This volume examines the aristocracy in Tuscany and in England in the years 1000-1250, offering a new way of studying English aristocracy in this period by tracing Italian aristocratic history, and then employing the same historiographic tools within English history.

• 1: Introduction


• Part One: The Tuscan Aristocracy


• 2: The Contextual Framework


• 3: The Aristocracy in City and Contado: Florence and the Fiorentino


• 4: The Aristocrazia Consolare: Pisa in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (c. 1000 - c. 1150)


• 5: Beyond the City: The Counts Guidi and their World


• 6: The Aristocracy of Southern Tuscany


• 7: Conflict and Stability within the Tuscan Aristocracy


• 8: From Knighthood to Nobility


• Part Two: The Aristocracy in England


• 9: The Aristocracy in 'Carolingian' England


• 10: The Structure and Articulation of Aristocratic Society in Anglo-Norman England


• 11: At the Apex of the Aristocracy: The Earls of Chester as Case Study


• 12: The Nobility and the State in Angevin and Post-Angevin England


• 13: Reflections


• Bibliography

Peter Coss studied for his doctorate at the University of Birmingham under the guidance of Rodney Hilton. His major posts were at the University of Northumbria, where he gained a personal chair, and at Cardiff where he held the established chair of medieval history from 1995 to 2013. He was head of the school of history, archaeology, and religion there from 2006 to 2011. From 1984 to 2017 he was a member of the editorial board of Past and Present. Among his areas of expertise is the English gentry on which he has written five monographs. He is also the editor of three volumes of medieval documents and of ten books of essays.