The Haskins Society Journal (for one of which she was co-winner of the Dennis Bethell Memorial Prize for best article) and Anglo-Norman Studies.

In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Professor Paxton is past conference director for the Charles Homer Haskins Society, a scholarly society dedicated to the study of the Anglo-Norman realms in the central Middle Ages. She lectures regularly on medieval history at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, and has been invited to speak on British history at the Smithsonian Institution and the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington DC.

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Table of Contents

LECTURE GUIDES

INTRODUCTION

Professor Biography ............................................................................ iCourse Scope .....................................................................................1

LECTURE 1From Britannia to Britain .....................................................................5

LECTURE 2Roman Britain and the Origins of King Arthur.....................................9

LECTURE 3The Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms ....................................................13

LECTURE 4The Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons ...............................................17

LECTURE 5Work and Faith in Anglo-Saxon England ..........................................21

LECTURE 6The Viking Invasions ........................................................................26

LECTURE 7Alfred the Great ................................................................................30

LECTURE 8The Government of Anglo-Saxon England .......................................35

LECTURE 9The Golden Age of the Anglo-Saxons ..............................................40

LECTURE 10The Second Viking Conquest ...........................................................44

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LECTURE 11The Norman Conquest ....................................................................48

LECTURE 12The Reign of William the Conqueror ................................................53

LECTURE 13Con ict and Assimilation...................................................................58

LECTURE 14Henry I—The Lion of Justice ............................................................63

LECTURE 15The Anarchy of Stephen’s Reign ......................................................67

LECTURE 16Henry II—Law and Order..................................................................71

LECTURE 17Henry II—The Expansion of Empire .................................................76

LECTURE 18Courtly Love .....................................................................................80

LECTURE 19Richard the Lionheart and the Third Crusade ..................................84

LECTURE 20King John and the Magna Carta .......................................................89

LECTURE 21Daily Life in the 13th Century .............................................................94

LECTURE 22The Disastrous Reign of Henry III ....................................................98

LECTURE 23The Conquests of Edward I ............................................................103

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LECTURE 24Edward II—Defeat and Deposition .................................................108

LECTURE 25Edward III and the Hundred Years’ War .........................................113

LECTURE 26The Flowering of Chivalry ...............................................................118

LECTURE 27The Black Death .............................................................................123

LECTURE 28The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 ........................................................127

LECTURE 29Chaucer and the Rise of English ....................................................132

LECTURE 30The Deposition of Richard II ...........................................................137

LECTURE 31Daily Life in the 15th Century ...........................................................142

LECTURE 32Henry V and the Victory at Agincourt ..............................................147

LECTURE 33Henry VI—Defeat and Division .......................................................152

LECTURE 34The Wars of the Roses ...................................................................157

LECTURE 35Richard III—Betrayal and Defeat ....................................................162

LECTURE 36England in 1485..............................................................................167

Table of Contents

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SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Timeline ..........................................................................................172Glossary .........................................................................................183Bibliography ....................................................................................193