A Medieval Life: William de Felton and Edlingham Castle, 12601327 [Paperback]

Offers a biographical and archaeological exploration of William de Felton, builder of Edlingham Castle.A Medieval Life: William de Felton and Edlingham Castle, 12601327 is a biography of a little-known man living in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Britain. Williams precise birth and death dates are unrecorded, his place of origin has for a long time been unclear, and his parentage is still uncertain. Althoughsomewhat wealthy and privileged, William does not represent either the high aristocracy or the great and the good of his time, and a central theme of this book is how to write a biography of someone relatively anonymous in the Middle Ages. There are plenty of books about kings, queens and battles; this book offers adifferent perspective.Its origin lies in archaeological excavations between 1978 and 1982 at Edlingham, Northumberland. The first house here, which grew to be called a castle, was built in the years around 1300. It was abandoned before the 1660s after less than four centuries of habitation, and nearly three centuries before it was uncovered by excavation. This book is not an excavation report, however, nor an architectural survey, but an attempt to excavate the buried and concealed life of the castles founder, and to understand the unusual building he created. It is a biographical approach to history framed by archaeological and landscape perspectives: the biography of one man, which illuminates the lives of those around him and serves as a biography of a place and landscape.William de Feltons story can be told because he was unexpectedly well documented. His career as a middle-ranking servant in the royal households of Edward I and Edward II, combined with the bureaucratic habits of the kings clerks, has bequeathed to historians two hundred documents that mention him. These documents are often individually banal, but taken together, and with other documentary evidence for Williams family, neighbours, friends and colleagues, thlã®