44 results in A Social History of England, 900–1200
I.1 - Land use and people
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- By Robin Fleming, Boston College
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 21 April 2011, pp 15-37
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Summary
In order to come to grips with the land of England and the people who inhabited it in the centuries on either side of the Norman Conquest, it is necessary to consider a period broader than the basic chronological timeframe of this volume. Indeed, as we shall see, the extraordinary transformations of landscape and people which so mark the central Middle Ages began not in the tenth century, but rather in the generations before ad 800. Although the West Saxon conquest of the Danelaw in the tenth century, the conquests of England by Cnut the Great and William the Conqueror in the eleventh and the problems of Stephen's reign and their resolutions in the twelfth century were the ruination of many landholders and the making of others, the major changes concerning land use and people described in this chapter had little to do with grand politics. Instead, they were determined by the ways many hundreds of thousands of people came to farm and pay what they owed their betters, and by the sorts of communities in which they chose or were told to live. These things changed dramatically over the course of the central Middle Ages, and they transformed the look of the land and the lives of the people who made their livings from it. Indeed, as people during this period remade the landscape, the landscape came to remake them.
VI.3 - Esoteric knowledge
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- By Andy Orchard, Trinity College, Toronto
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 21 April 2011, pp 381-390
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The esoteric learning of England before 1200 is enshrined in an extensive manuscript record that, while it exhibits significant losses as a result of Viking depredations and later looting and loss, and if it appears dramatically broken-backed in its relative reflection of Latin and vernacular texts before and after the pivotal reign of King Alfred the Great (871–99), nonetheless demonstrates a consistent and continuing interest in hidden and obscure learning throughout the period. The fact that Aldhelm (who died in 709/10), writing in the late seventh century, should quote from an anonymous treatise on animal noises that also appears in a late-tenth-century manuscript, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O. 1. 18 (1042), with strong associations with Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury (who died in 988), is as pertinent in this regard as that Dunstan should also be directly linked with a composite manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Auctarium F.4.32 (2176), that contains, alongside material in Breton and Welsh, notes on weights and measures in Greek and Latin, a runic alphabet and an extract from Ovid's Ars amatoria (Art of love). The Ars amatoria is otherwise attested (likely second-hand!) by Bede, who died in 735, by Wulfstan of Winchester (who died early in the eleventh century) and by a further manuscript from early England, namely Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 2410 (a Canterbury manuscript from around the year 1000), which contains two lines alongside an odd catch-all collection of diverse lore (including works by the poets Juvencus, Caelius Sedulius, Odo of Cluny and Alcuin, as well as, for example, a Greek litany and Sanctus, Greek numbers in Latin letters and a poem on the Four Keys of Wisdom) that characterizes the comprehensiveness of early English interests.
I.3 - Forest and upland
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- By Oliver Rackham, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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Summary
WOODLAND
Anglo-Saxon England was not a very wooded country. The original prehistoric wildwood had long since gone, and woods had been interacting with people for thousands of years. Only about half of the 13,000 estates recorded in Domesday Book possessed woodland; the area adds up to about 15 per cent of England, much more than there is now, but less than France has now. About one in thirty of the boundary features mentioned in Anglo-Saxon perambulations alludes to a wood: these are located in roughly the same areas where Domesday records woodland. Woodland can also be inferred from place-names, which, however, are difficult to date. Generally place-names indicate that the distribution of wooded and non-wooded areas, as recorded in perambulations and Domesday, was already established well before 900.
England in the period from 900 to 1200 lacked many species of tree familiar today: sycamore, horse-chestnut, most poplars and all conifers except yew and juniper. Beech and sweet-chestnut were much less widespread than now. Plantations (people planting areas of trees) begin after our period. There were, however, trees in hedges and other non-woodland places, as recorded in many boundary perambulations, and also orchards.
Woodland was very unevenly distributed. There were big concentrations in the Weald and the Chiltern plateau, and lesser concentrations in Worcestershire, north Warwickshire and east Cheshire; the southern Lake District, though outside the scope of Domesday Book, had abundant woodland as recorded in place-names.
