The Fifteenth Century Conference, Durham University, Thursday 4 – Saturday 6 September 2025
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 – Reconsidering the Battle of Towton: the Franco-Burgundian evidence
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