1381 The Peel Affinity

Description

Author:
Altmiller, Dorothy.
Summary:
An English knights household in the fourteenth century. This book is an attempt, from 600 years’ distance, to convey a sense of a world undergoing intense change. Society was not the neat hierarchy envisioned by contemporary philosophy or later historians, but untidy and unstable. The shapes of people’s lives may seem foreign to us today, but the motives behind them are very familiar: love, fear, faith, ambition.
Our focus is on a single place, time, and group of people: Hampshire, 1381, a knight and his affinity: family and servants, officials and tenants, associates and military company. Through this small community we will show you something of life in late fourteenth century England. Our knight’s life is different from his grandfather’s or grandson’s and different again from the lives of his contemporaries in Scotland, France, or Italy. Rather than try to give you a broad, shallow sketch of “life in the Middle Ages” we hope to use the daily details of our characters’ lives to evoke and illustrate their very specific world.
What you’ll see herein is the culmination of three years of intense, focused work and many more years of general research, preparation, construction, and acquisition. We have relied on discoveries and interpretations in many historical disciplines, among them archeology, arts, material culture, literature, politics, warfare, and economics. Our photographs feature carefully researched and reconstructed clothing, tools, armor, furnishings, and other items. Many of our artifacts are based closely on surviving items; others are based on manuscript illustrations and paintings. Some are extrapolations, as they must be given the current state of knowledge. We have used backgrounds photographed in England, France, Denmark, and Germany, many of which feature preserved or reconstructed buildings. But in the end, our portrayals of everyday life and work, celebration and tribulation, battle and death can only offer glimpses through a fogged window at people as real as you or us who lived in those distant times.
Further details:

Hardcover: 176 pages.
Language: English
Illustrations:Glorious Colour Photographs throughout
ISBN-13:9780980072600
Product Dimensions: 29.0 x 22.3 x 1.9 cm

Staff Comments:
I LOVE this book. Its like Embleton’s Medieval Soldier but with a story arc. The photos are fantastic, the garb and props first rate. It really showcases what re-enactors are capable of when they put their mind to it.