New approaches to medieval landscape and settlement: the programme of the workshops

Chris Dyer and Neil Christie

This collaboration between the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Medieval Settlement Research Group began when the AHRC announced its initiative on the theme of ‘Landscape and Environment’. At first the document outlining the projects that the AHRC had in mind, with, for example, its references to the performing arts, seemed incompatible with the aims of the MSRG.  Neil Christie was anxious that the MSRG should become involved, and after discussions, he and Chris Dyer found that the MSRG could and should indeed make a proposal which accorded with both the AHRC agenda and the MSRG’s needs.  Importantly, this was at a time when the MSRG was starting to discuss and draw up a sizeable revision, updating and expansion of the MSRG Policy Statement on ‘Medieval Rural Settlement Research, Conservation and Excavation’ (This circulated in November/December to all MSRG members, relevant national bodies, museums and units); in addition to the Review of research for 1996-2006 (Published in the last Annual Report).  It was thus more than opportune to use the AHRC programme to examine the ways in which current and recent research in medieval settlement and landscape exploitation are – or should be – heading. Neil was inspired to devise the series of workshop titles to flag some of the key questions – these very much centred around identity and belonging but drawing out also the bonds with the landscapes and their resources.

The workshops were held in every corner of Britain in order to demonstrate the inclusiveness of the series, but the list of those participating had to be selective in order to maintain a seminar format. We were keen also to attract a full range of ages and interests and enable younger scholars a voice.   Those who could not attend could keep themselves informed of the content of the workshops through the POMLAS website. The plenary was envisaged as open to all so as to share something of the output of the various workshops and related discussions.

The purpose of POMLAS was to refresh the subject, to engage with other disciplines, and to enable us to see settlements or even individuals in a new light. The focus would be on the people who organised and lived in the medieval landscape: to understand their experiences; to see more of their role in the landscape; to reveal their decision making; and to reconstruct the ideas that lay behind their decisions.  During the workshops people have asked ‘Whose perceptions are we considering - theirs or ours?’  The answer is, of course, both, as we have to adapt and develop our own perceptions if we can aspire to comprehend their ideas and outlook.

 

Perceptions: where do you think we came from?

Chris Taylor

The concern of this paper is with the origins of three separate methodological strands that came together and thus controlled the way we look on medieval landscapes and settlements in the last fifty years.  These strands are landscape analysis, monuments and a good story.  All three strands existed long before landscape history began to evolve as a proper subject.

Landscape analysis came from geography, and in particular from French geographers’ concern with Regional Geography and especially determinism, both physical and social.  When in the 1950s geographers abandoned Regional Geography, it was left to another generation of scholars to take up its principles in their development of medieval landscape history.

The second element that helped to produce medieval landscape history was the monumental approach.  This originated from the work of the earliest antiquaries who saw the past as a series of discrete, often relict, sites, at first mainly prehistoric and Roman in date.  With the increase in knowledge of and interest in the past, more types of site, for example churches, castles, settlements, etc, became worthy of study.  The obsession with the past as sites was initially with prehistoric and Roman ones, but by the 1930s there was an extension into medieval settlements, and after the Second World War an explosion of interest, first in deserted villages and then in all settlement sites.

The final strand in the study of the landscape and settlement of medieval times was the ‘good story’.  This is the narrative tradition, embedded in most British historical writing.  Again, even the earliest antiquaries were always concerned to fit their sites into a historical narrative and this method has been the principal form of such writing until recently and still remains an important way of disseminating history.  Today this narrative approach is being overtaken by more thematic and theoretical ways of looking at medieval landscapes.  But, while exciting for scholars, and convenient for heritage managers, the demise of the narrative form means the loss of the very people whose interest in medieval settlement and landscapes we should be aiming to capture.  Few outside academia now read, or can understand, much of what we write.  As a result we lose influence and our chance to educate the wider world.

Our subject emerged for the work of scholars as far back as the sixteenth century.  It had developed before the 1950s but it was strengthened and given a coherence by scholars such as Finberg and Beresford, popularised by Hoskins and then taken forward by successive generations of students, most of whom came from one or other of the disciplines that produced the original three strands.

 

Session 1:

Pastures, woods and fields: how the land and its margins were understood

Piers Dixon

When I set up the workshop in Edinburgh I wanted to look at the issue of the perception of the medieval landscape and settlement, and particularly woods and pasture, from the point of view of the different disciplines – paleoenvironmentalists, landscape and environmental historians and archaeologists – allowing them to speak for themselves and to see how their perceptions differed.

