Inhabiting medieval buildings: theorising place and space in pre-modern England

Kate Giles

In recent years, medieval domestic buildings have been a fertile ground for debate and study amongst academics and vernacular buildings enthusiasts. Importantly, scholars have sought to theorise more explicitly the study of the plan form, appearance and use of houses and other building types. Such debates are perhaps best represented in the lively exchanges of the journal Vernacular Architecture, and in the writings of scholars such as Dyer, Austin, Johnson, Pearson. However, they have also exerted a profound impact on the day-to-day recording of such buildings by local and regional scholars and recording groups in the UK.

I have been drawn into this debate by my work on guildhalls, a type of building which seems to have important spatial and structural parallels not only with houses but also with other building types, such as parish churches. Increasingly, within the literature, emphasis has been placed on the remarkable and apparently universal use of the ‘tripartite’ organisation of domestic buildings, across a long chronological period and across a wide social and geographical range of houses. This ‘consensus’ has been interpreted not only as a reflection of deeply-embedded principles of social organisation, but also as the very mechanism by which such principles were reproduced over time. In other words, the existence of these ‘templates’ appear to provide evidence of the perception of medieval domestic space and household relations. Increasingly, however, I have found these ideas rather difficult to square with the apparent diversity and flexibility of medieval houses which is emerging from the day-to-day local and regional studies of medieval peasant houses and urban buildings.

First, I want to problematise the construction of typologies of medieval buildings and the use of categories such as ‘open, ‘transitional’ and ‘closed’ house types. I want to argue that such categories serve to reproduce a homogenous and static view of medieval life, so that it can act as a foil against which the changes of the early modern period can be set.

Second, I wish to argue that rather than simply relying on the evidence of surviving buildings, medievalists can turn to the rich source of evidence about medieval perceptions of space, in the writings of contemporary philosophers and, if sued carefully, contemporary literary sources. I want to suggest that these sources, in turn, allow us to be much more selective and critical about our use of contemporary spatial theory in the analysis of medieval buildings. Here then, I want to highlight the important of the idea of ‘inhabitation’ as a useful way of thinking about such buildings.

Third, I want to return to the archaeological evidence itself, and discuss a series of examples of buildings, drawn from several different regions which demonstrate the diversity, flexibility and adaptability of medieval ‘peasant’ buildings. I want to suggest that the differences between peasant houses, particularly those within the same parish, street or ward, have important things to tell us about the differences between households: the composition of family and wider household, the domestic and industrial activities which occurred within them, the social use of spaces by the household but also by other members of the community. These differences, then are profoundly important to our understanding of the dynamism of medieval communities and their active manipulation of domestic space, to create particular kinds of visual impression on their families, kin groups, neighbours and guests. Such differences, I would argue, were one of the most important ways in which the relative social and economic divisions within peasant craft and mercantile communities were structured and negotiated. And thus, I would suggest that the creation of particular kinds of perception of domestic buildings was central to the successful construction of identity and status amongst the emerging middle classes of pre-modern England.

Within and without the house, I want to call for a much more integrated understanding of the relationship between house forms, settlement forms and landscape use, particularly the kinds of agricultural activity, industrial and mercantile activities in which peasants, craftsmen and merchants were involved. Here, we might return profitably to the idea of ‘pays’ as a means of integrating our understanding of building materials, structure and appearance and plan form with household composition and the use of space. Here too, is an opportunity for us to consider the significance of temporality and seasonality in our search for the perception and meaning of medieval buildings.

Finally, and perhaps predictably, I want to argue that we cannot study domestic buildings in isolation. Neither the form, the function, nor the perception of medieval buildings was not constructed by houses alone. We need to re-integrate the study of houses with churches and public buildings and ask how the combined and dynamic use of all of these spaces, as well as other places – streets and fields, marketplaces and churchyards – were inhabited by medieval communities.

