earlier mental wanderings

Turned into this paragraph. Consider it copywrited, bitches!!

"The Auchinleck manuscript has been dated to roughly 1330-1331, early in the reign of the young Edward III. For Londoners at this time, the reign of Edward I with its strong judicial institutions and prestigious knights had a powerful pull on the imaginations of those who had lately suffered through the corrupt reign of Edward II. Edward II’s reign was a time of much legal change and experimentation, coinciding with corruption and injustice in the highest levels of the government. As Anthony Musson points out, the beginning of Edward III’s reign was characterized by a “conscious resurrection of various laws and policies from Edward I’s time” (174). As Edward III took power and settled in as king, his subjects were energetically trying to re-establish social order and justice in the legal system (and indeed in the country at large). Citizens became nostalgic for the legal and cultural traditions of Edward I, using that nostalgia to re/create (i.e., both revive and create anew) the broken legal system. But the nostalgia was not limited to the legal system; it also involved the high chivalric ideals exploited by Edward I to form the backbone of his military might against the Welsh and the Scots in his imperialistic wars. By the 1330’s when the Auchinleck manuscript was being compiled, knights were not the mounted military figures they had been, but were instead taking a leading role in the newly representative form of a parliament which was largely concerned with the arbitration of justice. Knightly activity had become more involved with parliamentary judicial proceedings and upholding social justice than it was in battle and tournaments. In a sense, then, knights and justice had been conflated, and manipulation of one could in turn help define the other. Londoners in particular had a high sense of pride for their legal history, compiling it in custumals, which formed miscellaneous collections of law code and historical record and which were kept on record by the City Magistrate and also privately collected by individual citizens. Ralph Hanna points to these custumals as being the closest analog we have to the Auchinleck manuscript, which again suggests the conflation of chivalric and legal ideals in the early reign of Edward III."

Like I said, MY THOUGHTS, MY WRITING. (I hate having to think about that.)

But still, I'm pretty happy with that mess of words! It only took five hours of sitting at a computer and staring and the past two and a half months of sitting and staring at books and feeling the knots in my back return from their summer, post-exam hiatus...

Off to watch South Park and convince myself that the fact that there won't be a Daily Show until the writers' strike ends (and I'm rooting for the writers) means that I should spend time I would normally be watching that working on my dissertation, or at least reading for class on Monday...