For a little over one hundred miles, the Anglo-Scottish border wends its way west to east from the head of the Solway Firth to just north of the River Tweed. This line roughly follows the one that was legally fixed in 1237 when Alexander II of Scotland (1214–49) and his brother-in-law, Henry III of England (1216–72), signed the Treaty of York. Its process of becoming and what it has symbolised is rather more complicated. In the eleventh century, the kingdom of Alba expanded south, acquiring Lothian and Strathclyde; in the twelfth century, Galloway became part of the kingdom; in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, several attempts were made to fix a definite boundary between the two kingdoms. G.W.S. Barrow has suggested that by 1092, the ‘new castle of Carlisle … paralleling the New Castle upon Tyne of 1080, constituted the essence of the Border’ from the Norman perspective, with the actual border delimited along a line between the Solway and the Esk.2 David I (1124–53) took Carlisle in 1136 and agreed with King Stephen (1135–54) at Durham to restore the border to the Rere Cross at Stainmore, which had served as a boundary marker between the two kingdoms in the mid-tenth century. The Scots held Carlisle for two decades, before Henry II (1154–89) compelled Máel Coluim IV (1153–65) to surrender the city, along with Cumberland and Westmorland, in 1157. The late twelfth century saw the Scottish kings seeking to assert claims over Northumberland and other territories, and, in 1174, William I (the Lion, 1165–1214) was captured at the Battle of Alnwick during a French-backed invasion of northern England.

Words are at the heart of the matter. Words spoken and written, then as now. What words say and what they do, who speaks or hears, and above all, who interprets what words are meant to do and say. Words taken from the Bible are especially fraught when two faith communities coexist in unequal tension. In the world of northern France from the latter twelfth through the thirteenth centuries, Jews are increasingly perceived by Churchmen, moralists, and monarchs as an unwelcome, even threatening Other whose persistent disbelief calls for condemnation, conversion, and expulsion. In such a context, speaking with biblical words took place in a hotly contested arena, a place of encounter, a contact zone.

This study examines how biblical material is encountered in a variety of French works, in order to follow how claims to authority, hence correct and incorrect reading, are enmeshed with competing approaches to interpretation and intimately tied to the way different levels of literal and figurative meanings are defined. In this epilogue, I briefly put into dialogue key turning points to “come to terms” with a range of Jewish representations within Christian texts that engage the question of how we might appropriately characterize their stance.

What is deader than drab, glossier than gold, and bad all over? Answer:Lazarus haud procul hinc Bethanes regna tenebat Dives opum, clarus, genus alto a sanguine regum. (Not far from there, Lazarus of Bethany ruled his kingdom – rich in resources, famous, descended from the high blood of kings.)

The only poetry that comes off worse than ‘drab’ in C. S. Lewis's study of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama is neo-Latin. Lewis denied that his use of the term ‘drab’ was ‘dyslogistic’ (although, he confessed, ‘[t]here is more bad [drab] than good’). He would have owned, however, that his characterisations of neo-Latin verse certainly were dyslogistic. Vida's Christiad, a sixteenth-century Virgilian epic on the life of Christ, was, for Lewis, ‘the supreme example’ of neo-Latin's entirely original, unrivalled and unprecedented kind of badness, ‘which no man could incur by sheer defect of talent but only by “endless labour to be wrong”’. If Lewis is to be believed, an ‘unchanging and unmeaning glossiness’, a ‘varnish and stucco’, spreads across Vida's lines above on Lazarus, the influence of which was ‘deadly’ and threatened to destroy the likes of Milton. It is not just that Vida ‘polishes up the lowness’ of the biblical story, giving Lazarus a lustre he lacks in the gospel; it is also (we might add) that this polishing is achieved by stitching together fragments of a pathologically, meaninglessly Virgilian language, with the result that, beyond the dazzling, glossy surface, this still-living Lazarus is no less clothed in strips of graveclothes than when he is later resurrected: ‘regna tenebat’; ‘dives opum’; ‘genus alto a sanguine’.

On 4 June 1630 the Privy Councillors and chief justices who reconvened as judges in Star Chamber pronounced verdict and sentence against Alexander Leighton (c.1568/70–1649), a Scottish-born minister, medical doctor, and controversialist charged with ‘framing, publishing and dispersing a scandalous book against king, peers, and prelates’, a book the court found to be ‘full of most pestilent, devilish and dangerous assertions’. By writing, printing, and distributing this ‘seditious’ work (An Appeal to the Parliament: or Sions Plea against the Prelacie, 1629) Leighton had ‘committed a most odious and heinous offence, deserving the severest punishments the court could inflict’. Being a prerogative court, based on the royal will rather than statute or the common law, Star Chamber could not impose death, but had a versatile range of sanctions in its armoury. It used them to the full against Leighton.

