Scribner Seminar Program
Course Desription
Famine, Warfare, and Plague in 14th-century England
Instructor(s): Erica Bastress-Dukehart, History
England in the fourteenth century may be considered the embodiment of what we think
of when we use the term “medieval.” It was a time of famine and disease, prolonged
and bloody battles with France, of chivalry, art, new architecture, and the end of
the Crusades. If someone living at the beginning of the century survived famine and
warfare, it was likely that they succumbed to the plague that crept onto England’s
shores three decades later, with deadly consequence. This was a dynamic time socially,
politically, and culturally: London’s back alleys were alive with beggars, pickpockets,
and gamers, its markets filled with hawkers, fishmongers, barbers, and wool merchants.
Knights jousted at the Tower of London, and the Church dominated people’s spiritual
lives. The City stank of rotting garbage and raw human sewage, and the Thames was
fouled by toxic runoff from the local tanners. Yet, everyone wanted to be part of
this exciting city. Pilgrims arrived daily at it gates ready to be swept up in its
wonders. In the fourteenth century, London was the place to be.
This course offers us a new way to consider what “History” means. It allows us to think about the past as something that is still in the process of unfolding, rather than as something that has already occurred. As Ian Mortimer writes “Understanding the past is a matter of experience as well as knowledge, a striving to make spiritual, emotional, poetic, dramatic and inspirational connections…It is about our personal reactions to the challenges of living in previous centuries and earlier cultures, and our understanding of what makes one century different from another.”1 Our task this semester, then, will be to peel back the layers of the intervening centuries to rediscover London and its surrounding towns as they may have been in the fourteenth century.
Course Offered