This chapter deals with one aspect of the relations between the United States and Franco's Spain – and vice versa – during the years in which the policy implemented by President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson required the Franco regime to make liberalizing reforms. The policy was opposed by some sectors of Congress, the armed forces, various economic interests, personalities from the world of culture and the press, and a part of public opinion, who pressed for a change that would take Spain out of diplomatic “quarantine” and no longer exclude it from the strategic and economic alliances struck by the United States in Western Europe. Paradoxically, the president and Acheson implemented the policy at the same time as their administration was doing its utmost to contain communism. Of course, Franco was at the head of one of the most doctrinally anti-communist regimes in Europe, so they clearly gave more weight to the fascist nature of the regime and Spain's friendship with the powers defeated in 1945 than to its undeniable anti-communism. This raises various issues such as the singularity of Spain's position in the immediate post-war period; the struggle between the executive and legislative powers in the United States to direct foreign policy; the increasing influence of the armed forces on the design of this foreign policy; the relations between the Allies in the years of transition from anti-fascism to anti-communism as the fundamental paradigm of international relations, with Spain being a surviving case that aroused anti-fascist feeling; and the influence of personal factors – beliefs, feelings, emotions, prejudices – on politics, in particular those of Truman and his anti-Franco sentiments.

Even though it is unlikely any of those living in late medieval Kent would have seen a copy of what has come to be known as the Gough Map, they would have recognised their ‘country’ due to its position between the great walled city of London (to the northwest) at the head of the Thames Estuary and English Calais across the Narrow Seas (to the east). For any potential Kent audience, the key features would have been the named coastal and riverine towns across the county and the dominance of the river systems that fed into the Thames Estuary and by extension the North Sea. While it is likely the map's early London provenance may explain this apparent topographical emphasis on the relationship between Kent and the capital (and its river), politically, economically and even socially this would have been viewed as appropriate by many in Kent, especially among the leading citizens of the various towns and cities and their rural peers. For even though there are no roads shown as passing through Kent, the marking of the recently rebuilt Rochester Bridge across the Medway would have been sufficient for those familiar with the county to denote the importance of the ancient route from London to Dover via the two episcopal cities of Rochester and Canterbury.

Therefore, the Gough Map is a helpful entry into this contextual exploration of Kent's history during a period that saw a complex mix of continuity and change in all aspects of society. Although much of the emphasis here will be on the maritime communities, as Gough highlights, inland urban communities were similarly part of this network of waterborne commerce. As a case in point, the stone from the quarries near Maidstone was carried from there via the River Medway and the Thames Estuary to Whitstable, and thence from that port by cart to Canterbury for the rebuilding of the city's Newingate in the late fifteenth century.

In the year 1373, a young woman in the burgeoning city of Norwich fell dangerously ill, during which illness she experienced visions of the crucified Christ. Some twenty years later, this woman, Julian of Norwich, withdrew into a local anchorhold, a sealed cell attached to a church, in order to live a solitary life devoted to God. There she wrote and rewrote her meditations on her earlier visionary encounters. In the second of her two texts especially, Julian forged a witnessed theology in which God's divine love manifested as a devoted mother nurturing the whole of humanity. For Julian, this feminised apparition of divine love was ultimately ‘oure lords mening’ and, moreover, ‘made alle things profitable to us’.

Such a vision of God, while hardly mainstream during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, nevertheless chimed readily with what has been termed by scholars the ‘affective turn’ within late medieval spiritual practices in England and beyond. Indeed, in Bishop's Lynn near Julian's hometown of Norwich, another local woman, Margery Kempe, who would later spend six weeks in Bristol mixing with the town's wealthy and literate merchant community, was also experiencing visionary encounters with God, which she too would eventually translate into written text. Driven in part by these experiences, in the year 1413 (some four years before her Bristol sojourn), this mercantile wife and mother to fourteen children visited Julian in her Norwich cell, keen to receive guidance and draw on the older visionary's experience in order to make sense of her own visions and the intensely somatic and uncontrollable bodily and spiritual ecstasies they incited.

In 1486, when nine-month-old Miles Frebrygge was playing with a Thomas Becket pilgrim badge given to him by an older boy, he ‘eventually put it in his mouth, as is the custom of such [children]’. The badge, too large to fit down young Miles's throat began to choke the child. His panic-stricken father desperately tried to help his son but could not remove the badge; unable to breathe, the signs of life left poor Miles. The father turned to prayer and repeatedly called upon ‘the most distinguished King Henry’ and ‘the most compassionate Mary’ to help his child, whereupon Miles, through the miraculous power of the dead king, suddenly spat out the badge and was able to breathe again.

