Plantagenet Rose

HUMANITIES POSTGRADUATE SEMINAR SERIES
MON 27 MARCH, NOON, PAT HANAN ROOM, ARTS 2

Fortune, Family and Faith: On the Trail of the Blackburns, 1400 – 1450

Nicholas and Margaret Blackburn senior
(detail from St Anne Window, All Saints North Street, York)
Photograph E. Bloomfield

Throughout the first half of the fifteenth century the Blackburn family – rich, astute and ambitious – were among the leading citizens in one of medieval England’s most important cities: York. The Blackburns were a mercantile family whose roots lay in Lancashire; during the fourteenth century they moved into Yorkshire and in the late 1390s to York itself, probably with the expectation of making their fortune there. From the detailed wills left by Nicholas Blackburn, the family patriarch, and his wife Margaret we know that this expectation was fulfilled. The wills reveal how the Blackburns’ lives were shaped by two over-arching concerns: faith and family. Linking and facilitating the two is fortune; the distribution of wealth stipulated by the wills illuminates the Blackburns’ relationship with both God and family, and is the means by which these relationships are expressed and delineated.