History

This book is the first to investigate how Anglo‐Saxon society dealt with social outcasts. The study begins in the period immediately following Roman rule and ends in the century following the Norman Conquest. This period, the 5th to 11th centuries, witnessed the conversion to Christianity, the emergence of the late Saxon state, and the development of the landscape of Domesday Book. While the study of early Anglo‐Saxon cemeteries and churchyards of the Christian period is well established, a substantial body of excavated and documented evidence for human burial in a range of other contexts has remained neglected until now. This book thus reveals for the first time a nuanced and varied approach to burial rites in Anglo‐Saxon England, particularly relating to individuals cast out from mainstream society. Although impressive written evidence survives, archaeology is uniquely placed to investigate the earliest period of post‐Roman society, the 5th to 7th centuries, where documents are lacking and to provide an independent assessment of documented situations in the later part of the period. The landscape setting of unusual human burials provides insights into the chronology of territorial arrangements and how features such as boundaries and pre‐existing monuments, such as barrows and linear earthworks, were perceived by the Anglo‐Saxons. Overall, the book argues that modes of outcast burial show a clear pattern of development from the pre‐Christian centuries, where deviant burials are found only in community cemeteries, to a situation whereby locally determined rites, such as crossroads burial, existed alongside formal measures imposed from the 7th century ad in the context of kingdom formation.

This book explores the origins and development of regional variation in landscape character across southern Britain during the medieval period. The ‘long eighth century’, between the late seventh and the early ninth centuries, is highlighted as having seen significant changes in how the countryside was managed, with further developments around the tenth century. While villages and open fields were created in the central zone of England (for example in the East Midlands down as far as Somerset), there were also significant changes with regard to how the landscape was exploited and managed in areas such as the south‐west of England and East Anglia. A number of major boundaries in landscape character are identified, such as the Blackdown and Quantock Hills in the South‐West, and the Gipping and Lark valleys in East Anglia, and it is suggested that these have their origins in the pre‐medieval period. In the twelfth century the concept of managing the landscape through villages and open fields was exported into newly conquered southern Wales where major differences in landscape character reflect areas of English, Welsh, and Flemish settlement.

This book overturns many of the traditional assumptions about the nature and purpose of castle-building in the middle ages. It demolishes the traditional belief that castles were overwhelmingly military in their function, showing how this was simply one aspect of a more complicated whole, and sets out to recreate the medieval understanding of castles as symbolically fortified places of all kinds. It places castles in the context of medieval culture and society, as ancient walled post-Roman towns and prestigious religious enclaves to transitory campaign forts. Going back to the original sources, the book proposes a new and subtler understanding of the function and symbolism of castles as well as insights into the lives of the people who inhabited them. Fortresses were only occasionally caught up in war, but constantly were central to the ordinary life of all classes: of the nobility and gentry, of widows and heiresses, of prelates and clergy, of peasantry and townspeople alike. The book presents and explores this broad social panorama.

This book provides the first comprehensive study of city‐states in medieval Europe for more than a century. Rather than highlighting the political and cultural achievements of city‐states, above all those of central and northern Italy, it offers a detailed comparison of city‐states in an urban belt which spanned the Alps from Italy to Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries, focusing on their territorial expansion: Why, how, and with what consequences did cities as communal polities succeed (or fail) in their efforts to construct landed territories and so become sovereign states in their own right. For the first time there is full coverage of the Swiss city‐states and the imperial cities of Germany. In contrast to the typologies of city‐states put forward by social and political scientists the study argues that city‐states were not a spent force in early modern Europe, but survived by transformation and adaption. Furthermore, it suggests that a historical framework for the city‐state which embraces both time and space should be sought in a regional approach which does not treat city‐states in isolation but within their wider geopolitical context.

This book argues that Duke William of Normandy's claim to succeed Edward the Confessor on the throne of England profoundly influenced not only the practice of royal succession, but also played a large part in creating a novel structure of land tenure, dependent on the king. In these two fundamental respects, the attempt made in the aftermath of the Conquest to demonstrate seamless continuity with Anglo-Saxon England severed almost all continuity. A notable result was a society in which instability in succession at the top exacerbated instability lower down. The first serious attempt to address these problems began when arrangements were made, in 1153, for the succession to King Stephen. Henry II duly succeeded him, but claimed rather to have succeeded his grandfather, Henry I, Stephen's predecessor. Henry II's attempts to demonstrate continuity with his grandfather were modeled on William the Conqueror's treatment of Edward the Confessor. Just as William's fabricated history had been the foundation for the tenurial settlement recorded in Domesday Book, so Henry II's, in a different way, underpinned the early common law procedures which began to undermine aspects of that settlement. The official history of the Conquest played a crucial role not only in creating a new society, but in the development of that society.

This book uses manorial account rolls innovatively to reconstruct the economic mentalities of medieval farmers and, by so doing, argues that they have been unfairly stereotyped. It overturns the traditional view of medieval countrymen as economically backward and instead reveals that agricultural decision-making was as rational in the 14th and 15th centuries as in modern times. It investigates agricultural mentalities first in a detailed case study of the exceptionally well-documented demesne farm of Wisbech Barton, analysing the sale and consumption of produce, cereal-cropping strategies, crop rotations, the use of agrarian techniques, and livestock husbandry in four periods between 1313 and 1429. The last third of the book then tests the findings of this case study across medieval England as a whole. The book argues that human action shaped the course of the rural economy to a much greater extent than has hitherto been appreciated, and challenges the commonly held view that the medieval period was dominated by ecological and economic crises. In particular, it argues that rational decision-making rather than soil exhaustion or climatic change lay behind declining arable and pastoral yields at this time, and that the change in demesne management from direct cultivation to leasing during the later Middle Ages was partly the result of a managerial crisis. Although focused chiefly on well-documented farms of great landlords, the book also has crucial implications for our understanding of medieval peasant farming, not least the yield of their land, which may well have been significantly higher than is generally assumed.

Heresy was the most feared crime in the medieval moral universe. It was seen as a social disease capable of poisoning the body politic and shattering the unity of the church. The study of heresy in late medieval England has, to date, focussed largely on the heretics. In consequence, we know very little about how this crime was defined by the churchmen who passed authoritative judgement on it. By examining the drafting, publicizing, and implementing of new laws against heresy using published and unpublished judicial records, this book presents a study of inquisition in medieval England. It argues that because heresy was a problem simultaneously national and local, detection relied upon collaboration between rulers and the ruled. While involvement in detection brought local society into contact with the apparatus of government, uneducated laymen still had to be kept at arm's length because judgements about heresy were deemed too subtle and important to be left to them. Detection required bishops and inquisitors to balance reported suspicions against canonical proof, and threats to public safety against the rights of the suspect and the deficiencies of human justice. The major figures in the prosecution of heresy were Thomas Arundel and Henry Chichele, archbishops of Canterbury. At present, the character and significance of lollardy, the heresy associated with John Wyclif, in late medieval England is the subject of much debate. The book considers that this debate has to be informed by a greater awareness of the legal and social contexts within which heresy took on its many real and imagined attributes.