Nicholas Orme: 8 books

Medieval children lived in a world rich in poetry, from lullabies, nursery rhymes, and songs to riddles, tongue twisters, and nonsensical verses. They read or listened to stories in verse: ballads of Robin Hood, romances, and comic tales. Poems were composed to teach them how to behave, eat at meals,...

Originally published in 1984, this is a study of the kings and the aristocracy who ruled England between the Conquest and the Reformation. Not, as usual, about their adult lives, but how they became the people they were through childhood and education. The first such study of its kind, it follows...

Medieval Exeter was a religious city containing nearly seventy churches, chapels, monasteries, and almshouses, as well as private oratories, holy wells, and standing crosses. This book explains why this huge number of buildings came into being from about the eleventh century onwards. It shows what...

A cat with wages paid four times a year; a bishop cursed by a witch; and a lady descended from a swan. These are a few of the delightful stories from Exeter Cathedral's past, unearthed by a lifetime of research into the Cathedral and its archives by a distinguished scholar. We also learn of the man...

There has been a church on the site of Exeter Cathedral since Roman times. This is the story of its first thousand years, when three successive cathedrals were built, including the present one. In twelve chapters, the author takes us back to the past to see why the cathedral is like it is, and what...

Pilgrimage was popular throughout medieval England until it was suppressed at the Refor-mation. This book explains how it originated, what it involved, and what it meant to those who practised it. Normally it is imagined in terms of long journeys to famous places in England or Christendom. In fact...

Devon has a rich Christian history going back to the early fifth century. This book explains how the Church grew into a complex organisation of bishops and clergy, monasteries and friaries, parish churches and chapels, and how it was reshaped by the Norman Conquest, the Black Death, and the great...

‘An ancient cathedral records more than its own private history. Indeed it can be read as a miniature history of England. We are treading in the footsteps of Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Tudors, Stuarts, Hanoverians, Victorians, and they all left their mark.’ England’s sixty or so Anglican...