Event Details

This fifth installment of this year's History Research Seminars will be held in person, at the Cavendish Colloquium. We will welcome Jörg Peltzer and Nicholas Vincent, who will present a joint, comparative paper on the cartulary of Edmund, earl of Cornwall, and the Great Cowcher.

The 'Great Cowcher Book of the Duchy of Lancaster' has long been acknowledged as one of the wonders of medieval record-keeping: a massive collection of deeds compiled for Henry IV (previously Duke of Lancaster), elaborately illuminated, surveying the duchy estate county by county. Much less well known is the equivalent record book, compiled after 1300, following the death of Edmund earl of Cornwall (nephew of King Henry III), covering an estate in many ways even greater than that of the duchy of Lancaster. By comparing and contrasting these two great cartularies, Lancaster and Cornwall, we can hope to achieve a clearer impression of the development not just of the land market, and magnate politics, but of the written culture of later medieval England.

Professor Jörg Peltzer (UEA and Heidelberg) and Professor Nicholas Vincent (UEA) are leading medieval historians, currently working on a British Academy Global Professorship project on the major thirteenth-century figure Richard of Cornwall, King of Germany and earl of Cornwall.