Search publications: Engeland

Full of intriguing facts and literary quotations, this fun, engaging and beautifully illustrated book explores the role of money and medals in Shakespeares world and works. Deniers and ducats, groats and guilders, crowns and cruzados, the author reveals how coins and medals illustrate the personalities and events that shaped Shakespeares world. Through lively and informative text the reader will discover the role of money in Shakespeares life and career; how much people were paid and how much things cost looking in detail at the theatre and currency and how it changed.

Review

This book brings together for the first time the astonishing diversity of excavated furnishings and artefacts from medieval London homes. These include roofing and other structural items, decorative fixtures and fittings, and assortment of culinary utensils, writing instruments, and toys and weights. Illustrating some 1,000 items, the catalogue provides a fascinating account of how metalwork and glassware manufacturing trends changed during the period covered, while close dating of many of the finds has resulted in many new insights into life at the time.

Although clay tobacco pipes are still made today, their place in history is the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Until about 1890 the clay pipe was as commonplace as the tankard of ale and the mug of tea, but competition from the briar pipe, the cigar and the cigarette brought the clay-pipe industry to an end about 1900. Many people remember using clay pipes in blowing bubbles when they were children, and some can recall seeing navvies, or their grandfathers, smoking them, but it will not be long before such memories are forgotten.