Before c.1750, all land in Scotland was pasture in some degree, and that includes woodland and land that was cultivated too. It is one of the facets of infield-outfield that outfield was pasture more of the time than it was arable, and even infield could be grazed when the crop was off every year. Of course in a world of common rights, most grazing was stinted or soumed as it is called in Scotland. In a context where most land was unenclosed, what was the perception of the land? Did the different qualities advertise themselves and enable their varying use to be understood at a glance or not? Were infield, outfield, and rough pasture readily distinguished by vegetation and/or physical structures?

The infield-outfield system that was common in Scotland has been written about since work on understanding pre-improvement field-systems began (Gray 1915), but archaeologists made little contribution to this until the advent of EDM and digital mapping in the late 1980s and it was only in the 1990s that the significance of their observations became apparent. A key piece of work in this respect was that of Menstrie Glen near Stirling, in 1997, where serendipity played a part. The survey recorded a landscape of irregular, earthen-banked enclosures containing rig, which local historian, John Harrison helped us interpret as tathe folds, or enclosures of outfield that were stocked overnight to dress the land with manure in preparation for cultivation. This was a good example of the benefit of a complementary study by two disciplines.

The Ben Lawers Landscape History Project in 2002 brought together for the first time in Scotland all the various disciplines interested in studying the history of a highland landscape. This included paleoenvironmental research, led by Richard Tipping, whose work has shown that pollen rain is often derived from a very localized area of perhaps a few hundred square metres, a small field-sized unit. Tipping, with this in mind, developed a method to target small basins next to particular types of landuse in order to relate the vegetation history to the adjacent landscape. The presence of tathed outfield folds depicted on an estate map of 1769 presented an opportunity to examine their vegetational signature. Interestingly the small irregular fields on the estate map, whether infield or outfield, were similar and apparently enclosed. Richard Tipping designed his pollen analysis of the Ben Lawers mountainside to take advantage of this with a transect that ran from the high shielings via the head-dyke and outfields to the shores of Loch Tay.  The result of this analysis was that there is no palynological trace of any sudden restructuring of the landscape in the late 18^th century when the outfields were enclosed as small farms; the outfields area had always been cropped and grazed since c.350BC; the site above the head-dyke was not cleared until c. AD 1100, becoming permanent grassland managed with burning episodes leading to heather regeneration, without any sign of settlement; and the vegetation at the high shielings had changed little in the last 2000 years.

This is an important result. It shows that for much of the landscape there is a continuity of landuse since prehistory that archaeological models currently fail to match, but it fails to register the documented enclosure of small farm units on the outfields, presumably because there was little change in agricultural practice at the time. The outfields were, however, long-established arable even if only used sporadically. However, it could be argued that these results negate our attempts to use pollen analysis to tell us about land management changes such as enclosure, infield and outfield. This needs to be tested further, but the technique has thrown up data, which we need to consider, that alters our view of the past.

Our view of woodland management, especially of highland woods, has changed significantly as a result of recent research led by Chris Smout amongst others. Philip Sansum, for example, combined Campbell estate documents relating to Loch Awe, where the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland had carried out field survey, with pollen analysis to develop an understanding of the woodland management in the medieval and later periods.  He documented woodland use, be it, bark peeling, grazing, burning and cutting wood for large or small timber and argued that the Lochaweside estate attained sustainability with a heterogeneous woodland management during the medieval period c.1000-1700, before a monoculture of oak was developed in the 18^th century to serve the needs of the iron industry. He illustrated this with relict examples of pollards, coppiced trees and bark-peeled trees. This dovetailed with Alisdair Ross’ work on a rare example of a detailed survey in c.1590 of the use of timber and wood in the buildings on the Strathavon estate in the northern Cairngorms, which shows township by township the quantities of wood that were used to provide material for buildings and utensils and the species cut (Birch, Alder, Hazel, Aspen and Rowan), indicating this ran to thousands of pieces of wood, year-on-year. The survey gives precise details of the use of the wood in buildings that shouts out to be compared with archaeological data that Ross flagged with examples of deserted touns in the strath. Clearly there is much potential here for complementary study.

In conclusion, our perception of past landscapes has been altered and broadened by inter-disciplinary working, each discipline providing evidence that other disciplines cannot provide and complementary data that help elucidate our understanding of medieval and later landscapes. Our changing appreciation of infield-outfield systems outlined above is a case in point, as is our growing appreciation of the symbiosis of highland settlements and woodland management.