This review is followed by another on Ambroise Thomas's Carmagnola, ultimately premiered on 19 April, but this latter is not included here.

The new work [Carmagnola] would have been staged much earlier if the numerous rehearsals of [Mozart’s] Don Giovanni had not caused its postponement for several weeks. It's annoying that these prolonged sessions delayed the performance of the new opera without any advantage to the ancient masterpiece; we know that twice in a few days Don Giovanni was announced to no avail as Barroilhet, feeling hoarse during the first performance, which was consequently abandoned, was replaced by the overture and a trio from Guillaume Tell. He was then indisposed shortly before the second performance, which did not take place at all.

If Barroilhet doesn't give up this celebrated role, which seems to terrify him, it's worth making some observations about the way he seemed to me, on the basis of a few scenes, to understand the Mozartian style. Barroilhet clearly belongs to that class of singers, so abundant in Italy, for whom the music, words and the plot of an opera are merely more or less plausible vehicles for his personal success. Everything, if we are to believe these people, must lend itself to the demands and even the characteristics of their talent. If they’re dealing with a living composer, they oblige him to change a host of passages in their roles according to their own ideas.

Berlioz takes the opportunity of a large-scale concert to complain about one of his major bugbears, the poor tax (literally ‘right of the poor’) which varying in amount over the years, taxed the takings (not just the profits) of concerts and other entertainments. It had been introduced by Louis XIV, to be used for the maintenance of the poor. It was reduced to a mere 1 per cent in February 1848 at the outset of the revolution. The bracket […] in the third paragraph marks the omission of an anecdote whose relevance Berlioz himself questioned.

The Opéra is currently preparing a ceremonial concert of the greatest interest conducted by M. Habeneck: a large-scale performance of the famous oratorio The Creation. Haydn's masterpiece will be heard this time in its entirety; the five hundred performers, ranged on an amphitheatre built on the stage, cannot fail to make a colossal impact in the acoustic of the Opéra, whose dimensions, although vast, are not excessive.

The solos will be sung by Mme Gras-Dorus, Mme [Cinti]-Damoreau, Mlle Dobré, and MM. Duprez, Barroilhet, Roger, and Hermann-Léon. The concert will conclude with Weber's lovely overture Oberon and with the ‘Song of Triumph’ from Handel's Judas Maccabeus. The takings from this splendid evening are to be given to the Association of Musicians, a recently formed, really useful institution, which already includes most Paris musicians, as well as a large number of foreign ones.

Most people, in most societies, live private lives, with private crises, removed from the central events that exercise chroniclers and historians. Yet their lives are framed and constrained by the cultural and political circumstances of their age. This was true in early seventeenth century England when the majority of Charles I's subjects attended primarily to local and domestic matters until the crisis of the kingdom demanded their attention. Preoccupied by their careers and comforts, and driven by personal anxieties and ambitions, people had to cope too with the pressures of public occurrences and the business of church and state. In that regard they shared some stresses with our own age, though theirs eventuated in civil war and revolution.

Early modern England is one of the most intensively studied areas of history, a reflection not only of the drama of events but also the richness and depth of the sources. A bureaucratized royal government generated rooms full of paper concerning the nation's political, administrative, legal, financial, and religious business. Institutions of local and ecclesiastical government, courts of law, landed estates, chartered companies, and individuals added reams of documentation. Parish officials tended registers of rates, receipts, and life-cycle events, while leading families created private archives of accounts and correspondence. Although only a minority of the population was fully literate, most people were familiar with the written word, and the elite were awash with text. Despite lacunae, and four centuries of losses, a surprising amount of manuscript and printed material survives and has been made available for research.

