If by some odd chance, some of you Medieval England students are looking here during the holiday, rejoice! I have finally posted the first part of the 2nd term assignment, which involves looking at the Parliamentary Rolls of Medieval England at the NU library site and using the record of one parliamentary sitting to answer a few basic, but not necessarily easy questions.
I had hoped that we could discuss this assignment on Monday, but that is looking less likely. Parts of the NU net are down, which makes PROME unavailable at the moment. Nevertheless, have a look at the assignment and especially what I have done with it.
What have I done?
I quickly realized that you students would have a very hard time extracting even the basics from these records. The modern English translations don't provide easy explanations of what legal terms mean, for instance, and though each parliament has an introduction by modern editors, I'm willing to bet that with just the background you have now, those introductions won't help much -- at least the first time through.
So what I did was add to the assignment sheet my own answers for the questions, based on the parliamentary roll for the April 1384 meeting. I actually found it pretty difficult to do this. I had to read the roll twice, and after that it took most of an afternoon to write up my answers (which include extensive quotations from the April 1384 roll).
Even if PROME continues to be unavailable, download and print out the assignment sheet and have a close look at it.
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