Reading the late medieval peasant dwelling: notes towards a social archaeology of power, resistance and community

Sally V. Smith

The domestic space of the medieval peasant has received very little archaeological attention in terms of considerations of meanings or perception. The types of conclusions on these matters, where they have been drawn at all, have been limited to suggestions concerning ‘universal codes’ of spatial meaning existing throughout medieval society and to attributions of generic structuralist dichotomies to the space of the home. In a sense, these types of conclusions reflect present-day conceptions about ‘the domestic’, part of which involve characterising the meanings of this space as essential and unchanging.  Explanations of this sort are very a-contextual; in other words, they universalise peasant experience. Moreover, other aspects of peasant domestic space which I argue would have been important in terms of the meanings of that space remain un-discussed.  In this paper, I wish to look at peasant domestic space as a site implicated in the creation of peasant community and in resistance to seigneurial power. (It is also an important site in the exercise of gendered power relations, which there is not time to go into in the paper itself but which, I think, is vital to any understanding of the meanings of peasant domestic space).

I will firstly turn to the archaeological evidence of peasant domestic space which allows us to talk about peasant perceptions of community and the material correlates of its construction. It must be noted here that I, following Dyer, feel that is reasonable to assume that, in many cases, peasants were responsible for the form and layout of their domestic space. Moreover, even if peasants were not directly responsible for the spatial arrangement of these buildings, they almost certainly were for its maintenance.  It is therefore plausible to conclude that a not inconsiderable amount of the archaeological evidence we have for peasant domestic space can speak to us of the agential actions of the peasantry.

The evidence from the village of Wharram Percy in the Yorkshire Wolds allows us to view peasant domestic spaces as implicated in the processes of generating, as well as of reflecting, peasant perceptions of community cohesion. Firstly, there would have been a substantial similarity in the external appearance of the houses of this village; all were of cruck construction, many had a cross-passage and opposed entrance plan, and the pottery assemblages found within them were similar. As well as this broad similarity in house lay-out and appearance, the suggested change in house alignment that happened later in the period is also of interest. It has been, I think convincing, argued by Stuart Wrathmell that earthwork and aerial photographic evidence from the six tofts in the northern half of the east row of the village reveals a change from each toft containing a building aligned parallel to the toft frontage to a lay-out in which each messuage accommodated two buildings separated by a yard with both buildings running at right angles from the toft frontage. It is very difficult to know why this change occurred, but the important point for our discussion is not so much to do with the reasons which lay behind it, but to do with the fact that the peasants at this time changed their toft lay-outs in basically identical fashion, producing startlingly similar results throughout the row. It is also significant that, throughout the late medieval period at Wharram Percy, with only one exception, toft boundaries stayed fixed; in addition, we have evidence for only minimal household encroachment onto the public spaces of green or track-way. If we view material culture not as simply reflecting the workings of technological, political or environmental processes, but as evidence for people’s deliberate actions, we can start to suggest some conclusions relating to the experience and meaning of this material culture. The evidence from Wharram Percy seems to suggest that peasant domestic space was used to produce meanings of unity, co-operation and community.

The configuration of domestic spaces could also serve to create and reflect gender-group identities, as can be seen by the arrangement of the foldyards at the village of Wawne, in the East Riding. The sharing of these yards, in combination with what we know about women’s taskscapes, lets us suggest that these spaces would have been am important site in the creation of a female gender identity. It must be noted, however, that I am arguing that domestic space can provide us with information pertaining to the peasant perceptions of ‘community’, not that it simply demonstrates the existence of peasant community. The evidence for the domestic spaces of other villages shows that these spaces could be used to produce meanings, not of the unity of the community, but rather, of difference and distinctions between households.

The domestic space of the medieval peasant can also be read in terms of resistance to seigneurial power. Turning again to the village of Wharram Percy, we can see that there are a number of indications that practices resistance to seigneurial power were clustered around the domestic sphere. We can see this through the material traces of stone robbing, hand-milling and poaching. It is only when interpretive weight is put on objects which are normally simply listed in small-finds catalogues that the material culture of the medieval peasant dwelling can begin to speak to us of perception and meaning.

