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For the first forty years of his life, Marshal was a landless knight, but by his marriage to the daughter of Earl Richard of Pembroke in 1189, he became a great feudal lord. His biography depicts the two extremes of feudal society.
Originally published in 1933. As mediaeval society was dominated by the feudal caste, a biography that depicts the position, activities, manners, and thoughts of a member of that class might do much to elucidate the history of the period. This is what Sidney Painter had in mind when he wrote a William Marshal: Knight-Errant, Baron, and Regent of England. The subject has proved a peculiarly fortunate one. The fourth son of John fitz Gilbert, marshal of the king's court, William for the first forty years of his life was a landless knight who devoted most of his time and energy to tournaments. In the year 1189 by his marriage to the daughter and heiress of Earl Richard of Pembroke, William became a great feudal lord with fiefs in Normandy, England, Wales, and Ireland. Thus his biography depicts the two extremes of feudal society—the landless knight and the rich baron. Finally in 1216 he was chosen regent of England for the young king, Henry III, and his biography becomes for three years the history of England.
The career of William Marshal (1146/7-12), who rose from being the penniless, landless younger son of a middle-ranking nobleman to be regent of England in the minority of Henry III, is one of the most extraordinary stories of theMiddle Ages. His biography was completed shortly after his death by a household minstrel and we are fortunate that it survives to give a unique portrait of a twelfth-century knight's life in the early days of tournaments and chivalry as well as his career in warfare and politics.
Renowned scholar Thomas Asbridge brings to life medieval England’s most celebrated knight, William Marshal—providing an unprecedented and intimate view of this age and the legendary warrior class that shaped it. Caught on the wrong side of an English civil war and condemned by his father to the gallows at age five, William Marshal defied all odds to become one of England’s most celebrated knights. Thomas Asbridge’s rousing narrative chronicles William’s rise, using his life as a prism to view the origins, experiences, and influence of the knight in British history. In William’s day, the brutish realities of war and politics collided with romanticized myths about an Arthurian “golden age,” giving rise to a new chivalric ideal. Asbridge details the training rituals, weaponry, and battle tactics of knighthood, and explores the codes of chivalry and courtliness that shaped their daily lives. These skills were essential to survive one of the most turbulent periods in English history—an era of striking transformation, as the West emerged from the Dark Ages. A leading retainer of five English kings, Marshal served the great figures of this age, from Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine to Richard the Lionheart and his infamous brother John, and was involved in some of the most critical phases of medieval history, from the Magna Carta to the survival of the Angevin/Plantagenet dynasty. Asbridge introduces this storied knight to modern readers and places him firmly in the context of the majesty, passion, and bloody intrigue of the Middle Ages. The Greatest Knight features 16 pages of black-and-white and color illustrations.
"The plan of this work [is] ... to illustrate the life of Sir John Falstaff exclusively from the most striking passages in his career, as invented by Shakespeare"--Preface
Georges Duby, one of this century's great medieval historians, has brought to life with exceptional brilliance and imagination William Marshal, adviser to the Plantagenets, knight extraordinaire, the flower of chivalry. A marvel of historical reconstruction, William Marshal is based on a biographical poem written in the thirteenth century, and offers an evocation of chivalric life—the contests and tournaments, the rites of war, the daily details of medieval existence—unlike any we have ever seen.
This story of medieval life follows the remarkable adventures of young Cuthbert de Lance, a lad who serves as a page to an English nobleman during the Third Crusade.
At the beginning of the twelfth century, the region around Paris had a reputation for being the land of unruly aristocrats. Entrenched within their castles, the nobles were viewed as quarrelling among themselves, terrorizing the countryside, harassing churchmen and peasants, pillaging, and committing unspeakable atrocities. By the end of the century, during the reign of Philip Augustus, the situation was dramatically different. The king had created the principal governmental organs of the Capetian monarchy and replaced the feudal magnates at the royal court with loyal men of lesser rank. The major castles had been subdued and peace reigned throughout the countryside. The aristocratic families remain the same, but no longer brigands, they had now been recruited for royal service. In his final book, the distinguished historian John Baldwin turned to church charters, royal inventories of fiefs and vassals, aristocratic seals and documents, vernacular texts, and archaeological evidence to create a detailed picture of the transformation of aristocratic life in the areas around Paris during the four decades of Philip Augustus's reign. Working outward from the reconstructed biographies of seventy-five individuals from thirty-three noble families, Baldwin offers a rich description of their domestic lives, their horses and war gear, their tourneys and crusades, their romantic fantasies, and their penances and apprehensions about final judgment. Knights, Lords, and Ladies argues that the aristocrats who inhabited the region of Paris over the turn of the twelfth century were important not only because they contributed to Philip Augustus's increase of royal power and to the wealth of churches and monasteries, but also for their own establishment as an elite and powerful social class.