 

Reflections on Uplands and How the Land and its Margins were Understood

Mark Gardiner

Much of the discussion at the Edinburgh workshop focussed upon the uplands and, in particular, the way in which these areas were perceived by those who used them. The uplands had a distinctive type of land-use which was characterized by an emphasis on pastoralism. The soils were often poor and unsuitable for arable agriculture, though they could be exploited for extensive grazing. Grazing provided one means of concentrating the nutrients from the poor upland soils. The dung could be collected and spread on the land around the farmstead. The improvement of land, through the use of animal manure or by the addition of turf or sea-weed, produced artificial or plaggen soils. These improved fields might be used for meadowland to provide hay for winter feed, or indeed for small-scale arable (e.g. Simpson 1997).

The term ‘upland’ is a little unfortunate and has been used rather loosely by historians and archaeologists, and more generally, to refer to any area in the ‘upland zone’, regardless of the height above sea-level. We might distinguish between upland,  referring to land at a high altitude, and Upland as a Term of Art, referring to areas regardless of elevation with a predominantly pastoral economy and with soils which were poorer in character. Upland then becomes a useful concept to describe such diverse areas as the South Downs, which were not very high, the moors of south-west England, the mountains of Wales and Scotland, and Orkney and Shetland.

These Uplands have never received the level of study which have been accorded to lowland settlements and, in truth, are much more difficult to study. The pastoral economy leaves few traces. There may be no field boundaries, because the animal grazed freely on the moors. The settlements sites are often difficult to find and when found are generally difficult to date: they have few, if any, associated artefacts, and even radiocarbon dating can be problematic because of the burning of peat and bog timber which grew many centuries or even millennia before their period of use for fuel.

Prehistorians, however, have developed approaches for working in such situations which might be usefully applied to the medieval period. Richard Bradley (2000), for example, has argued that prehistoric populations invested places with meaning and significance. This enculturation of the landscape is often difficult to pick out in lowland situations where there is simply too much evidence for the way places have acquired significance. In the uplands, where human impact is so much less, enculturation is thrown into clearer relief.

One example will suffice to demonstrate how enculturation might be identified in the Uplands. Work undertaken in the Mourne mountains in the north of Ireland has begun to identify numerous summer huts, called shielings in England, but referred to there as booley huts.  Three conclusions have emerged from our initial study. First, though the huts could be situated almost anywhere in the upland landscape, they lie in almost predictable positions. They are located by streams, frequently at a confluence, and overlook at area of flatter land. It seems that the pastoralists had a clear idea of appropriate locations of booley huts. Second, booley huts tend to occur in groups. This is a feature also of shielings in the uplands on the Scots borders, and in the Black Mountains in Wales (Ramm et al.  1970; Ward 1997). We appear to see the establishment of, or the seasonal movement of whole communities into the uplands. Third, some of the Mourne booley huts were apparently built on sites which had been used for many years. The buildings seem to overlie or partially overlie earlier structures. These are long-lived places.

In upland landscape a sense of place and value has been given to a landscape. ‘Places’ have been established. They have been given meaning through repeated use over a long period and this sense of place has been crystallized through giving them place-names. The order created is not arbitrary, but reflects the culture of those using those places. The often featureless landscapes  of the Uplands has acquired an order and meaning which, I would suggest from our Irish experience, can be recovered, at least in part.

Bradley, R. 2000. An Archaeology of Natural Places. London.

Ramm, H.G., McDowall, R.W. and Mercer, E. 1970. Shielings and Bastles. London.

Simpson, I. A. 1997. ‘Relict properties of anthropogenic deep top soils as indicators of infield management in Marwick, West Mainland’, Orkney, Journal of Archaeological Science 24, 365-80.

Ward, A. 1997. ‘Transhumance and settlement on the Welsh uplands’, in N. Edwards (ed.), Landscape and Settlement in Medieval Wales, 97-111. Oxford.

 

Session 2:

Maps of medieval thought? Interpreting, imagining and inhabiting settlement spaces.

Keith Lilley

Observing from above has an enduring place in English landscape history. In the Making of the English Landscape WG Hoskins (1988, 82) describes how: ‘there are certain sheets of the one-inch Ordnance Survey maps which one can sit down and read like a book for an hour on end, with growing pleasure and imaginative excitement’; how ‘one dwells upon the infinite variety of the place-names, the delicate nerve-like complexity of roads and lanes, the siting of villages and farmsteads, the romantic moated farmsteads in deep country, the churches standing alone in fields, the patterns made by the contours or by the way the parish boundaries fit into one another’.

 Hoskins’ delight comes from having a view from above, of seeing the landscape as it cannot be seen or perceived from the ground. It is a sensory experience that no doubt many of us here can relate to, but at the same time it reveals the power of maps, their allure. Though he reflects on the map as an object of interest, for what it shows of the landscape, Hoskins does not pause to reflect on its values and subjectivities, on its politics.

