The primary aim of this thesis was to investigate the history of the Cistercian Abbey at Boxley in Kent (1146-1538) through its surviving written archive to provide a comparison to existing studies of individual houses that have focused on larger Benedictine houses. The documents considered include early deeds in addition to household and estate accounts that date to the late fourteenth century. Founded by William of Ypres, who had left England and returned to Flanders by 1157, initially Boxley Abbey had only a moderate endowment of lands. With an absent founder who had left no heir, it fell to the early abbots to build up estate holdings by any means. The surviving deeds reflect this. The abbey acquired land, piece by piece through grants, purchases and exchanges. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, they had established nine granges. They also established strong ties with a number of local families. The estate and household accounts reveal the considerable impact that The Black Death had on the economy and administration of this small house and the subsequent response of the Boxley monks to it. The Black Death opened up career opportunities for small group of capable young monks who held all of the main offices of the abbey in the years following it. Boxley used the same system of accounting employed by large monasteries, the obedientiary system, but adapted it for a small house with fewer monks who were capable of holding office. A partially centralised bursars’ office administered the bulk of the Boxley revenues to maintain both abbot and convert. A significant figure was John Herrietsham, who first entered the abbey in 1345, was abbot of Boxley by 1357, and held this post for at least the next fifty years. He led a number of important changes in the internal economy of the abbey His attempts to maximise the revenues of the estates and limit spending within the household culminated in the 1360 Assessment of Revenues. An unexpected finding of this thesis was the income of the Boxley rood of grace, recorded in late fourteenth-century bursars’ accounts. This income emerged in the accounts at a critical time in the Boxley economy and provided the monks with a valuable, and probably not therefore wholly typical, source of revenue. The abundant accounts of the bursars, sub cellarers, Kitchener and granator are further analysed to reveal the positive impact their disposable income had upon lifestyle and diet within the abbey and household and they reveal just how far it had moved the monks of Boxley Abbey away from the original Cisterclan ideals by the end of the fourteenth century.

This research focuses on social and gender visibility in the landholding and domestic spaces of southern England in the central middle ages (ca 900—ca 1200) in order to examine the constructions of prestige and authority in the period. This research contains three main areas of work incorporated into the greater whole. The first section examines gender and gifts in Anglo-Saxon wills. This corpus of documents allows for the viewing of familial and social structures as well as larger inheritance patterns and schemes, permitting a historical approach to social relations in the period and a deconstruction of previous gendered assumptions. Following the chapter on Anglo-Saxon wills is a larger section discussing the spatial analysis of archaeological sites from ca 900 through to ca 1200, moving the research from the objects and relationships seen in the wills to the physical locations of these objects and these relationships, broadly placing the population of the wills within the spaces they inhabited. These chapters provide an in-depth reinterpretation and sequencing at Faccombe Netherton followed by an examination of other domestic sites from England and Normandy, utilizing access analysis to discern the social flexibility and rigidities of the spaces. The objects seen in the wills and the spaces seen in the narrative texts are, within this chapter, a part of the physical and material past. The final section in the thesis moves from the representations of objects in wills and the physical use of space in archaeological sources to examine how gender and space are signified in narrative sources from the late Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman period, particularly considering the manner in which space and gender were perceived and represented to an Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman audience. In this, the objects seen in the wills as well as the spaces seen in the archaeological sources are queried in the narrative sources. Following all of this, conclusions are drawn from the larger body of research, including directions for future study. This research ultimately suggests that whilst there may have been gendered roles to play for the social elite in this period, the position of the elite was a construct of their own elite status, not a construct of the gender of the person holding this authority.

Ightham Mote, Kent, is the most complete surviving fourteenth-century half-timber framed house in England. Although the property has attracted scholarly attention over the years, and has been extensively restored and conserved by The National Trust, current understanding of its history is limited. This thesis was set out to present a detailed revision of the history of Ightham Mote, to challenge its status as a house of men lacking in ambition, and to provide a case study of its gentry owners during the fourteenth century. The methodology chosen is ‘lived experience’, an interdisciplinary phenomenological approach that provides an experimental, experiential approach to the built environment. The necessity of a study of this type was manifest from a review of the current state of building studies, gentry studies and military studies. Current approaches, which compartmentalise these disciplines and consider them within overarching political themes, have consistently failed to achieve a suitable synthesis of the information available. The present investigation thus presents an innovative review of the physical and documentary evidence for Ightham Mote’s material culture, as well as the life of its earliest known owner, Sir Thomas Couen. The resulting thesis demonstrates the importance of applying multidisciplinary approaches to medieval built environments, and accordingly proposes that architecture is of greater historical import as a signifier of contemporary habitus and identity, than as a signifier of wealth, ambition or power.

The census enumerators' books (CEBs) of Winchester between 1841 and 1891 are the focus of this thesis. They are examined, in association with other records like trade directories, share contracts and visual evidence of photographs, maps and plans, to track aspects of the economic, social and topographical development of Winchester, with specific reference to the effect of the railways in the later nineteenth century. Surviving rail company records of passengers and freight for this period are scarce and so the census is used to indicate a tangible yet difficult to quantify effect: the impact of the railways upon a city that was neither a railway town nor an industrial centre. The census provides evidence of the structure of the de facto population on census night every ten years, and the CEBs show this detail at the level of the individual. It therefore provides a revealing picture of change and continuity in the city at a time when it experienced its most momentous demographic change since medieval times. As such, the analysis contained within is of relevance to people studying both nineteenth century history and the post-medieval history of Winchester. The methodology employed in this work, a sourceoriented KAE1CD database, is a product of the techniques employed by those working in historical computation. The study uses almost 2 million pieces of information in a database covering a continuous run of 50 years of censuses, allowing both a broad and detailed analysis of the data to take place. Using evidence from CEBs as well as concomitant local sources, this thesis questions the extent to which the railway did affect the city. It finds that despite the redistribution of a larger population throughout the city and many changes in the economic and topographical structure of the city, it is rarely possible to expose a quantifiable influence of rail transport.

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This thesis adopts the micro-analytical methods of local history to expand understanding of the late Stuart period. It focuses on local dynastic families, just beneath the level of gentry, residing in a part of rural West Berkshire comprising 30 contiguous parishes. Most of their males used the descriptor 'yeoman'. Many of these families appear to have left the area by the 1720s. Little evidence of financial hardship has been found, so forced sales of land, a theme found in the historiography of this period, does not seem to have caused this widespread migration. A combination of factors suggests that its reason may have lain partly in a gradual perception that their social position had become less certain than in earlier generations. Firstly, it is possible that their doubt about gentility's reach and their continued nervousness after the Civil War may have caused some gentry to increase their distance from other social groups, including even local rural dynastic families, with whom a symbiotic relationship may have long existed. Secondly, once the emergence of 'middling people' began to be noted, some local dynastic families may have experienced difficulty in maintaining their inclusion amongst rural 'better sorts'. Thirdly, the designator 'yeoman', earlier a desirable marker of distinction for local dynastic families, may have declined in prestige by the late Stuart period, adversely affecting the reputations of their descendants. In combination, these factors perhaps began undermining a social position based on pursuing, in ancestral locations, strategies inherited from earlier generations. Several pieces of evidence suggest that, for rural West Berkshire, whereas the 'tipping point' occurred in the 1720s, the seeds for this gradual abandonment of a traditional way of life and an established way of making money may have been sown during the late Stuart period.

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