San Antonio College Library

This study traces the subject to the reign of Henry VIII. The author describes the location and analyses the types of prison buildings: county gaols, 'national' prisons (like the Fleet), franchise, municipal, 'bishops' and forest prisons. He also deals with the administration, staffing, repair and appearance of the buildings. Professor Pugh emphasizes that imprisonment was widely used as a punishment and was not wholly custodial and coercive; that...

Divided between the outer world of affairs and the inner world of poetic insight, Chaucer sought to make sense of his changing, conflicting world. In Chaucer and the Late Medieval World, Lillian M. Bisson examines the societal issues that the poet explored in his work. Bisson provides lively interpretations of Chaucer's texts, especially The Canterbury Tales, in the context of the paradigmatic shifts taking place around him, and offers a broad historical...

"This is a study of rural social structure in the English county of Essex between 1350 and 1525. It seeks to understand how, in the population collapse after the Black Death (1348-1349), a particular economic environment affected ordinary people's lives in the areas of migration, marriage and employment, and also contributed to patterns of religious nonconformity, agrarian riots and unrest, and even rural housing. The period under scrutiny is often...

This groundbreaking work traces developments in poor relief from the mid fourteenth century to the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601.