![\"eastgatehouse1\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/445\/2015\/03\/eastgatehouse1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe stair tower at Eastgate House, Rochester<\/p>\n
At its summit is an observation platform – the watchers and the watched, but who is who?<\/p>\n
To return to last week\u2019s events, Professor Wilkinson\u2019s masterly analysis of the clauses in Magna Carta that affected the legal position of women was given to a packed audience which was fascinated to learn that widows after 1215, for example, were guaranteed access to property to which they were entitled as well as \u2018freebench\u2019 of forty days in the principal marital home, as long as it was not a castle. Another clause of special value to widows was that they could not thereafter be remarried if they wished otherwise. Of course to a modern audience these and other clauses involving the rights of free women seem somewhat strange but for contemporaries, particularly the women themselves and their knightly, baronial and noble relatives, these were a major victory in their struggle again King John and his use (or abuse) of the royal prerogative. In addition to providing some fascinating examples where particular women had either suffered prior to 1215 or had been able to take advantage of these rights thereafter, Professor Wilkinson also looked in some detail at other clauses that might be said to affect these higher status women indirectly. These include those relating to the selling of wardships and the marriages of orphans, something that John had been exploiting ruthlessly in his drive to fund his attempt to regain the territories he had lost in France. As well as drawing on examples from a wide range of aristocratic families, Professor Wilkinson also provided cases concerning women from Canterbury and Dover, thereby linking the local to the national.<\/p>\n
This connecting of local and national was similarly in evidence yesterday. As several speakers recorded, Joan Thirsk had either been a direct influence or they had benefitted from those who themselves had gained from her insights respecting the role of the provinces in the development of early modern English society. Moreover, there were a couple of themes that became increasing evident, thereby providing fascinating threads that ran throughout the day from Duncan Harrington\u2019s assessment of the role of education in Faversham to Dr Andy Kesson\u2019s analysis of Kentish playwrights in the early history of the commercial stage. These, I would contend, were the idea of \u2018negotiating the political\u2019 and the role of networks in the lives of those below the aristocracy \u2013 a celebration of \u2018history from below\u2019 that has been in evidence at all three Kent universities (Canterbury Christ Church, Greenwich and Kent) for at least two decades. And as one might expect such negotiations were not always undertaken in a spirit of co-operation, for conflict has been equally important in the shaping of early modern society. Thus Joan Thirsk\u2019s \u2018lost conversations\u2019 might just as easily have taken place among the Earl of Dorset\u2019s tenants before their assault on his deer park at Knole in the early seventeenth century, as described by Dr Susan Pittman, as between those setting out the tithe sheaves in such a way that the tithe farmer\u2019s corn was inferior to that collected by the tenant. Dr Paula Simpson\u2019s investigation of such low-level resistance through sixteenth-century disputes over tithe also drew attention to regional clustering, and the people of the Weald were also the subject of Dr Lorraine Flisher\u2019s paper. She highlighted the role of radical religious ideas in the lives of a group of entrepreneurial clothiers, and among other topics she underlined how both horizontal and vertical familial, communal and occupational networks were significant for this cohort, especially in the period before and during the Civil War.<\/p>\n
Similar ideas were equally in evidence on the other side of the county. Keeping with the inter-relationship between economy and politics, Dr Sandra Dunster pointed out how during the reigns of the later Stuart monarchs the Chatham market was the focus for differing constituencies in their \u2018fight\u2019 to supply the neighbouring royal dockyard. From a slightly earlier period, I looked at Sir Peter Buck\u2019s Eastgate House in Rochester, an example of such negotiation in brick and stone where to see and be seen were deployed as markers of status and of commonwealth. Dr Claire Bartram, too, highlighted the value of material culture as an analytical tool through her assessment of the place of agricultural texts in these \u2018lost conversations\u2019. Consequently, it was a lovely linking of twenty-first and sixteenth century when one of her examples was a reference to Barnabe Googe\u2019s finding of a particularly wholesome herb in Lord Sackville\u2019s deer park, for unlike the deer poachers that Dr Pittman had just described, Mr Googe was there by invitation, and his \u2018conversation\u2019 through his comments in the pages of his translation of Heresbach\u2019s \u2018Four Books of Husbandarie\u2019 underlined the placing of Kent as a county of consequence \u2013 its peoples from William Lambard\u2019s governors AND the governed actively engaged in the shaping of their society through their \u2018negotiating of the political\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I decided to wait until today because the Centre\u2019s programme of (joint) events hit a real high this week with first Professor Louise Wilkinson\u2019s lecture on Wednesday (with Friends of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6665,"featured_media":182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[818],"tags":[25,85,157,9,29,137,193,149,181,233,37,173,93,117,89,185],"class_list":["post-180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","tag-agrarian-history","tag-archaeology","tag-book-culture","tag-canterbury","tag-community-history","tag-conferences","tag-drama","tag-early-modern-history","tag-historic-buildings","tag-history-from-below","tag-joan-thirsk","tag-kent","tag-lectures","tag-local-and-regional-history","tag-magna-carta","tag-material-culture"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"authorName":"Sheila Sweetinburgh","featuredImage":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/445\/2015\/03\/eastgatehouse1.jpg","postExcerpt":"I decided to wait until today because the Centre\u2019s programme of (joint) events hit a real high this week with first Professor Louise Wilkinson\u2019s lecture on Wednesday (with Friends of […]","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6665"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":874,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions\/874"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}