Using this Site

Please familiarize yourself with Aedificium's terms of use and/or information for students if you plan to do more than simply browse. Regardless of your intentions, you should find Aedificium to be a relatively straightforward website to navigate and use; nonetheless, a quick survey of its conventions will help you get the most out of your visit.

Terms of Use

All text, maps, artwork, and other material found on this website are Copyright © 2002 Christopher Golden unless otherwise specified. Personal use is not only acceptable, but actively encouraged; after all, that's why it's here. However, this site should not be reproduced or redistributed in whole or in part without my express permission. Aedificium is the product of countless hours of research that I've done in my spare time over the last few years, and is offered to the public as a labor of love.

Practically, what this means is that you are not permitted to use this site or the material contained herein for commercial purposes, nor may you copy the material to your own website, include it in a publication, etc. unless I have given you my explicit consent. Direct quotes of a few lines of text are permissible for scholastic purposes; see Information for Students. If you wish to reference Aedificium in an online document, please consider using an iconographic hyperlink.

Information for Students

If you are a student (official or otherwise), feel free to use the material found herein for your research. However, please keep in mind that I am not a professional historian or archaeologist, nor do I possess academic credentials relevant to the study of medieval England. While I have endeavored to provide as complete a picture as possible of each subject that I have addressed, undoubtedly errors of deduction or omission have crept undetected into my articles.

If you intend to use Aedificium as a reference for scholastic work, I advise you to ask your professor whether this is acceptable. If it is not, treat the site's material as an introduction, and consult the Bibliography as a starting point for your own research instead. I recommend this approach in any case to those students researching topics in depth.

Finally, remember that if you quote from this site, or use facts, ideas, etc. presented herein, you must include appropriate citations. If you do not, you are engaging in plagiarism.

Site Conventions

In keeping with the living history theme of Aedificium, I have chosen to write articles as if the current year were 1190 A.D. Thus, words such as "currently" should be taken to mean "in the late twelfth century," and a passage indicating that something happened "over the past two hundred years" would indicate a time period including the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For accessibility's sake, however, the writing style employed is thoroughly rooted in modern English.

Where appropriate, I have included endnotes to provide supplementary information of relevance to the text. Generally, endnotes consist of citations indicating sources for information given, though they sometimes include other details. Endnotes are connected with the corresponding in-text references via bidirectional hyperlinks, making it a simple matter to navigate to the endnote from the reference or vice versa. An example endnote is provided here [1].

Besides endnotes and their in-text references, hyperlinks found herein conform to the following conventions. Those that are rendered in non-bold typeface (e.g. benefice) link to the corresponding entry in the glossary. Boldfaced hyperlinks (e.g. Site Conventions), in contrast, are more general. They link to targets within the same page, to another Aedificium document, or in some cases, to another website entirely. Finally, each page features a footer that includes contact information and one or two iconographic links, one to the Aedificium home page, and, if appropriate, another to the next level above the current one in the site's page hierarchy.

In creating this site, I have tried to strike a good balance of form, function, and simplicity, foregoing fancy effects and keeping large, bandwidth-hogging images to a minimum. All pages should display properly when viewed with any HTML 4.0x compliant (or mostly compliant) web browser, regardless of whether or not Javascript is enabled. If you find that one or more pages are problematic in this regard, please send me an email detailing the problems, and I will do my best to correct them. Likewise, the content on Aedificium is designed to be as accessible as possible to people with disabilities; again, if you find that improvements could be made, please let me know.

Endnotes

1. Sample endnote for illustrative purposes only. Follow the endnote number's hyperlink to navigate back to the corresponding in-text reference. Note that if the endnote is visible on the same page as the in-text reference, clicking on either of their hyperlinks will not scroll the document.

Last modified 2-22-02