British Archaeology, no 15, June 1996: Reviews

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTION
Roberta Gilchrist
Leicester, UKP55.00
ISBN 0-7185-1730-X hb

The sight of yet another book about monasteries is usually calculated to induce a yawn. But not so in this case. Roberta Gilchrist has tackled the monastic parts others fail to reach. Appropriately subtitled `The Other Monasticism', this work steps aside from the houses of the major orders, and their much loved ruins, and explores four areas of scholarly neglect, embracing `a range of religious vocations and associated monasteries that were integral to medieval life'.

This wide-ranging and highly readable study embraces four topics, three of which are reasonably well- known in concept, if not in detail. Medieval hospitals are a case in point. Most major towns and several minor ones were endowed with at least one hospital, usually sited on the outskirts. Although there were at least 1,500 of these foundations in the British Isles, their history and archaeology is ill- known, and the sole evidence for some is a `spital' field name.

Equally familiar by name, as well as for their concentrically planned churches, are the Military Orders of knights, especially the Templars and Hospitallers. Gilchrist reminds us also of some obscure Orders, of which few will even have heard. Altogether, about 180 preceptories were founded in Britain by these powerful Milites Christi. As with the hospitals, it is useful to be presented with a range of plans and reconstructions, as well as an overview of the historical evidence, demonstrating how every foundation was a complex community, of which the church or chapel was but one element.

Of lesser importance on the social scale, and without an archaeological vocabulary of their own, were the solitary hermits and anchoresses. While some were attached to parish churches, others were associated with complicated, idiosyncratic structures, such as rock dwellings and light-houses. Upmarket hermits - the Carthusians and Grandmontines - lived in communes, the buildings of which exhibited a distinctive monastic plan. Mount Grace Priory is the best known.

In the chapter on the archaeology of religious women we come closer to regular monasticism, since many nunneries had filial ties with established orders. The layout of their buildings commonly reflected that link, and the more affluent nunneries, such as Barking Abbey, were architecturally no less grand than many of the houses occupied by their male counterparts. Despite the ambivalent attitude of medieval society towards religious women, equality was sometimes achieved - well, almost.

Dr Warwick Rodwell is an independent church archaeologist

LANDSCAPE AND SETTLEMENT IN BRITAIN AD400-1066
eds Della Hooke and Simon Burnell
Exeter UP, UKP12.95
ISBN 0-85989-386-3 pb

How's landscape archaeology doing, over 40 years after WG Hoskins showed us, in his Making of the English Landscape, that there's more to the story than just scheduled monuments and sites with Gothic script on the OS map?

To judge by this collection of papers based on an Exeter University conference, the picture remains cloudy but clear skies are breaking through. Christopher Taylor's experience, after 20 years' study of a single parish, that `little has been achieved except a slow descent into confusion' should serve only to encourage us to redouble our efforts.

This book sets out a number of approaches to unravelling the landscape over the centuries from the Romans to the Norman Conquest. They range from Celtic Cornwall (Peter Rose and Ann Preston- Jones) through Somerset (CJ Bond) to the North of England (Colleen E Batey), taking in post-Roman changes (Simon Esmonde Cleary), Saxon land-use (Della Hooke) and monastic influences (Christoper Holdsworth) on the way. This is a pivotal period for English settlement and these papers make clear the complexities of relating documentary sources to a wealth of field evidence now increasingly found to be rooted in Roman and prehistoric patterns.

Two points come to mind on putting this book down. Firstly the sheer diversity of the British landscape highlights the value of local research, centred on Sites and Monuments Records, for building up overviews. And secondly the rate of landscape change demands that the results of research are carried through into action on historic conservation. As Hoskins warned, `while we are still talking and sitting in committees, things are being lost to us for ever.' How, for example, will Della Hooke's work on Saxon charter boundaries tie in with the Government's Rural White Paper proposals for protecting historic hedgerows?