Throughout this book, we have journeyed into the world of Alfonso X's imperial ambitions and their profound imprint on the Estoria de Espanna. Alfonso's reign, marked by cultural efflorescence, also bore the weight of his relentless pursuit of the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. This dream, born from his familial ties to the Staufen emperors, and the legacy of the Imperium Hispanicum that his father Fernando III had tried to revive, faced formidable challenges. From papal opposition to the reticence of Castilian-Leonese nobles, Alfonso's quest was fraught with obstacles from the very beginning.

Yet, Alfonso X's determination never wavered: why would a king so stubbornly pursue an aspiration that the papacy had denied from its very inception? In the context of the fight for both imperial and Peninsular hegemony, Alfonso X leveraged his privileged position to reinforce his dominant role in the Iberian Peninsula, a legacy inherited from the unification of Castile and Leon by his father, Fernando. This, combined with the rapid advance of the Christian kingdoms against Islam in the thirteenth century, and the enduring imperial idea linked to the kingdom of Leon – embodied by monarchs such as Alfonso VII, the emperor – made Alfonso X's connection to the Staufen family the final element necessary to consolidate his imperial ambitions.

Given these circumstances, the arrival of the Pisan emissaries could not have been timelier. The proposal to crown Alfonso X as Holy Roman Emperor provided the perfect opportunity to assert his Iberian superiority. At this point, Alfonso inherited two imperial strands: the legacy of the Imperium Hispanicum from Fernando III and his predecessors, and his Staufen lineage through his mother, Beatriz of Swabia. This convergence fuelled his concentrated effort to claim the German imperial crown, traditionally known as the Fecho del Imperio, one of Alfonso's most significant and costly endeavours.

The concept of rebellion was ubiquitous across medieval Europe both geographically and chronologically. All European polities witnessed numerous armed revolts that varied in scale and success. Such insurrections were not in themselves evidence of a disorderly and chaotic society, but rather a symptom of a political culture that viewed violent resistance as a legitimate option for redressing grievances. The fifteen essays in this collection examine rebellions from across Europe, highlighting the various forms that this active resistance could take. In one respect, the coverage of this collection is very broad, both in terms of its geographical scope – ranging from Sweden in the northern Baltic to the Reconquista kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula and from the British Isles in the north-eastern Atlantic to Hungary and Slovakia in Central Europe – as well as its chronological span, encompassing some four centuries from twelfth-century Sicily to late fifteenth-century Ireland. In another respect, the essays in this collection are connected in a number of ways. Catholicism was the dominant religion in the all the rebellions being discussed and those societies were ruled predominantly by kings and landed elites.

His last voyage across the Atlantic was pleasant, but his reception in Spain was convoluted. His rules for confession and absolution in Chiapa had preceded him home, and the encomendero class across the Indies and those back in Spain campaigned to make the encomiendas perpetual, handed down from father to son and heirs forever. A flag no redder could be waved before the still bishop of Chiapa. He fought this new challenge for the rest of his life.

Everyone, it seemed, was offering money re the life of the encomiendas. The encomenderos in Spain offered to pay the Crown an immense gift for recognizing perpetuity. The Dominicans in Peru, especially one of Bartolomé's brothers, Father Domingo de Santo Tomás, “organized the Indians [in Peru] to authorize Las Casas to offer Philip II a large sum of money to deny perpetuity.” There appeared to be some proto-modern capitalism at work here.

“It was,” one of Las Casas's most astute modern students, Lewis Hanke, wrote, “in fact a blank check, for Las Casas was authorized to offer as much cash as would be necessary to outbid the encomenderos, no matter how much they offered for the privilege of perpetuity.” While the battle with the encomenderos grew warmer, in the meantime, in 1549, Las Casas pounced on another adversary, this time in his very own Dominican camp.

One of the most antagonistic Dominicans towards the Indians was Domingo de Betanzos, who opposed, for example, the training of Indians for the priesthood.

Thomas Churchyard's 1587 volume, The Worthines of Wales, composed predominantly in verse, is a description and celebration of Wales, loosely based on the author's journey through parts of the province. As the title-page declares, with a degree of bookseller's exaggeration, it is ‘enterlarded with many wonders and right strange matter to consider of: All the which labour and device is drawn forth and set out by Thomas Churchyard, to the glorie of God, and honour of his Prince and Countrey’. It is purportedly unfinished, since Churchyard's travels were curtailed by illness, and functions as something of a miscellany, since the topographical passages are accompanied by the transcription of historical material, digressions on subjects such as gentility and mountains, and reflections on the author's life. But this is by no means a rough or unconsidered book. Indeed the Worthines is Churchyard's longest poetic work; produced when he was in his early sixties, it also stands as the work of a self-consciously mature author. Churchyard is indeed remarkable for his longevity: probably first writing while in the service of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in the 1540s; having his earliest work in print in the 1550s; and publishing his final poem, an elegy on Elizabeth, in 1604. Looking across this career, The Worthines of Wales stands as arguably his greatest and most representative work.

