The greatest northern European artist of the 15th century, Jan van Eyck, died on or very near this date. He had perfected the new technique of oil painting and his portraits and religious works were in huge demand among the good and great. Obligingly for art historians he signed and dated many of his later works, of which the greatest is the "Ghent Altarpiece".
Wars and religion carried on as usual. The Hundred Years War [actually 116 years altogether] still had 12 years to run, and in Sweden a revolt over excessive taxation on farmers had ended a couple of years earlier. By 1441 taxation was heavy again.
The slowly declining importance of the church and its clergy is illustrated in a little story from Lincoln in England, where locals were upset about the conduct of the Prior at St Katherine’s. He “had taken upon himself to be their prior. The commons of the country have expelled the prior...” Attempts to install a new one were fraught with risk “in case of a new insurrection” and the prior of a neighbouring abbey would not consider the job.
Eton College was founded by Henry VI in this year, and the recent verification (by carbon dating)of the “Vinland Map”, believed to have been produced at about that time for a church council in Switzerland, proves the Vikings had indeed discovered America long before Columbus. There are loads of lists of pre-reformation wills, testaments, probates, and administrations, but people who want to trace their family trees will have problems going back this far. Although in recent decades many European countries have centralised and catalogued medieval records, many are not yet online and official records are often random and incomplete.
The medieval period is conventionally thought to have ended in the 1480s, so by 1441 it only had about a generation to go.