One of the conclusions that I think it is important to draw from the above discussion is that the loaded-ness of the term ‘domestic’ can be unhelpful for those investigating meanings in the past. Of course, there is no doubting that the house or ‘domestic building’ was a particular ‘place’ in medieval peasant lives; distinct activities went on there, thereby evoking distinct meanings. Similarly, there are differences as well as similarities between peasant houses, items such as decorative pottery alert us to the fact that household, as well as peasant group, identities were important to these people. However, the use of the term ‘domestic’ is not always helpful, mainly because of the suggestion of separation and the links with the idea of a public/private dichotomy which it contains. Possibly a change of nomenclature, to ‘household’ or some other such word might be helpful in removing us from the baggage of the word ‘domestic’. As we have seen, the space of the peasant house and the activities which went on therein were embedded in and formed an important site of both political resistance and of the creation of peasant community.

A history of domestic space, or a spatial history of domesticity?

Tadhg O’Keeffe

When I was thinking about this paper I was struck by how the word ‘space’ appears in the title of the section in which I am to speak but not in the title of the larger, multi-session, workshop itself. That is an observation, not a criticism. Deliberately or subliminally, this workshop’s identification of ‘landscape’ and ‘settlement’ as the objects of medieval perception reflects our own contemporary perceptions of landscapes and settlements as tangible entities, experienced and comprehended primarily through our visual senses, and susceptible to near-objective comparative analysis. ‘Space’, as traditionally understood by medievalists (well, archaeologists and historical geographers!), simply does not lend itself to such investigation. But my suggestion in this (entirely theoretical) paper is that the exploration of medieval meanings and perceptions demands a serious re-engagement with the concept of space, and not in the Cartesian sense but in Lefevrian and Foucaultian senses.

 Space and place

Delegates at this workshop will know, perhaps, how the conceptual relationship of ‘space’ to ‘place’ has been exercising humanist geographers (as well as a small cabal of theoretically-aware archaeologists) for some time now. They will know that the preference today is for describing landscapes and settlements as species of ‘place’, with the word ‘place’ being favoured because it connotes intimacy or familiarity. And they may sense, as I do, that this concept of ‘place’ has actually driven a wedge through our understanding of space and spatiality, isolating those scholars who conceive of space as fundamentally measurable from those who conceive of it as Edward Soja does: time and space are, he maintains, the ‘co-equal and mutually formative aspects of social life’.

Medievalists, on the whole, still conceive of space in the former, very narrow, way, whether it is with respect to the macro-scales that are discussed later in the day in Belfast or to the micro-scales of domesticity. They regard space solely in terms of structure and structuring, and take for granted ‘the existential spatiality of being in the world’ (as Edward Soja again expresses it), so as to deal with ‘the temporal and social aspects of being in the world’. The very phrases ‘planned landscapes’ and ‘planned settlements’, for example, derive from then often-unconscious privileging of spatial structure. The study of the domestic arena, which is a smaller-scaled landscape, may seem a little more daring, thanks to the incorporation of ideas about architectural permeability from architectural theorists, but domestic space is still understood as fundamentally structured: Access Analysis, for example, purports to offer an alternative strategy for reading medieval built-space, but one could argue that it merely offers an alternative strategy for representing built-space as structured and controlling.

This rather narrow view of space and spatiality can be understood historically, and it is critical that we are aware of its historiographical roots. Dalibor Vesely identified how, under the growing sway of modern science, a new fascination with encyclopaedism, taxonomies, comparative studies, different kinds of measured observations, and the like, profoundly altered architectural thinking and architectural practise at the end of the eighteenth century. He characterised this as a shift from symbolic representation to instrumental representation (what Aristotle described respectively as poiesis and technē). At the risk of misrepresenting his complex argument, we might understand it as a shift from a metaphysical and aesthetic understanding of architecture to one that is overtly technical and scientific. The susceptibility of the technical/scientific to evaluation by experiment, and so to some measure of ‘truthfulness’, gave it primacy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries over the aesthetic/metaphysical, both in the creation of new architecture and, especially, in the consideration of historic architecture. And it also gave it primacy over the experiential, in the sense that the aesthetic/metaphysical were, in part, experienced. Although the postmodern turn has changed things around again, the study of medieval architecture – indeed of medieval space in general – remains time-locked.

A new spatial history of domesticity?

