At first glance the development of Anglo-American prize law may seem like a topic with little practical relevance for modern readers, of use to scholars only. But the topic will continually resurface in the future in relation to the development of the (geo)politics in the maritime world, so long as the United States does not agree to remove it from its catalogue of military strategies. Robert Bayard's life has shown how such a system of law was successfully used to the detriment of independence-supporting seafarers during the Revolutionary War by the Vice-Admiralty Court of New York. It also demonstrated that colonial jurisdiction, though in theory following the same principles as in London, had massively diverged, with major consequences for claimants. The different approaches to judicial procedures and staff made New York's Vice-Admiralty Court a far more liberal and efficient system, governed practically by a different set of rules than its metropolitan counterparts. HCA 49/92 is a great tool for gaining an overview of the court's workings, but more in-depth research must be done here, particularly regarding the court's impact on military operations during the War of Independence and its development throughout the conflict.

Samuel Bayard's experiences on the other hand demonstrate that a generation later, America and Britain would be able to come together and forge a new way forward together, impacting on the development of maritime law worldwide. The transformation from illegitimate rebels and objects of adjudication in the Revolution, to adjudicators and recognised players in the global system by the 1790s is remarkable.

The impact of endemic plague on medieval art and architecture, a subject of sustained, energetic debate among scholars of Italian art and architecture since the middle of the last century, has received less focused attention from scholars of English art. Writing about English book production and illumination specifically or architecture and the arts more broadly, Francis Wormald, Lynda Dennison, John Harvey, Philip Lindley, Paul Binski, Joanne Filippone Overty, Michael A. Michael, and Zachary Stewart are among the scholars who have considered issues of disruptions to work and to artists’ training – to the “loss,” in Binski's words, of both “talent” and “procedural memory” – and in Michael's case, that most difficult issue, the Plague's possible effects on esthetic aspects of visual expression. As this study has argued, it was the Plague that precipitated the dramatic reversals of fortune that motivated the Bible's commission, influenced the conditions of its facture, and shaped aspects of its visual program and its translation (see above, Chapter 1, 38–9, and passim). One nonetheless looks in vain in the Bible's painted histories for direct references to the Plague, which are uncommon even in the illustrations in historical chronicles.

Of Empires and Their Subjects

In an early chapter of Pardon wird nicht gegeben (Men without Mercy), the sixteen-year-old Karl is shown exploring the strange new urban environment in which his family now lives. He wonders at the tree-lined avenues, restaurants and department stores, palaces, museums, and monuments he discovers there. The city is not named, but the mention of a triumphal arch and the parkland that lies beyond the architectural splendours of the centre strongly suggests the area around the Brandenburg Gate, and that impression is reinforced by the later evocation of an old king's ceremonial entry into the city at the head of his troops (P 28–29). In that area, Karl also notices parties of schoolchildren being taken to see an exhibition that is free to the public, and when he plucks up the courage to follow them, he finds himself mounting a long staircase with marble balustrades that leads to a room full of monumental paintings commemorating battles and historic victories (P 27–29). The image that most plays on Karl's imagination, however, is that of a landscape strewn with the debris of battle, while a solitary figure, the defeated king, climbs a hill to surrender his sword to the victor. That image stays with him as a cliché to be recalled at moments in his life when he anticipates unprecedented success or comprehensive failure (P 200–201, 270).

Representation of the Bayard family tree, focusing on the Delaware and New York branches with regard to the male line as relevant for this study. Starting with Samuel Bayard and Anne Stuyvesant, who first immigrated to the United States in the seventeenth century. On branches displaying two marriages, the next generation of Bayard sons sprang from the second marriage. The lifespans of family members were compiled from Hess, Bulloch and the New York Historical Society. The Bayard family was perpetuated by the three brothers – Nicolas, Balthazar and Petrus – upon their arrival in New Netherland in the seventeenth century. Nicolas established the New York branch, one of the foremost politically and economically influential in that area, from the time of its first European settlement. From that branch sprang Robert and William Bayard, proponents of the Crown, supporting the loyalist cause in the American Revolution. Petrus, however, would break with the family, both religiously and geographically, leaving New York and moving to the Delaware region, more specifically, to Cecil County, Maryland, to join a colony of Labadists. While the New York Bayards would be overwhelmingly loyalist in 1776, the Delaware branch embraced independence and became embedded in the new republic's governmental service.