Simon Timms is County Archaeologist in Devon

A SLICE THROUGH TIME
MGL Baillie
Batsford, UKP25.00
ISBN 0-7134-7654-0 pb

Prof Baillie, of Queen's University Belfast, was one of the pioneers of tree-ring dating in the British Isles, and his views command respect among dendrochronologists.

This book, however, is not an introduction - although it is stated in the preface that it will draw the student or interested lay reader into the subject. It contains no photographs, few sketches apart from graphs and bar diagrams, and no maps to locate the sites and sources of timber referred to. In the first chapter terms such as `semi-log plots', the `signal' and `t values', are used without discussion. The section on building master chronologies is not really about how this is done; rather, it is on the problems the Belfast group overcame in building their chronologies. Chapter 3 is on the problems the late John Fletcher had in dating chronologies built from oak boards from late medieval paintings - problems that Baillie resolved once a master chronology for Baltic oak became available; but the long drawn-out discussion on the resolution, repeating one of 1984, seems rather pass‚ now. The chapter is also used to stress the limitations and pitfalls of tree-ring dating, some of which is very sound, but some is puzzling too.

The later chapters are mainly concerned with the author's more recent researches in detecting volcanic eruptions and socio-economic changes from tree-ring data. One date with anomalies in the tree-ring record is AD540; and in considering this date, Baillie searched for documentary evidence, and found such remarks as `the failure of bread' in AD536 and 539, `eclipses of the sun' for AD538 and 540, and so on, from which he suggests there could have been dust-veils which accompany large eruptions. I am not happy with this approach - searching documents for doubtful evidence to support tree-ring anomalies. Would it not have been better to consider first the major eruptions of historical times, to see what effects they had on tree-rings? The Tambora eruption in 1815 produced little evidence in the tree-ring record. What are we to make of this?

Dr Bob Laxton is a dendrochronologist at the University of Nottingham

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF SHAKESPEARE
Jean Wilson
Alan Sutton, UKP19.99
ISBN 0-7509-0926-9 hb

The discovery in 1989 of the remains of the Elizabethan Rose and Globe Theatres in Southwark, both closely associated with William Shakespeare, propelled the archaeology of the post-Middle Ages into the centre of British cultural life. Not since Martin Biddle's excavations at the Tudor palace of Nonsuch in 1959/60 have land sites of this period made such an impact on the public.

Previously, despite the vast corpus of scholarship on Shakespeare's dramatic work, little progress had been made on its physical setting and staging. In contrast to the relatively prolific survival of theatres from the classical world, early modern historians had to rely on random survivals in the pictorial and literary record. This book, by a scholar of the Elizabethan stage and literary life, weaves together a rich tapestry of documentary, pictorial, and material evidence and provides a panoramic social and artistic context for the archaeological discoveries in Southwark.

Wilson concludes with a refreshingly frank review of the events of 1989. Here, she identifies a series of failures by the conservation lobby and the responsible archaeological bodies in London, both to overcome the conflicting political and planning interests, and to integrate historical data into the research design.

At the Rose, in a catalogue of errors of excavation strategy, only minimum information was recovered. This culminated in the failure to fully excavate the exposed site, because of opposition from the theatrical lobby campaigning for total preservation. While senior archaeologists such as Martin Biddle advocated total excavation, English Heritage sent in their own team to perform keyhole surgery with little or no benefit. The site now lies entombed under an office block.

Moreover, archaeologists working on the site of the Globe failed to assimilate recently published historical information. Their strategy for the evaluation of the site was based on Visscher's view of the Globe in a 1616 panorama of London which was, coincidentally, being exposed in an exhibition of fakes and forgeries at the British Museum. Wilson concludes that the excavations highlight an increasingly fragmented scholarly community. There seems no reliable mechanism for integrating historical data into strategies for excavation and research. Likewise, few of the excavation findings have been assimilated by the theatre historians now advising on the construction of Sam Wanamaker's new Globe. The result is that this `Globe' is no more authentic than Laurence Olivier's in the film version of Henry V.

Dr David Gaimster is Hon Secretary of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology