The Fifteenth Century Conference, Durham University, Thursday 4 – Saturday 6 September 2025
Registration for the 2025 Fifteenth Century Conference is now open here
The programme is below and can also be downloaded here
Programme
Sessions are at Sir Thomas Allen Assembly Rooms Theatre, Durham University
Thursday 4 September
1.45pm: Introduction
2pm: Session 1
Len Scales – Sigismund of Luxemburg’s visit to England, 1416
Anna Probert – ‘And thus endet Vmffrey the Duke of Gloucetre’: Richard Fox, Bartholomew Halley and the Parliament of 1447
3.50pm: Tea & coffee
4.10pm: Session 2
Tom Johnson – ‘A Reckoning of the Herrings’: Quantification and Economic Life in a Fifteenth-Century Fishing Village
Toby Donegan-Cross – Eating Under Watch: Consumption in Durham Priory Visitation Records, 1390–1448
6pm: Wine reception
Held at 7 Owengate, co-hosted by Durham University’s Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and the Yorkist History Trust
Friday 5 September
9am: Session 3
David Grummitt – Edward IV, the Duchy of Lancaster and the War in the North, 1461-1464: Lordship and Logistic during the Wars of the Roses
Selina Whiteman-Gardner – Warfare and Lordship in the Irish Sea, c.1385-1410: The Rise of the Douglases?
10.50am: Tea & coffee
11.10am: Session 4
Mark Bailey – New perspectives on the mid fifteenth-century economy: extreme weather during the Spörer Minimum and tenurial change
Phil Slavin – The Disease That Would Not Let Go: Plague Outbreaks and their Wider Demographic Implications in Late-Medieval England
1pm: Lunch
2.30pm: Excursions
To Palace Green Library and its collections (Books of Hours), Bishop Cosin’s Library and the Exchequer Building, and Durham Castle
5pm: Session 5
Rowena Archer – Managing an Alien Priory. Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk and Grovebury in Bedfordshire
6.15pm: Performance by the Dunelm Four, held at Durham Castle; a programme of fifteenth-century music
7.00 pm: Banquet Dinner in Durham Castle
Saturday 6 September
9am: Session 6
Andrew Green – ‘The lady would have done much better if she had acted as a mediator’: French Noblewomen in Revolt in the Fifteenth Century
Katy Bennett – Royal-seigneurial authority and Plantagenet rule in Gascony: the case of Gaillard II de Durfort, seneschal of Gascony (1399–1415)
10.50am: Tea & coffee
11.10am: Session 7
Rachael Harkes – The Council of the Marches and Marcher lordships in the later Middle Ages
John Watts – After ‘After “After McFarlane”’: High Politics and the New History of Political Society
1pm: Lunch
2pm: Close of conference