Las Siete Partidas (c.1265), Alfonso X's (r.1252–84) most ambitious legal code, compared treason to leprosy. It could not be cured, those afflicted with it became outcasts, and it was an illness which also harmed the reputation of an individual and their lineage. In early 1323, abuses in the collection of taxes by the Flemish ruling elites had precipitated an uprising in coastal Flanders that soon spread from the countryside to other castellanies and urban centres like Bruges and Ypres, whose skilled artisans quickly made common cause with the rebellious peasantry. While some of the first rural riots were dispersed by the year's end, the general hatred felt towards the nobility, together with the pro-French stance of Louis I, count of Nevers (r.1322–46), who had recently succeeded his grandfather as count of Flanders, soon transformed this localised peasant insurrection into a full-scale rebellion supported by a much broader coalition drawn from across the social hierarchy.1 At first the rebels were mostly peasants but, by the end of 1323, they had been joined by a significant section of the urban nobility and artisanal classes. As townsmen and peasants fought alongside each other under the banner of Willem de Deken, the burgomaster of Bruges, the socially mixed insurgents quickly captured the cities of Nieuport, Veurne and Ypres.2 At Courtrai, they were even able to take Count Louis himself prisoner. In 1325, however, the rebels’ momentum diminished after their attempts to seize Ghent and Oudenaarde had failed despite two lengthy sieges. The king of France, Charles IV (r.1322–28), used this opportunity to intervene and negotiate the Peace of Arques, the terms of which included the release of the count of Flanders from captivity in February 1326. But the ceasefire broke down just a year later, prompting the rebels to take up arms once more. The issue of treason had been discussed extensively in Castilian chronicles since the twelfth century. However, it was Alfonso X's legal works, especially the Partidas, which focused and developed the concept of treason, first, by defining it, and then by imposing a royal monopoly over its jurisdiction – if the same crime was committed against a lord, it was considered to be alevosia, treachery not treason. Alfonso's view of treason was heavily dependent on the idea of the king as sennor natural (natural lord), which implied that all the inhabitants of the kingdom (naturales) were obliged to serve him. Therefore, from his reign onwards, treason was identified as a crime of laese maiestatis.

“Bad Prizes”

American seamen who were fortunate enough to have been on a captured vessel that the Prize Council declared a “bad prize” (prise nulle) would be released from port jails without ever having gone to a prison depot, and were never really prisoners of war, which is not to say that they did not suffer from cold, damp, and bad food. There were not many cases of the capture being judged invalid. Captain Gorham Coffin's vessel, the General Lincoln, mentioned above, was one such, and his crew were released from jail after a very long wait.

Another example was the case of the Saratoga, Captain Barkir Baker, captured on 26 April 1812, as was the Massachusetts, Captain Alan Case, by the Espadon, Captain Balidar. Soon afterward, the Massachusetts and its prize crew were captured by the Royal Navy's Helicon and taken in to an English port as a British prize. The Saratoga was sent in to Roscoff, along with the crew and a few of the men who had been taken off the Massachusetts. Perhaps because the expected declaration of war by the United States brought some benevolence, the Massachusetts crew members were granted permission to leave within weeks and sailed from Morlaix. By the middle of July, the Saratoga was judged a bad prize and returned to the owners. The crew were released. (See Appendix A for the released men's names.) Captain Baker sailed the Saratoga between France, Britain and America as a cartel, ferrying British seamen captured by American privateers, who brought their prizes in to France, to Britain to be exchanged for American prisoners, who were then taken home to America.

In the early ninth-century poem De Abbatibus, addressed to Ecgberht, bishop of Lindisfarne, the presbyter Æthelwulf describes a smith named Cwicwine, a monk of a cell of Lindisfarne, whose work with hammer, metal, and anvil complemented his ascetic labor of fasting and prayer. After Cwicwine sang his psalms, Æthelwulf says, ‘the hammer rang on the anvil as the metal was struck’ (continuo insonuit percussis cudo metallis / malleus) while the smith made ‘vessels’ (culdarios) for the monks’ refectory table. While Cwicwine's art produced useful things to support the life of the monastery, smith-work also adorned the cell's church with pennants ‘of shining metal’ (rutilo … metallo), golden decorations for the Virgin's shrine, embossed silver panels, and book-covers made of ‘bright ductile gold’ (ductilis auri). In the sanctuary resided a ‘paten … made from silver’ (argento … fabricata patena) and a ‘golden chalice’ (aureus … calix), treasures made by the smith to ‘hold that which can mend our life’ (nostre seruant medicamina uitae), the bread and wine miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. Outside the church, the abbots’ generosity further supplied the cell with abundant ‘crops … under cultivation’ (germine cultae), ‘all kinds of beasts’ (pecus omnigenum), and the means to produce illuminated manuscripts (ornare libellus) skillfully written by an Irish monk, Ultan, who ‘by this art … made the shape of the letters beautiful one by one, so that no modern scribe could equal him’ (atque apicum speciem uiritum sic reddit amoenam hac arte, ut nullus possit se aequare modernus scriptor).

When the shifting needs of propaganda and other factors changed Whig playwrights’ relationship with conduct literature and thereby made the reform comedies from 1704 onwards more moral than before, the anti-theatrical animus showed no sign of diminishing. Although Collier did not mention The Careless Husband in his last named pamphlet against the stage in 1708, it is certain that he saw no sign of moral improvement in contemporary drama after his publication of A Short View in 1698. Sharing Collier's opinion, Arthur Bedford, the second famous anti-stage critic, began The Evil and Danger of Stage-Plays (1706) with a chapter on ‘the Obstinacy of the Stage’. In fact, the attack on the stage became more violent. While Collier only criticized ‘the immorality, and profaneness of the English stage’, Bedford and John Tutchin denounced the theatre as the antithesis to the church. Because of these circumstances, recent researchers have never thoroughly abandoned the fading ‘playwright-versus-priest’ division but integrate it into the demarcation line between the attackers and defenders of the stage. As a result, ‘Collier’s’ Stage Controversy is reckoned to be a part of the Reformation of Manners, and Edward Stillingfleet, a Latitudinarian and Collier's political enemy in the Allegiance Controversy, is mistakenly thought to be his friend in the Stage Controversy.

Can the writers on the same side of the Stage Controversy be described as allies? To answer this question, we need to look beneath the surface of the escalated war against the stage. Collier's anti-theatrical criticism was indeed a brand, but not a political one.

This appendix lists royalist collections of prayers and royalist services that were printed from the outbreak of the civil war in 1642 to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and which contain references to public affairs. These collections and services are supplementary to the royalist prayers ordered for particular occasions from 1642 to 1645 and printed with the suffix ‘R’ in volume 1, between p. 387 and p. 445, and in this volume on pp. 606–8, 619–20.

The collections and services were issued for a variety of purposes. Some were for use in royalist armies during the civil wars; some were intended to maintain general royalist morale during these conflicts, and included reprints of prayers published to celebrate victories of the royalist armies. After parliament had prohibited use of the BCP in 1645, they provided material for private prayers or for ministers and congregations that wished to retain the use of set texts. Some of the collections of prayers (items 3, 4 and 6) were issued by Charles I's ‘command’. During 1648, a form was published by Prince Charles's ‘direction’ both to supply prayers for the now captive king of ‘Great Britane’ and to present his eldest son as a ‘pattern of piety’. During the year after Charles I's execution on 30 January 1649, two forms demonstrated Charles II's commitment to upholding the royalist cause and to the liturgical styles of the Church of England, adjusted to the new conditions of ‘trouble and adversity’.

Step inside the Middle Ages’ invites the cover copy of the game Stronghold 2. If medievalism is the ‘reimagining and repurposing of the Middle Ages’, then video games with historical settings have contributed, from their earliest beginnings in the 1970s, to the shaping and changing of medievalism. Even before the IBM-compatible personal computer and other home computer and console systems made video games more accessible and ever more popular, games set in history and specifically in medieval times came within reach of a growing circle. As early as 1972, people with access to a mainframe computer could use the new medium to enter (a) Kingdom or, with the help of Odyssey, one of the first commercial games consoles, start (an) Invasion in a virtual world described as medieval.

The following decades saw an upsurge of new digital games and games that made use of historical narratives. Among these was the Middle Ages, comparable to Antiquity and Early Modernity in popularity but still lagging behind the most favoured age in video games: the twentieth century with its two world wars. We should not underestimate how far the setting and choice of era has been just one of many factors affecting the success or failure of a game in the market and among players; the time period is very often subordinate to the fun factor of the gameplay, the difficulty level, or the degree of flawlessness of the programming. Sales figures, then, only partly account for the popularity of a game and its setting.

The grave of James Hugessen the younger ‒ formerly of Dover ‒ lies in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Lynsted, Kent. He died on 2 October 1646, and above his and his wife's effigies, beside the memorial, is written this short verse:

Infancy youth and Age are from ye wombe Man's short but dangerous passage to his tomb. Here landed (the proceed of what we vent’red) In Nature's custom-house this dust is ent’red. Christ's all our gaine by whom, in death we live And carry hence, but only which we give; Almes-deeds are surest bill at sight, (the rest On Heaven's Exchange are subject to protest) This uncorrupted Manna of the just is lasting; store exempt from worms and dust.

Its morbid but witty fusion of piety with aspects of mercantile life offers us a small glimpse of the final thoughts and sentiments of a figure featured in this book. The son of immigrants from Dunkirk, just across the Channel, he was a successful merchant, shipowner and state agent, both a victim and participant in maritime predation ‒ a man deeply enmeshed in Kent's economy, society and politics at the end of the period concerned.