MEDIEVAL ENGLISH HISTORY

Comparative Analysis of History Books and their Themes

Comparative Analysis of History Books and their Themes

Introduction to Books

This assignment is based on a comparison between two history books with regards to their themes and concerns about common people of Medieval England. The books that are chosen for this purpose are Barbara Hanawalt's “The Ties that Bound” and Helen Castor's “Blood and Roses”.

Barbara A. Hanawalt's effort to depict the lives of Medieval England in an accurate and enriched manner is clearly observable in her book “The Ties that Bound”. Hanawalt argued that the concept of a nuclear family remained intact form the middle to the modern ages, where the biological needs of the Medieval England also did not change. The peasant families of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries faced biological desires for premarital sex, materialistic approaches by the environment and issue for the aged and the new born children, as well (Hanawalt, 1989, pp. 10-355). The families, while coping with these issues, tend to be adept to the changes that took place in their surroundings. The most interesting aspects of this publication includes some exciting accounts, for example, bread consumption patterns of the peasant families, a summon about rats, accounts about the games that those people play and several other events. This also translates into an understanding about how these people assumed changes in their lifestyles, to keep pace with times.

Helen Castor's “Blood and Roses” is a narrative about the struggle of an influential family belonging to the from the Norfolk village, namely the Pastons. The book is a collection of correspondence that depicts their sorrows and tragedies as they faced war times. It reveals their lust for more money, and shows their greed for land and property as they struggled to grab more riches form other similar gentries. Set among the turbulence of the Wars of the Roses, the Pastons suffered from political maneuvers but finally came through the disastrous times.

Thematic Overviews

According to “The Ties that Bound”, family life in the medieval England revolved around nuclear families as their main family theme. This shift from the extended family structures to nuclear families has to do with the promotion, growth and reproduction of the values ??of Western culture throughout the world, including East. The other key lesson of the book was that a farmer was not the master of himself. Everything, including the land he worked, his animals, his house, and even their food, belonged to the lord of the mansion. Domestic life was much more in common than at present, as entire families ate, slept and spent their free time together at home one or two rooms. Known as serfs, peasants were forced to work for his master; who, in Britain, was granted in exchange for a parcel of land for cultivation itself (Hanawalt, 1989, pp. 10-355). His life was full of hardships to produce food for their families and meet their masters. They were forbidden to leave the manor without permission, and for a peasant, the ...