I will outline in brief some of the empirical and theoretical research since the 1970s into the (sometimes-domestic) spaces of modernity and postmodernity, and suggest a relevance for these in the context of medieval architectural-residential thinking. The richness of the theoretical work will be illuminated by reference to the work of Paul Virilio, Anthony Vidler and Edward Soja; the empirical research will be represented by assorted geographers. Following the lead of Juan Pablo Bonta, who argued in 1979 that architectural history needs to be a history of meanings and not just of forms, I will then suggest that we reflect on the meanings of domestic built-spaces by developing ideas about architectural transparency and what I clumsily call spatial in-betweenness.

Morphology and meaning in the late medieval Yorkshire Wolds

Briony McDonagh

Combining new theoretical perspectives developed within cultural geography and archaeology with more traditional methodologies for analysing and mapping settlement form, the paper explores questions about the meaning and planning of rural space in late medieval and early modern England.  Drawing on her recently competed doctoral thesis, the speaker examines what settlement morphology might reveal about the ways space was conceived and experienced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and consequently how power, status and identity might be articulated through such a landscape.

Focusing in particular on the Yorkshire Wolds, a region of low chalk hills stretching across the historic East Riding of Yorkshire, the paper examines the geographical relationships between manor houses, parish churches and other settlement elements as a way in to exploring how people thought about and experienced the spaces around them. The paper points to the complex overlapping and interaction of manorial, church and village space which occurred in some places, perhaps particularly where manor houses and churches were in close spatial proximity (as they often were in the Yorkshire Wolds), as well as explores how manor houses and churches might be thought of as public, private, secular, religious, elite, community or gendered spaces. In thinking about the construction and meaning of public and private space, the paper also draws attention to the connections between micro-scale, settlement-scale and landscape-scale spaces.

Yet to argue that public and private space might overlap in churches, manor houses and settlements is not to suggest that medieval space was incoherent or organised without logical order. A series of holdings may have been comprised of distinct and incongruous parts, but to talk of “incoherent space” implies that space was obscure, difficult to define or even chaotic, a theme echoed by geographers who refer to the “chaotic political geography” of Europe in 1500 or the “untidy geography” of madness in medieval England.  In contrast, the paper argues that space was organised in a meaningful way in medieval and early modern England, if also frequently subject to multiple uses. Moreover, power did not operate a-spatially in late medieval England but was rather articulated through specific local sites, of which manor houses and parish churches were some of the most important examples.

The speaker also addresses questions about continuity and change within the rural landscape. Whilst recognising that settlement patterns were rarely static, the speaker points to continuities in the organisation and meaning of space across the medieval and early modern centuries. The speaker highlights continuities in the ways communities used and thought about manorial and church space in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, arguing that the spatial relationships between manor houses, churches and settlements were not radically transformed in the later medieval period as some scholars have suggested.  In fact, many manor houses in the Yorkshire Wolds maintained their sites through the medieval and early modern period, thereby preserving the spatial relationships between manors, churches and settlements which can be first documented in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, if not before.

As a corollary to this, the paper interrogates the notion of a radical break from pre-modern to modern understandings of space around 1500, arguing that concepts such as landscape, space and territory existed in late medieval England. In this sense, the paper underlines the importance of examining the meaning of space over the long durée, as well as highlights the value of thinking geographically about medieval society.

Measures of meaning: medieval perceptions of settlement form?

Keith D. Lilley

Over the past few years, in trying to consider how urban forms might have been understood in the Middle Ages, I have often made use of an extract from a description of Chester written in c. 1195 by one of its inhabitants, a monk of St Werburgh’s Abbey called Lucian. His is a laudatory description of Chester in which he refers to the cross-shaped form of the city and offers us his interpretations of it (see below). In a number of conference and seminar papers on the subject of medieval urban forms and their Christian symbolism my use of Lucian’s description has tended to raise two objections among audiences: they say, first, that Lucian’s reading of Chester’s urban form is post-hoc, an interpretation of an existing urban plan, rather than evidence that settlement forms were imbued with meanings by their creators; secondly, Lucian, they point out, is a churchman, learned in letters, and offers us a clergy-based view of the urban landscape rather than a generally held one. I want to pursue these two themes in my paper as they touch upon issues on medieval perceptions of settlement form and the question of whether it is possible for us to reach back and really know what people in the Middle Ages thought of settlement forms.