US politicians hoped to enforce the US claim on independence, sovereignty and neutrality in the British prize law system. However, in practice the American experience was one of unavoidable dependence and entanglement.

Prize law, by its very nature, has always been a contested legal field nestled between domestic and international law. The Judge of the High Court of Admiralty was subordinate to and bound by British parliamentary decisions. In this constellation, he could be considered a conflicted judge, much like prize law itself, trapped between municipal interests and international principles. Sir William Scott would become the judge of the High Court of Admiralty in 1798, when Marriott retired. During the first years of the Jay Treaty commission, he was active as the King's Advocate. He was intertwined with the political sphere both on a professional and familial level: in his role as King's Advocate he drafted opinions for the Foreign Office on various matters, including neutral rights.

While Marriott's work was widely received, it is his successor Scott whose judgments were internationally cemented into admiralty law. Scott's predecessors argued that British law and international law were one and the same.

In his original communications to Secretary of State Edmund Randolph on the treaty of amity and commerce, Jay noted: “It appeared to me advisable that our people should have precise and plain instructions relative to the prosecution of appeals and claims, in cases of capture. For that purpose, I applied to Sir William Scott, and requested him, in concert with Dr. Nicholl, to prepare them.”

A coup d’etat that left a Merovingian king tonsured and his ox-cart-riding dynasty impotent. A hunchbacked heir's failed rebellion and resulting monastic imprisonment. The late-eighth- and early-ninth-century Carolingian court wove compelling stories to propagate a vision of royal power that became standard for more than a millennium. Such high drama coupled with limited documentation encouraged twentieth-century American writers to transform these historical fragments into comedic political commentaries. When John Steinbeck (1902–68) wrote a satire set in France, he chose the Merovingian-Carolingian regime change in 751 CE as his inspiration. In The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), a politically chaotic twentieth-century France returns to monarchy, and a Merovingian descendant proposes a Carolingian king. The appeal of Carolingian political intrigue surfaced again one decade later, when college student Ron Straus read about Pippin, the son of King Charlemagne (r. 768–814 CE) who rebelled against his father in 792 CE and was exiled to a monastery. Straus and Stephen Schwartz wrote a musical full of court intrigue that eventually debuted on Broadway in 1972 as Pippin.

How do the meanings of words serve as a clue to cultural perceptions in late medieval England? Methods in semantics and in literary scholarship help to give us a perspective on how lexical usage both reflects and shapes collective ideologies. This small study considers how the connotative resonance of words about social gathering indicate mixed attitudes to civic assembly and suspicions about particular groups in the late fourteenth century.

It is generally understood that words in our language acquire connotation: the affective meaning that indicates the emotive and associational aspects of a term. Connotation is conceived in opposition to denotation, the dictionary or referential sense for the word. Lexical connotations may be personal or shared by a group, and they both reflect and influence how we perceive concepts. As such, they can be a touchstone for the study of changing culture and can influence wider social ideology.

This chapter moves from the human sphere to the divine and discusses one of the most celebrated stories that rely on the notion of the mortality of gods, namely the myth of the death of Baldr. Here, we do not encounter humans wishing or attempting to vanquish gods, but rather one god annihilated by another. The Baldr story counts among the most celebrated in the corpus of Norse mythological tales, and countless studies have been devoted to the elucidation of its meaning and origin. Current interpretations of the Baldr myth generally highlight meaning over origin and see Baldr's death as the pivotal point in a great mythological narrative that outlines the history of the flawed order of Óðinn from creation to destruction. This chapter will first discuss the interpretation of the Baldr story as a murder within the family and a direct consequence of the primordial killing of Ymir. It will then consider how the grand narrative arc of mythological history in the Prose Edda may have developed.

Summing up the history of research on the Baldr story in his Murder and Vengeance among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology in 1997, Lindow wrote as follows: “It may be that the search for a unified Baldr theory is ultimately too grand an endeavor and should be scaled back to a series of attempts to interpret various texts or traditions”. And this is indeed what he does throughout most of his meticulous study of the Baldr myth. Toward the end of his monograph, he nevertheless proposes a cogent overarching interpretation of the Baldr material as it was recorded in writing in thirteenthcentury Iceland. Myth offers, in his view, “a means of dealing with and sometimes working out problems of society and the human condition.”