"Lords of the North-Sea World" Topic

"Abstract: This thesis seeks to understand the impact of the locality on the lordships of the North-Sea world. Historians, previously, have focussed on aristocrats and lordship through a lord's relationship to a central authority. Medievalists, moreover, have focussed on central Europe when investigating the aristocracy and nobility, the consequence of this is that lordships were fixed in central kingdoms, which have been perpetuated from a twentieth-century idea of nationhood. Also such a perception causes us to describe the period in structuralist terms and negates the possibility of a fluid society in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

‘Lords of the North-Sea World' will, however, show that society was not ‘feudal' or rigid, by contrast it was flexible and subject to change. This thesis intends to investigate lordships in a seascape that has been relatively untouched by historians. I use a comparative methodology which has remained an underused medium by medieval historians. I begin by outlining the topic and justifying my approach, which will explore the huge historiographical background of aristocratic studies…."
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Amicalement
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