 Yet, as JB Harley reminds us, there are silences on maps, absences, which are just as significant and important as the features that are shown, and that there are ‘rules’ by which the maps are created that underpin their claims to objectivity and truth. Rather than seeing the one-inch Ordnance Survey map as Hoskins had done in the Making of the English Landscape, as a geographer Harley’s approach would first query the map itself. If the map itself is socially constructed and culturally embedded, what should we make of the patterns of landscape and settlement it shows? How does understanding the rules and language of the map change our perception of the features it represents?

 Such questions might also, of course, be extended to those maps that litter our learned publications, which we like to see, and which we hope present a ‘truthful’ view of medieval landscapes and settlement.

Maps and mapping

 Rather than attempt a précis of those papers on ‘Planning and Meaning’ given at the POMLAS workshop held in February 2007 at Belfast (these are already available online)[1], what I aim to do here is focus on ‘mapping’ as a unifying theme. Although mapping was touched upon by all who presented at Belfast it was not itself given sufficient discussion or attention, so what follows here is an attempt to offer some reflection, based upon the ‘Planning and Meaning’ workshop, on how we interpret our maps of medieval settlement spaces and how settlements are themselves, in a sense, ‘maps’ of medieval thought. To explore this I’m going to look at how maps help us to engage with perceptions of medieval landscapes and settlement, firstly dealing with issues of maps and mapping, and secondly by turning to plans and planning. In so doing I hope not only to build upon the discussions we had at Belfast, but also raise some questions relating to the broader aims of this plenary conference.

 Modern mappings

Mapping is an eidetic activity in that drawing a map is an imaginative and generative exercise that helps us to think deeply about what it is we are looking at. Accepting that what we are making is a privileged and alien view of the medieval landscape, drawing a map nevertheless gives us a feeling of being close to that landscape, an intimacy of the kind that Hoskins describes in his reading of maps.

 Selecting those features we wish to show, and tracing them off detailed Ordnance Survey maps and plans for example, I think does help to give greater insight and understanding of the various patterns that are set out on the ground. In working on village morphology, or analyzing town-plans, the mapping itself pulls out the characteristics of the features of the settlement’s form, such as the curvature of certain streets, or the orientation of particular plot patterns. To gain this insight means doing the mapping, and reflecting on the process. In this sense, the map is a means to an end, and not an end in itself, for what it can teach us about medieval settlement. And yet the finished map itself does not reveal this journey of discovery, and if anything actually hides it behind the rules of cartography and pretense of cartographic truthfulness and accuracy. Whether such self-reflective mapping helps to take us closer to the thinking and practices of those who inhabited and shaped these places in the Middle Ages is itself a matter of perception. Personally I think it does, as we shall see later.

 As well as mapping settlement forms and interpreting their morphologies, mapping the paths taken by local inhabitants can also provide a way into the medieval imagination. This is an approach taken by Tom Boogaart in his work on the procession of the Holy Blood in Bruges. There are no contemporary maps of the processional route of course, but Boogaart has created one using contemporary documentary sources to map out the path the procession and its participants took through the urban landscape. Through the map, the form traced by the processional route becomes apparent and, as Boogaart argues, its symbolic significance can be better understood, not only in terms of the significance of the various places it took in en route, but also through the very form the procession itself traced out in and through the city. He sees its circular encompassing form, and its linking of centre and edge, as a reflection of cosmologically-rooted beliefs about the city and its place in the Christian world. Boogaart’s mapping of the processional route is of course a two-dimensional representation of this three-dimensional medieval experience, yet at the same time it provides us with some understanding of the embodied experience of the urban landscape of Bruges, and the symbolic meaning of both the procession and its route. Mapping out the ritual paths performed by the social body of Bruges’ citizens thus perhaps brings us closer to their perceptions of their city, their world, and their Saviour. 

 So as an imaginative exercise, the act of mapping landscapes of settlement helps us to think more deeply about the spaces we seek to represent as well as those who inhabited them, so helping us to consider how they were perceived at the time. In this sense, the map becomes a useful tool for exploring medieval perceptions of space, drawing out for us ideas and thoughts we might not otherwise have had, and seeing things differently. It may be that those who drew maps in the Middle Ages likewise experienced this same sensation of closeness through exercising their own cartographic imaginations.

 Medieval mappings

Medieval maps are still so often viewed as either quaint or simply ‘wrong’ because they do not look like modern maps. But not so by those who follow Harley’s thinking, for he would not differentiate between medieval and modern maps on grounds of truthfulness or accuracy – all are social constructions, and all reflect certain kinds of truth, whether a mappa mundi or Ordnance Survey map. With this in mind, what can we learn from reading medieval maps of settlement, and how might we begin to understand them?