Taking the second of the criticisms first, is Lucian’s view a narrowly-defined one? That depends on the context within which he was writing. His description is considered to be part of a sermon, and is a comparatively rare English example of laudatory writing about a particular place – William fitzStephen’s description of London being a well-known other (and similarly of late twelfth-century date). Who was it written for? If a sermon was it intended for local consumption, to be read to Chester townsfolk? Or was it aimed at a narrower, clerical or noble audience? Either way, for me it shows that there were those living in medieval cities who were attempting to make sense of their surroundings, by using the layout and form of the place to read from it, and so perhaps into it, certain symbolic meanings, in this case Christian symbolism. Lucian thought of Chester in this way, and the fact that he was writing for an intended audience also indicates that others – whoever they were – would have been being cultured to read the city’s form likewise symbolically. This should not be a surprise, as local settings, including those at Chester, were often used in the staging of Corpus Christi pageants and plays, for example, because they reinforced the spoken message itself – the cross of Chester’s streets thus resonated with Christian meanings. All Lucian was doing was capitalising on this, and through the cross-form perhaps drawing the ‘body’ of the city closer to Christ’s own body. This leads us to the matter of whether such symbolism was deliberately written into urban forms at their outset.

 Lucian was writing at a time when many new urban landscapes (and rural settlements) were being created from new. If he thought of Chester’s urban form as a sign of Christ might others have done likewise in creating similar urban forms elsewhere? Certainly there are many medieval towns formed in a cross. The pragmatics and sceptics tell me that this is because towns developed at cross-roads, and that cross-shaped plans long-predate Christianity, and so therefore the meanings that I am seeing are not medieval perceptions at all but rather simply my own. Well yes, in my view we cannot detach ourselves from our subject, but I maintain that for those creating urban landscapes in the Middle Ages forms were not inert and neutral, but constructed and conveyed meanings. This is seen most obviously in architectural forms, so why not built forms too? The problem here is one of evidence, or at least direct conventional historical evidence. The formation of new urban landscapes is a process rarely documented by contemporary accounts, except in rather vague terms. Indeed how new urban landscapes were set out, and who did the work, are grey areas. True, the layouts left on the ground may be used as evidence to reveal who may have been involved and how the design and planning work was carried out. But what did the forms themselves mean? In every single case we cannot be sure of course, but from what is known of the importance of forms in Christian thinking, and the fact that medieval architects had knowledge of the meanings of forms and used them in their work both in building projects and in laying out new towns, surely begins to open up the possibility that urban landscapes were laid out with particular forms for a reason.

So to address the two criticisms I regularly receive, and to perhaps reach medieval perceptions of settlement forms, requires us to be much more sympathetic to the mentalité of medieval individuals, who were in the main Christian. They were instructed throughout their lives by the clergy who made – as Lucian had – reference to local landscapes and buildings in the course of worship. Moreover, such meanings are to be found in the Bible itself – the use of measures for example, of rods, of having a four-square plan, of the need to take a straight path, and so forth. From Scripture, then, meanings were ascribed to forms. Those forms, measures and measuring instruments, were used to create new urban landscapes. Are we to believe that the faithful in the Middle Ages who were shaping towns to four-square designs, often with exacting straightness and precision, were not cognisant of the significance, in Christian terms, of what they were doing? In the end, then as now, it is a matter of faith, of belief. But in my view the forms of medieval urban landscapes, whether described by the likes of Lucian, or set out on the ground, or depicted in urban imagery, are meaningful, symbolically, both to us today as well as to those who knew them first hand.

Lucian’s ‘description of Chester’ (De laude cestrie):

[Chester] having four gates to the four winds, looks on the east to India, on the west to Ireland, on the north to greater Normandy [Norway] and on the south to Wales …  There are two excellent straight streets in the form of the Blessed Cross, which through their meeting and crossing themselves, then make four out of two, their heads ending in four gates … [and] in the middle of the city, in a position equal for all, [God] willed there to be a market for the sale of goods … Now if anyone standing in the middle of the market turns his face to the east, according to the positions of the churches, he finds John the forerunner of the Lord to the east, Peter the Apostle to the west, Werburgh the Virgin to the north, and Archangel Michael to the south. Nothing is more true than that Scripture, ‘I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem’ [Isaiah 57:6] … So behold our city, as it was predicted, entrusted to the holy guardians as it were in fourfold manner. From the east the mercy of the forerunner of the Lord supports it, from the west the power of the doorkeeper of Heaven, to the north the watchful beauty of the virgin, and to the south the wonderful splendour of the angel.

