History Workshop Journal

Johnson, Tom

doi: 10.1093/hwj/dbaf001pmid: N/A

A fifteenth-century bailiff named Nicholas Greenhalgh drew a picture in his account book. Next to the image he wrote noverint universi per presentes me (‘Everyone shall know me by these present [things]’), suggesting that he conceived it as a self-portrait, one that would be preserved in the archive of his lord. This essay explores these two suggestions, first by placing the image in the wider context of such ‘doodles’ in fifteenth-century administrative writings; and second by considering the afterlife of seigneurial archives in present-day England. It argues that such archives continue to reanimate the relations of lordship that generated them.

Whitehead, Andrew

doi: 10.1093/hwj/dbaf007pmid: N/A