Churchyard has not been greatly appreciated by literary historians. For C. S. Lewis, he is broadly typical of the ‘drab age’; while Lewis concedes that Churchyard may occasionally produce ‘a pleasing line’, this is, he concludes, ‘probably accidental’. Churchyard is ultimately a poet with ‘no standards’.

After my mother's death in 2005, when we were clearing out her apartment, I found in her dresser five light-blue international envelopes held together by a thick rubber band. They were addressed to my parents in my handwriting. Here are the contents of the first one:

Though K.B. McFarlane would rebuke historians for too often and too eagerly taking the part of ‘king's friends’, one might occasionally feel a twinge of sympathy when considering the scale of the challenges faced by twelfth-century rulers of Sicily. The Norman (Hauteville) monarchy was a newly-made one; Ruggero II (r.1130–54) had only upgraded his title from count to king in 1130, taking advantage of papal schism to contrive the blessing of one of the rival contenders to the papal throne. Norman control in southern Italy (which included much of modern Puglia, Calabria, Basilicata and Campania) was imposed on a landscape with its own complex political frameworks. Ruggero II's coronation was only the latest step in attempts to embed Hauteville power in the region. The eleventh century had seen strategic marriages into Lombard families as a way of enmeshing the Hautevilles within local princely hierarchies. Rival princes and counts were not the only other sources of political power in the region; as Paul Oldfield has demonstrated, the towns and cities of southern Italy had their own traditions of long-standing, which were not erased by the presence of Norman upstarts. Finally, there was a long history of mistrust and competition within the house of Hauteville itself, as different branches of the family competed for the spoils on offer in southern Italy.

While working on the English queen's household in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Johnstone devised a framework that outlines three categories for the methods used to provide for a late medieval queen consort. In this framework, one of the queen's primary sources of revenue was a traditional payment to the queen that seems to have first been mentioned in a treatise from the twelfth century. This treatise, concerned with matters relating to the Royal Exchequer and commonly known as the Dialogus de Scaccario, was written during the reign of Henry II (c.1133–89; r. 1154–89) by the king's treasurer, Richard FitzNigel. In his discussion on the obligations and fees due to the king, FitzNigel stated, as in the above quotation, that whoever owed certain payments to the king was also bound to pay a requisite sum to the queen as her prerogative. This sum was set at one mark of gold to be paid to the queen for every one hundred marks of silver to the king. Proportionally, since a mark of gold was understood to be equal to ten marks of silver, this meant that a 10 per cent levy was imposed on the payer in addition to what was already payable to the king. This payment was known as queen's gold and may well have been enjoyed only by medieval queens in England and its neighbours in the British Isles.

St Thomas Becket’s great popularity throughout medieval England and Europe is reflected in ubiquitous references to his feasts in medieval calendars appearing in books of hours, psalters, breviaries, and other manuscripts. However, calendar illustrations of the saint are relatively rare and are also rarely studied. In part, this may be because most of these images occur in books of an unusual, folded format, rather than in codices. These accordion, or concertina, folded almanacs survive in around thirty copies but probably once were much more numerous. The nine known English examples (eight manuscript and one printed) typically contain three representations of Becket. In date the manuscripts are mainly fifteenth century, although the latest manuscript example is dated 1535, and sixteenth-century xylographic versions, printed using woodblocks, exist up to 1554 (see Appendix).

Three and a half years after the assassination of Thomas Becket, Henry II performed a public penance at Becket's church, Canterbury Cathedral, on 12 July 1174. The ceremony included the king's confession and his receipt of several hundred blows administered by members of the clergy using a rod. As part of Henry II's penance, the cult of the newly canonised saint was supported beyond England by Henry's daughters. This paper will examine Becket's cult in Castilla, where the king's daughter Leonor married Alfonso VIII only three months before Becket was assassinated in 1170 [Fig. 6.1]. Once he was canonised in 1173, the clergy actively promoted his cult by means of art and architecture, with the backing of the Crown. Although these works have previously been enumerated, they merit further analysis, along with closer attention to the roles of the clergy and Castilian magnates in addition to the king and queen. These monuments to Becket, produced in various media and for different sponsors, share the iconography quickly established throughout Europe upon the saint's canonisation. Whether figural, architectural, or verbal, they attest to the breadth of his cult in Castilla while Castilla and England were bound by marriage and common interests. It was a golden age. The cult appears to have declined during the fourteenth century when relations between Spain and England became less amicable.