 English translation of Latin text in D.M. Palliser (ed.), Chester: Contemporary Descriptions by Residents and Visitors (Council of the City of Chester, Chester, 1980)

Aspects of meaning in the plan for medieval Salisbury

Christian Frost

I have spent the last few years evaluating various aspects of the layout of Salisbury and have come to the conclusion that that the primary ordering principles of the plan of the medieval city are centred on the processional routes for the rogation period directly preceding the feast of the Ascension. In order to come to this conclusion I have used contemporary texts, contemporary liturgical preferences which were prevalent within the cathedral chapter and, amongst other things, I have also investigated the organisation, design and locations of the religious foundations within the new city. These elements, their description and my findings form the basis of a larger study and therefore I do not wish to cover them here. In this paper I would like to discuss some of the reasons why I think that this may have been the case, i.e. why the manifestation of order within the urban realm at Salisbury was largely structured through a participatory act rather than a static form.

Salisbury was planned and built in the first half of the thirteenth century before the inclusion of Corpus Christi Day in the festal calendar. The feast day celebrations which developed on the feast of Corpus Christi often included processions and mystery play cycles extending the influence of the church into the towns themselves but in Salisbury it is unclear exactly how the feast was celebrated as no records survive which describe the events there. In addition to this, as has already been noted, in Salisbury the ground had already been forged, created by a chapter intent on preaching to the masses within their own, already established, liturgical tradition. The chapter’s sacramentalism was well known and thus their desire to offer a participatory image of Christian worship within the city as well as in the cathedral was a key aspect of their brief for the layout of the city. In the end, the elaborate processional rites which had been shaped by the preceding bishops at the previous site proved to be fertile enough ground for the architect (I use the word in its broadest sense) of the new city and helped reinforce the connection with the first foundation at Old Sarum which was still considered by the chapter as the their origin.

The manifestation of these processions at Salisbury in terms of the orientation of views and the overall routes taken resulted in clear relationships which would also have been visible for the remainder of the year to burghers who happened to follow particular sections of the path prescribed by the processions whilst engaging in their normal daily routine. Therefore these processions must be understood as an important aspect of the periodic revealing and concealing of the authentic meaning of the city which, in turn, mirrored the dialectic at the heart of medieval Christian theology whereby the limits of the earthly realm, bounded by the conditions of the Fall, meant that knowledge and wisdom could be approached through experience, but never absolutely attained. Any manifestation of order in the structure or layout of the city was, therefore, not designed to signal God’s presence – because that was believed to be both immanent and eternal whether it was signified or not – but to represent aspects of the relationship between idea and reality, between the world and our understanding of it. Additionally, this dialectic included issues of both time and place and therefore the desire to address it within the city was perhaps most clearly revealed in processional rites which utilised themes relating to origins, repetition and eternity through the experience of a particular place.

 In Salisbury the rogationtide processions revealed the temporal horizons most explicitly because they engaged in a threefold mapping of the city in the days leading up to Christ’s Ascension whilst also introducing themes relating to the temporal boundaries of being. This type of action, involved in the explicit revelation of the threefold nature of latent temporality, was also engendered in normal circumstances in the consecration rites of a church. These rites,  which were also processional, involved the triple circumnavigation of the church by the consecrating celebrant and entourage prior to their entry into the church and were believed to enact the birth and transfiguration of Christ as well as the soul’s first infusion of Grace.[1] Therefore, in the consecrations of the cathedral and churches of Salisbury, as well as the yearly rogation rituals which re-enacted the bounding of the city itself, the city imitated the ‘original act’ of consecration which revealed the temporal horizons open to man in his desire to communicate with that which is beyond. Gadamer describes this mechanism thus;

… the essence of the imitation consists precisely in the recognition of the represented in the representation … When I recognise someone or something, what I see is freed from the contingency of this or that moment of time. For what imitation reveals is precisely the real essence of the thing.

