In Ceremony and Civility, Barbara Hanawalt shows how, in the late
Middle Ages, London's elected officials and elites used ceremony
and ritual to establish their legitimacy and power. These civic
ceremonies helped delineate the relationship between London's
mayors and the crown, but also between denizens and their
government, between gild wardens and their members, between masters
and apprentices, and between parishioners and their churches.
London, like all premodern cities, had a largely immigrant
population-only a small proportion of the inhabitants were
citizens-and the newly arrived needed to be taught the civic
culture of the city in order for that city to function peacefully.
Ritual and ceremony played key roles in this acculturation process.
In a society in which hierarchical authority was most commonly
determined by inheritance of title and office, or sanctified by
ordination, civic officials who had been elected to their posts
relied on rituals to cement their authority, power, and dominance.
Since the typical term of elected office was a year, elections and
inaugurations had to be very public and visually distinct in order
to quickly communicate with the masses: the robes of office needed
to distinguish the officers so that everyone would know who they
were. The result was a colorful civic pageantry. Newcomers
themselves found their places within this structure in various
ways. Apprentices entering the city to take up a trade were
educated in civic culture by their masters. Gilds similarly used
rituals, oath swearing, and distinctive livery to mark their
members' belonging. But these public shows of belonging and orderly
civic life also had a dark side. Those who rebelled against
authority and broke the civic ordinances were made spectacles
through ritual humiliations and public parades through the streets
so that others could take heed of these offenders of the law. At
the parish level, and even at the level of the street, civic
behavior was taught through example, through proclamations, and
even through performances, like ballads. An accessible look at late
medieval London through the lens of civic ceremonies and dispute
resolution, Ceremony and Civility synthesizes archival research in
London with existing scholarship to show how newcomers in an
ever-shifting population were enculturated into premodern London.
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