III.2 - Commerce and markets
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- By Richard Britnell, University of Durham
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 21 April 2011, pp 179-187
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After the disasters that followed the collapse of Roman authority, trade, both international and internal, eventually grew, but its institutional infrastructure needed to be recreated. Even where towns eventually revived on old sites they operated with newly devised trading institutions and new monetary systems. During the eighth and earlier ninth centuries overseas commerce increased, especially through London, Southampton, Ipswich and York, and wider trading interests prompted currency reform as well as co-operation between the principal English monarchies. A single standard of currency established by the kings of Mercia and Wessex, together with the archbishop of Canterbury, implied a common interest in trade. But the later ninth and early tenth centuries experienced a temporary setback in parts of England as the Danish invasions of eastern England disrupted established institutions and practices. The level of international trade stagnated in the wics through which merchandise had previously passed, and the money supply diminished. Danish rulers ultimately proved no less interested than the English kings in fostering trade, but the coins they minted were of lower quality. No common standard of currency was re-established until King Edgar's new coinage of 973. The year 900 is accordingly a useful point at which to take stock of the institutional provision for trade, before proceeding to examine the subsequent revival of commerce in the Late Saxon and Anglo-Norman periods.
IV.2 - Ethnicity and acculturation
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- By D. M. Hadley, University of Sheffield
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 21 April 2011, pp 235-246
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Over the last twenty years the constructed nature of ethnic identity has been extensively discussed, and both historians and archaeologists have explored the processes – often dubbed ‘ethnogenesis’ – by which ethnic groups came into existence, were transformed and, in some cases, disappeared. This branch of scholarship has mainly focused on the societies of the early post-Roman centuries, but studies of later periods have more recently begun to address similar issues. Drawing on both historical and archaeological evidence, this subchapter explores the construction of ethnic identity and the processes of acculturation in England in the wake of successive invasions and migrations during the period c. 900–1200. Despite the presence of various migrant groups, who were frequently in the political ascendancy and in some regions were also numerically dominant, a sense of Englishness prevailed, both politically and culturally.
For much of the twentieth century researchers of the early medieval period regarded ethnic identity as largely unproblematic, and as readily identifiable from the ascription of ethnic labels to individuals and groups in contemporary sources and from discrete distributions of material culture. Such attitudes have, however, been thrown into sharp relief by scholarly developments since the 1980s. Patrick Geary memorably described ethnic identity as ‘a situational construct’, liable to be modified according to circumstances, and he argued that ‘early medieval ethnicity should be viewed as a subjective process by which individuals and groups identified themselves or others within specific situations and for specific purposes’.
V.5 - Textual communities (Latin)
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- By Teresa Webber, Trinity College, Cambridge
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 21 April 2011, pp 330-340
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Latin texts played a central role in the life of all religious institutions, in a way that set them apart from the laity. Monks, nuns and clergy encountered such texts daily, through the communal performance of the liturgy and other customary observances, individual devotional reading and study. Levels of knowledge and comprehension of Latin varied considerably both within and between religious institutions. Nevertheless, the concept of a textual community, as formulated by Brian Stock, accommodates the existence of differing levels of literacy within a single such community. Membership involved a shared understanding of the contents or precepts of a text or group of texts which shaped or reinforced their ideals and identity. Stock's detailed analysis focused primarily upon Continental marginal and heretical groups, but he acknowledged that textual communities also existed within the religious mainstream. England did not experience the emergence of Christian heterodox or dissident groups until the late Middle Ages, and, in all but exceptional cases, the laity's inclusion as part of a textual community required the use of the vernacular. The number of Latinate laymen was not sufficient to obviate the equation of clericus and litteratus, at a time when to be literate was understood to entail an ability to read Latin.
IV.4 - The Jews
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- By Anna Sapir Abulafia, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 21 April 2011, pp 256-264
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The Jews arrived in England in 1066 and succeeded in building up a successful livelihood. By the end of Henry II's reign some two dozen Jewish communities had come into being. By the end of the twelfth century a Jewish financial network had spread from London, where the first Norman Jews had settled after the Conquest, to Norwich and Lincoln and reached into the developing areas around York. Jewish prosperity owed much to Henry II's actions against the English moneyers and foreign Christian moneylenders like William Cade. By 1180 moneylending, rather than money changing or business in plate, had become the main financial occupation of English Jews. They enjoyed the king's backing, for rather than seek credit from them, he targeted their profits as a ready source for royal taxation. The complexities and shortcomings of this backing would become obvious in the pogroms of 1189/90. Richard's 1194 Ordinance of the Jews began to put in place the stringent royal control of all aspects of Jewish business which was to become the peculiar characteristic of English Jewish life before their expulsion in 1290.
It is likely that William the Conqueror brought Jews from Rouen to London on account of their expertise in trade of luxury items and their experience in money changing and supplying moneyers with plate to mint coins. The Anglo-Saxon kings seem to have decided not to follow this route.