This embodied understanding of mimesis was different from Eliade’s, who earlier had described this ‘freeing’ from the contingency of real time within the experience of the religious act as the only ‘real existence’, thus demoting the rest of existence to a state of ‘non-being’. Gadamer saw this relationship of differing horizons not as exclusive but as inclusive, a form of dialectic;

 Even if one speaks of two kinds of temporality, a historical and a supra-historical one … one cannot move beyond a dialectical tension between the two. The supra-historical ‘sacred’ time, in which the ‘present‘ is not the fleeting moment but the fullness of time, is described from the point of view of existential temporality. 

Therefore, what Salisbury teaches us is that given the ultimate opportunity to establish an ordered, geometrical structure on a virgin site, the chapter still persisted in the use of the festive realisation of order rather than the structural one – albeit some ‘regulating lines’ appear as a manifestation of this mode of representation. If the order at the heart of Salisbury had been primarily geometrical instead of processional then perhaps there would be some sense in the more general argument that a post-hoc appending of meaning to a city plan is of little significance in the understanding of medieval town planning. However, the revelation that one of the most important, if not the most important, cathedral and city foundation of the thirteenth century was organised around processions suggest that spatial and temporal renewal may have been the primary factors in the medieval understanding of the order of towns and cities of this period. As such it may be more fitting for us to accept that the symbolic order of Salisbury (and other cities) was revealed by the choreography of the movement through the city rather than through its form even if there were explicit geometrical fragments of order to the plan, and in this debate the question of provenance becomes less critical.

Placing the dead in late medieval culture

Stephen Kelly

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.

- W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

 The dead grasp the living.

- Medieval adage (repeated in Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages)

Concerning the ghost of Robert, son of Robert Botleby of Kilburn, seized in a cemetery (circa 1400).

Remember that the said Robert junior died and was buried in the cemetery.  But it was his custom to go forth from his grave at night and disturb and frighten the villagers; the dogs in the village followed behind him barking ferociously.  Finally, the young men of the village were talking together and they proposed to capture him any way they could.  They met at the cemetery, but at the sight of him they fled, except for two of them.  Of these, Robert Foxton grabbed him as he going out of the cemetery and put him on the church-stile.  His friend shouted bravely, “Hold him tight till I get there.”  Robert yelled back, “Run to the parish priest who can conjure him.  For God willing, what I’ve got, I’ll hold till the priest gets here.”  His friend hurried swiftly to the parish priest and he came and conjured the ghost in the name of the holy Trinity and by the power of Jesus Christ to tell them what they asked.  So conjured, the ghost started speaking not with his tongue but from deep within his guts, echoing like an empty barrel.  He confessed his various sins.  After the priest heard these, he gave him absolution.  But he cautioned the two young men who had captured the ghost not to reveal any part of his confession.  Afterwards he left the ghost to rest in peace, God willing.

But it is said that before his absolution, he would stand at the doors and windows of houses, and beneath their walls and partitions as if listening, perhaps waiting for someone to come out and conjure him to help him in his need…

- From M.R. James, "Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories," English Historical Review 37 (1922): 413 – 422.

The division, organisation and management of space articulates relationships not just between living human beings - neighbours, traders, enemies, and foreigners - but also between the non-human and, of course, the dead.  While the definition and location of the non-human is becoming an increasingly central preoccupation of philosophers and theorists in the humanities, the role of the dead in the construction of place has received little attention until very recently.  If medieval scholarship has provided us with an extensive understanding of the “cultures of death” in the later Middle Ages, it has not satisfactorily accounted for how perceptions of the locations of the dead contribute to the larger medieval project of defining space, community and identity for those who live on.

This paper will explore what happens to the perception of landscape when the dead are thought to disturb it.  Medieval ghost stories have an almost obsessive concern with the places in which apparitions are witnessed.  The extent to which the reappearing dead enjoy a disturbing mobility - the extent to which they are forever in transit, moving between houses and streets in villages, across fields, along roads - suggests that the issue of settlement is itself fraught with myriad forms of anxiety.

