Author: Tom Johnson

Abstract:

A fifteenth-century bailiff named Nicholas Greenhalgh drew a picture in his account book. Next to the image he wrote noverint universi per presentes me (‘Everyone shall know me by these present [things]’), suggesting that he conceived it as a self-portrait, one that would be preserved in the archive of his lord. This essay explores these two suggestions, first by placing the image in the wider context of such‘doodles’in fifteenth-century administrative writings; and second by considering the afterlife of seigneurial archives in present-day England. It argues that such archives continue to reanimate the relations of lordship that generated them.

Published on History Workshop Journal, Volume 99, Spring 2025, Pages 1–28,

https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbaf001

Open access and free to download

Sketch of a figure (self-portrait?), Nicholas Greenhalgh’s account book [Suffolk Archives, HA 30/369/46, fo. 56r].