‘AND WHOSOEVER WILL BE first among you, shall be the servant of all.’ That verse from the Gospels (Mark 10:44) would have echoed in medieval ears with greater contemporary resonance and relevance than it does today. As we have been rightly reminded, ‘Service has some claim to be considered the dominant ethic of the middle ages’ and Julian of Norwich was a woman of her time. Such an ethic, closely associated with concepts of ‘lordship’ and ‘worship’, thoroughly imbues her Revelation of Love. We do Julian a profound disservice if, with the laudable desire of making her accessible to our own time, we occlude the way in which she is firmly embedded in a specific historical era.

I have already argued that Julian's characterisation of the Holy Spirit as ‘our good lord’ can only be understood properly within the framework of so-called bastard feudalism. What Julian's contemporaries thought constituted a ‘good lord’, a ‘lord who looked after his servants’ interests', is implicit in numerous late-medieval texts. A ‘good lord’ was one's patron, with whom his man had a profound personal bond: the lord would reward his ‘service’ not by the grant of land as in the earlier Middle Ages but by fees or other material rewards, by his favour and patronage and, above all, by support in his ‘lawful causes’ (and on occasion in those not so lawful) in a court of law.