Our latest volume, Late Medieval Bristol: Time, Space and Power by Peter Fleming, is now available to purchase from Shaun Tyas.

With a population of almost 10,000, Bristol was late medieval England’s second- or third-biggest urban place, and the realm’s second port after London. While not particularly large or wealthy in comparison to the great cities of northern Italy, Flanders or the Rhineland, it was a metropolis in the context of the British Isles. As a port, it was the hub of a trading network that began with England, Wales and Ireland and extended as far as the Iberian Peninsula and Iceland, and for medieval Europeans, it sat on the edge of the known world; as a strategic strongpoint it commanded routes from Ireland, Wales and the west Midlands to London and the south; as an industrial centre, it was a major participant in English textile production. By the eve of the fifteenth century Bristol had already enjoyed a position among England’s leading towns and cities for several centuries.

Late Medieval Bristol: Time, Space and Power is an investigation of identity, community construction and political power in fifteenth-century Bristol. Written by Peter Fleming (emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of the West of England), this major study breaks with the traditional historiography associated with the writings of Eleanor Carus-Wilson, David Harris Sacks and Evan Jones. Their approaches, rooted in economic and social history, are replaced with one grounded in the cultural turn and its concern with meaning, self-perception and ideological messaging. The book examines how one of the greatest urban centres of England sought to construct its identity. How did Bristol’s merchant elite seek to create and use ‘history’ to bolster the position of their parvenu town and provide an ideological justification for their own position within it? How did Bristol’s merchants engage with literature and poetry to present commerce as a noble art and mystery, rather than the ‘grubby profession’ portrayed by the Church, gentry and aristocracy? And, lastly, how did Bristol’s rulers respond to the great dynastic conflicts of fifteenth-century England and position their community in the Yorkist Age?

This monograph is the product of over thirty years of research by Bristol’s leading medieval historian. It was fully written and almost ready to be sent to the intended publishers by 2013. However, the author’s increasing ill health, as he battled with advancing MS, first paused and then entirely halted progress on the book. The Yorkist History Trust have brought this major and groundbreaking work of scholarship to fruition.

£25 with free postage and packaging for UK orders. Order here.