High-status landscapes and designed space

Robert Liddiard

The term ‘medieval designed landscape’ is now a familiar one to landscape historians and has become shorthand for describing a particular ‘type’ of medieval settlement form, the immediate environs of high-status residences. These residential surroundings were, it has been suggested, provided with features, which although found elsewhere in the medieval landscape, when placed next to great buildings assumed a greater significance. Thus the provisioning of gardens, ponds and parkland around castles and palaces in particular, together with the apparent care with which they were integrated with residential accommodation, suggests an aesthetic appreciation of the landscape of some importance – hence the importation of a term used in the study of post-medieval parks and gardens. The use of the term ‘designed landscape’ is also judged to be appropriate when the often elaborate access arrangements to the great house are considered, particularly where emphasis seems to have been placed on ‘viewing’ the residence at key points in the approach.

Despite its popularity, this paper will argue that the term ‘designed landscape’ is far from problem free and when used to describe specific spatial contexts in the Middle Ages suffers from a lack of precision. It will also suggest that its application to the medieval landscape is questionable, or at the very least requires qualification. The sum of much recent work on this topic has been to demonstrate that medieval elites wished their residences to look magnificent, and that this concern extended to the wider environs, but whether this concern was a manifestation of proto-renaissance attitudes to the countryside is perhaps more open to debate. This paper is hopefully not an exercise in semantics, but one that discusses a genuine issue: is it possible to talk of ‘designed space’ in the medieval landscape?

 Leaving aside for the time being the tricky issue of definition, I would raise the following concerns over the idea of medieval landscape ‘design’ (many of which I have failed to deal with myself):

Firstly, the term has been imported from the post-medieval period where what we would call ‘design’ is clearly apparent from a wide range of sources. The term ‘design’ is sixteenth century in origin and derives from a Dutch word meaning ‘to mark out’. The closest medieval equivalent I have managed to find is the Latin ‘compositas’, which is normally translated as ‘ordered’ or ‘regular’. While this might indeed be compatible with design, it might just as easily mean that a particular place evidences a well-run estate and need not, therefore, be concerned with aesthetics.

Secondly, the evidence that is often invoked to support aesthetic intent is frequently non-archaeological in scope and open to many different interpretations. Gerald of Wales’ famous description of Manorbier castle clearly reflects a pleasant spot, but not necessarily one that has been specifically engineered with aesthetics in mind. Equally, the much cherry-picked account of the surroundings of Sycharth in Clwyd comprises simply one section of a much longer poem in which many other aspects of the estate, including barns, enclosed fields and haystacks, are eulogised – landscape features to which we would not readily ascribe an aesthetic significance and do not sit easily within the remit of design.

Thirdly, despite being responsible for putting the case for an aesthetic significance to high-status landscapes on the academic agenda some years ago, the archaeological evidence for landscape design - at least as we see it in its post-medieval manifestations - is limited. There is currently a real dearth of detailed examples where the kind of visual manipulation associated with the post-medieval period can be specifically dated to the Middle Ages. One such example was one of the first to be postulated, that at Somersham in Cambridgeshire, where a line of ponds appears to have been structured in order to correct the line of perspective when viewed from a specific angle. Similar concerns as to the visual appearance of landscape features is suggested by sites where the location of park pales appears to have been governed by a concern to give the impression of greater size. While such sites have been used to justify the existence of designed landscapes it is fair to say that there is no clear theoretical underpinning to their significance, other than the fact that they represent ‘design’. Where a deer park pale disappears over the horizon it is judged to be ‘designed’ to make the park look bigger, when all of the pale is clearly visible it is ‘designed’ to give the viewer the sense that the area is enclosed and controlled.

 Fourthly, recent studies have highlighted the difficulty of archaeologically recognising design, in turn which raises the question of what can be termed the ‘design threshold’ – the level at which those features such as ponds and moats cease to be part of the vernacular landscape of the manorial countryside and instead part of a more specific landscape of seigneurial vocabulary. It remains difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish what makes a landscape such as that at the royal palace at Clarendon ‘designed’, yet the small fief at Lavendon in Buckinghamshire seemingly not so, other than the scale of the enterprise. Such a problem would not exist if the label designed landscape is discarded and the two are simply considered as variations on a similar theme of emphasising control of resources.

It might be the case that, despite some inherent difficulties of definition, the term designed landscape remains a useful one in the study of high-status residences of the Middle Ages. At the very least, however, I would suggest that at present the term does require clarification.