I.2 - Water and land
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- By Stephen Rippon, University of Exeter
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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INTRODUCTION
Water, in its various forms, is one of the character-defining features of Britain's landscape. Its coast is heavily indented with estuaries that allow tidal waters to penetrate far inland, and the rivers that flow into these estuaries first cross low-lying floodplains whose permanently high water tables and vulnerability to flooding make them challenging yet ecologically productive environments in which to live. Many of these estuaries, and some stretches of open coastline, are also fringed by low-lying wetlands, mostly derived from the reclamation of what were once intertidal salt marshes, and in total wetlands once covered 8.4 per cent of England. In the prehistoric period these various wetlands formed a mosaic of natural environments including unvegetated intertidal mudflats around the coasts and estuaries that were covered by the sea twice a day, and more elevated areas of mud – known as salt marshes – that had been colonized by salt-tolerant plants and may have been flooded only a few times a month at the higher spring tides. In the more extensive coastal wetlands the deposition of sediment on these marshes meant that they built up to such a height that the sea no longer reached the inland areas, or ‘backfens’, where freshwater peatlands developed with a range of vegetation including reeds, sedges, alder-carr woodland and sphagnum moss.
Map 2 - England 900–1200
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 21 April 2011, pp xv-xvi
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II.2 - Lordship and labour
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- By Stephen Baxter, King's College, London
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 21 April 2011, pp 98-114
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Relations between lords and peasants underwent profound change throughout northwest Europe between 900 and 1200, so one way to deepen our understanding of the nature and pace of that change in England is to consider how historians of continental Europe – especially those of France – have approached it. They have developed a model which posits radical change occurring around the year 1000: so rapid that it has been labelled the ‘feudal revolution’. Its salient elements are these. In a process which began in the mid- to late tenth century and accelerated during the eleventh, the formal apparatus of Carolingian government disintegrated and collapsed. An aggressive form of seigneurial lordship filled the resulting political and judicial vacuum. Local magnates began to intercept and monopolize payments such as taxation, toll and judicial fines formerly paid to kings and found new, arbitrary and more exploitative ways of extracting surpluses from peasants: malae consuetudines (bad customs) such as swingeing tallages, marriage taxes and monopoly control of markets and mills. They also began to preside over private courts, thereby exercising judicial control over the peasantry and depriving them of protection from these forms of ‘seigneurial piracy’. All this was sustained by violence. Magnates cultivated the support of an increasingly assertive stratum within the lesser aristocracy – milites, ‘knights’, the ‘chevalerie’, ‘les valets du terrorisme seigneurial’ – who derived their power and influence through mastery of new technologies of warfare, above all the castle, heavy cavalry and the crossbow.
V.6 - Textual communities (vernacular)
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- By Elaine Treharne, Florida State University
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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DEFINING THE TEXTUAL COMMUNITY
The literate, Latinate elite of Anglo-Saxon England represents specific social and intellectual groups – those men and women fortunate enough to be educated through an institutional system that was religious, and principally monastic. Many of these privileged learners would have been aristocratic, or at least freeborn, as Alfred recommends in his Preface to Gregory's Pastoral Care. This Preface was written by Alfred towards the end of the ninth century, when he recognized that the consolidation of the truce with the Danes would require rebuilding a country devastated by a century of strife. Part of this reconstructive process involved the conscious fostering of education, so that the rich cultural and intellectual traditions of Anglo-Saxon England could be permitted to flourish once again. In the extant manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 20, given to Wærferth, bishop of Worcester, at the end of the ninth century, Alfred reveals his educational plans to his bishop, in what has become one of the most famous passages of early English:
Therefore it seems better to me, if it seems so to you, that we also should translate certain books, which are most necessary for all men to know, into the language that we can all understand, and also arrange it, as with God's help we very easily can if we have peace, so that all the young freeborn men now among the English people who have the means to be able to devote themselves to it, may be set to study for as long as they are of no other use, until a time when they are able to read English writing well. […]
VI.4 - Medical practice and theory
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- By Carole Rawcliffe, University of East Anglia, Norwich
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 21 April 2011, pp 391-401
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The practice of medicine in England before the late twelfth century and the theoretical assumptions that underpinned it have been subject to a comprehensive process of reassessment over the last three decades, with the result that sources formerly regarded as little more than ‘magic gibberish’ are now viewed in a far more positive light. Charles Singer's often-quoted dismissal of Anglo-Saxon medicine as the ‘final pathological disintegration’ of a once-great classical tradition was largely based upon his reading of Oswald Cockayne's influential edition of the principal medical texts of the tenth century. Produced in the 1860s with a lengthy introduction that emphasized the ‘superstitious’ and ‘irrational’ element of works such as Bald's Leechbook and The Old English Herbarium, Cockayne's idiosyncratic and often inaccurate translations were embellished with archaisms designed to make them appear even more outlandish and primitive. It is thus hardly surprising that, with a few exceptions, subsequent generations of medical historians tended to regard the years between 900 and 1150 as a dark age, when links with both the classical past and current intellectual developments on the Continent were lost through ignorance, and when healing was largely subsumed into folklore.
V.4 - Public spectacle
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- By Tom Licence, University of East Anglia, Norwich
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 21 April 2011, pp 321-329
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Public spectacle, which may be defined as any orchestration of events designed to engage the minds of spectators, can inform our understanding of the social identity or prevailing mores of past cultures. Typically it evolves as a co-adapted set of devices: superficially, devices such as sights, sounds, smells, splendour and ceremony, but at a deeper level – one might say psychologically – a sense of participation; an affirmation of identity and life's meaning for the individual, as a spectator within a collectivity of his or her peers. The trick is that each spectator imagines that he or she is at one with all, most or many of the others by participating in the common response of the crowd; indeed, the most enduring forms of public spectacle in the period 900–1200 stimulated the crowd to respond in a predetermined way. In doing so they performed four main social functions. The first function of spectacle was essentially contractual: to affirm the mutual responsibilities, or the mutually profitable relationship, between different ranks of the social hierarchy (including God and the saints), or social equals. Another function was to affirm life's meaning, usually by reinforcing belief in God and in the Christian cosmology. A third function might be termed recreational. Village drama, knockabout, satire, skits and the enactment of heroic tales tackled life's big questions in engaging, allusive, fun or frivolous ways, and surely helped people come to terms with them.
IV.1 - Invasion and migration
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- By Elisabeth Van Houts, Emmanuel College, Cambridge
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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Looking back to the year 1000, the mid-twelfth-century historian Henry of Huntingdon characterized the coming of the Danes and the Normans as a divine punishment for the English comparable with the Britons' fate after the invasions by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes:
This He brought about as if laying a military ambush. I mean that on one side the persecution by the Danes was raging, and on the other the connection with the Normans was growing, so that even if they were to escape the obvious lightning fire of the Danes, valour would not help them to escape the Normans' unexpected trick.
This retrospective view by the bilingual married archdeacon, son of a Norman clerk and an English mother, whose job required him to travel around in the Danelaw, is a valuable starting point for the present chapter. Between 900 and 1200 England experienced repeated foreign invasion, culminating in three periods of extended rule. While the first resulted in settlement and occupation of much of northeast England in the late ninth and early tenth century, the latter were political takeovers by a military elite which turned the eleventh century into an era of unprecedented trauma in the history of the English people. In this chapter the elite small-scale immigration will take centre stage with subsidiary roles for the various groups of immigrants that entered the country as they have done throughout English history (mercenaries and merchants, artisans and craftsmen as well as clerks and clergy).
V.1 - Religion and belief
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- By Carl Watkins, Magdalene College, Cambridge
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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By the year 900 England had already been shaped for three centuries or more by a Christian message which had spread from the north and west with Irish missionaries and from the south with the mission that arrived in 597 with Augustine of Canterbury (d. 604). That message was a meaning- rich account of existence in which a God-created world was riven by suffering and death because of the disobedience of the first human beings. That ‘Fall’, and the original sin which henceforth stained all born into the world, had been restored when God entered the world as Christ, a God-man who suffered and died to redeem the sins of humankind and then rose from the dead to seal his promise of eternal life. Through him, the Church taught, and through the remedies, the sacraments, which the Church offered in his name, salvation was possible for the believer. Moreover all, believer and unbeliever alike, would face Christ eventually for he would return at the end of days to judge the quick and dead, delivering the righteous into heaven and the wicked into the eternal fire. These essential messages ran like a golden thread through the conversion, into our period and beyond, but their institutional setting and detailed elaboration were subject to enormous change during the central Middle Ages. The Church itself was subject to a transformation which had major ramifications for the regions. Papal power, in particular, increased exponentially.
II.4 - War and violence
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- By John Hudson, University of St Andrews
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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Historians have often separated their treatments of war and of other forms of violence. They have done so mainly on two related criteria, the status of the leading participants and the scale of the violent activities; wars are large scale and the parties are obedient to opposing rulers or certainly leaders of high status. People in the tenth to twelfth centuries, however, used words such as ‘guerra’ both of conflicts between rulers and between parties of much lower status. At the same time, they, too, made distinctions, not only as to scale but also, for instance, as to legitimacy. Although churchmen made efforts to lay down strict canons of legitimacy, in practice judgment was very much in the eye of the beholder; the use of force by others might be seen as improper, and in turn require a forceful response. Thus Jordan Fantosme has Henry II of England state:
My lords, give me your counsel! My son is wronging me, it is right that you should be aware of this, for he wants to win by force revenues from my lands; I do not think it right that they should be made over to him; such revenues have never been extorted from one in my strong position. What is taken or achieved by force has no title in right or reason; that has often been decided. Harsh things are said about me because I stand up for my rights … yet there is no reason why we should suffer further harm. I pray you, my lords, to unite in aiding me; prove your strength in the heat of battle, and exert all your efforts on my behalf.
VI.5 - Subversion
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- By Martha Bayless, University of Oregon
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 21 April 2011, pp 402-411
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A tension between spiritual joy and earthly pleasures was a hallmark of the period in question, as it was of many other periods of history. On the whole, the ‘official’ culture of the Church regarded levity, eating, drinking and the enjoyment of the body, particularly the unruly and potentially immoral lower body, as profane and ungodly. These austere religious authorities shared an uneasy coexistence with more worldly forces, inside the Church as well as outside, which relished earthly delights, indulged the lower body and celebrated these exploits without shame. Occasionally such profane behaviour was purposefully blasphemous; at other times it was designed as satire, reproof for the abuses and hypocrisies of the Church and the age. Perhaps most often it was merely the product of high spirits, though those high spirits were commonly regarded as an offence to the dignity of the Church.
The period before 1200 recorded less frivolity, profanity and licence than later centuries, but this is indubitably an effect of limited literacy and the sombre bias of the written records. The situation of the modern scholar is much like that of Gerald of Wales, who described a dinner at Canterbury Cathedral Priory in 1180. Enjoined to solemnity, the monks were supposed to be keeping silence, but Gerald observed that in practice they were irrepressibly lively.
III.3 - Urban planning
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- By Julia Barrow, University of Nottingham
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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Proto-urban sites of various types had been a feature of Anglo-Saxon England, especially Mercia, for some time before the late ninth century, and from the 870s to 890s, under the influence of Viking attacks, Viking settlement and an energetic fortification programme in Wessex by Alfred the Great (king of Wessex 871–99), urbanization in England became more vigorous. The sites fortified in or by the late ninth and the tenth centuries were usually based at river-crossings and also on major roads. Permanent garrison settlements, coupled with the need for regulated markets to allow rulers to tap into profits from sales, encouraged many places to become urbanized. Defences were therefore an important feature of many urban places in England in the 900–1200 period, and certainly of the larger ones, including most of the shire towns; they often helped to determine the planning of streets and other minor features within the areas they demarcated. Also significant in deciding the internal layout of towns were major churches, especially, though not only, where these preceded urban development; in particular, Anglo-Saxon minster churches and Benedictine abbeys fostered the growth of markets and towns. Sites associated with secular political authority tended to be less influential than major churches, but nonetheless could influence internal organization, especially with the need to find sites for royal castles in major towns after the Norman Conquest.
V.3 - Saints and cults
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- By Paul Antony Hayward, University of Lancaster
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 21 April 2011, pp 309-320
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No two cult centres in England have exactly the same history between ad 900 and 1200, but if there is a general pattern it is that the period saw three great surges of interest in saints and their cults: the first took place at the end of the tenth century, the second in the six decades between 1070 and 1130 and the third and the most diffuse during the last three decades of the twelfth century. These periods saw efforts on the part of the leading churches to introduce new cults or to renew old ones. At Thorney, for example, there was much activity during the first two phases: diverse cults were relocated to the abbey when it was founded in the 970s; several of these cults – those of Botulf, Tancred, Torhtred and Tova – were subsequently equipped with vitae by Folcard, the viceabbas whom William the Conqueror appointed in about 1069; in 1098 the relics were translated to a new church built by Abbot Gunther, who had succeeded Folcard in 1085; more relics were then acquired in 1105 and 1111 – relics of Theodore the Martyr and then relics of the founder St Æthelwold himself; but there is little sign that the abbey's repertoire of cults was expanded or that they were provided with further textual support during the remainder of our period.
Further reading
- Edited by Julia Crick, University of Exeter, Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge
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- A Social History of England, 900–1200
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- 05 June 2012
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- 21 April 2011, pp 427-445
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