 There are relatively few medieval maps of whole settlements, but two well-known English examples highlight some interesting issues of interpretation that I think are relevant to us in thinking about perceptions of landscape and settlement. How medieval maps have been used by modern scholars, and what medieval perceptions they seem to embody, are two aspects we might reflect upon.

 Firstly, let us look at an urban example, an image of Bristol. Drawn late on in the fifteenth century, this view of Bristol appears in the city’s mayoral register compiled by Robert Ricart, then the town clerk. The image shows the inner part of medieval Bristol, the area contained within the earliest defences, with its two main streets meeting at the High Cross, and leading through four gates. This image is described often as a map, but was it seen as a map at the time it was drawn? In her essay on it, Elizabeth Ralph calls it a ‘plan’ and seeks to relate its features to those of Bristol’s physical urban landscape, suggesting that ‘there is much in Ricart’s plan that is factual’, and demonstrating this by a labeled line drawing (Ralph 1986, 314). But we need to look at the image not as a map in the modern sense but as a stylized image of the city.

 The image of Bristol that Ricart presents accompanies the part of his ‘kalander’ devoted to describing the foundation of the city, which he fits into a well-established tradition based upon Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. Ricart’s depiction of Bristol thus relates to the city’s imagined origins. In this context, the image he presents of Bristol, as a circle of walls and a cross of streets, may also be seen not as an attempt to create an accurate map of the city but rather adapt its form to an idealized urban model. Images of the heavenly and earthly Jerusalem throughout the Middle Ages used the same motifs to be seen in Ricart’s view of Bristol. As an archetype for Bristol’s imagined urban form, what better city could there be but the City of Kings itself? This is surely not without significance and perhaps points to ideas of the city that were circulating at the time in Ricart’s day, about urban forms, and about Bristol itself and its history. Rather than seeing his depiction of Bristol as a map or plan in a literal sense, it is a map of the mind, a figurative ‘mapping’ that is a reflection of his (and perhaps others) perception of Bristol’s local geography and history. With both, the city’s form had meaning.

 The second map is a rural example, again well-known and often reproduced, and like Ricart’s view of Bristol similarly of fifteenth century provenance. Dated to around 1450, it belongs to a cartulary of lands of Edmund Rede who was sheriff of Oxfordshire in 1450 and one ‘of the lesser gentry’ (Harvey 1986, 213).

 Paul Harvey compares the image of Boarstall, a Buckinghamshire village, with contemporary historical records and tries to identify the topographical features it shows with those on the ground, a similar exercise to that used by Ralph with Bristol. Again, Harvey’s emphasis is on judging how well or not the ’map’ matches up with the ‘reality’ of the village’s layout, and less so what the image points to in terms of the thinking that lay behind it or the perception of Boarstall it presents. Rather than debating its accuracy, what the map reveals of its (anonymous) author’s perception of the place is more interesting and significant. Like Ricart’s view of Bristol, the Boarstall ‘map’ was placed at the beginning of the section of the cartulary describing Boarstall, the home of the Redes at the time. As Harvey notes, the image was probably intended to form a frontispiece to the account of Rede’s lands, starting with his home manor, including the village and surrounding fields and woodland. Most striking on the map is the central placing of the settlement itself, and its prominent T-shape of roads, with a cross positioned at their intersection. This configuration, whether or not it was an idealized rendering of the streets on the ground, shows some of the motifs evident in Ricart’s depiction of Bristol. The form itself has of course clear Christian resonance. The form of the blessed cross linked the village to Christ’s body in a way analogous to the T-O configuration of certain mappae mundi depicting the tri-partite continents of the medieval world. Moreover, at Christ’s feet so to speak, is placed a depiction of one of Rede’s predecessors who had, by tradition, presented a boar to Edward the Confessor. As with Bristol, then, the perceived mythical origins of the place are closely tied to its imagined local geography and spiritual topography.

 With the fifteenth century views of Bristol and Boarstall we are thus taken closer to how the forms of these places were being understood at the time by those who knew them and inhabited them. Contemporary meanings of these settlement forms emerge not through seeing the depictions as maps in the modern sense but through interpreting them contextually, and in particular placing them within the conceptual, imaginative framework of those who drew these so-called ‘maps’.

 As maps of the mind, the images of Bristol and Boarstall point to perceptions of past and present, and of the significance attached to certain kinds of form, a cross of streets or a circle of walls, for example. Such spatial imaginings relate to the Christian beliefs of those who inhabited these spaces, and who tried to make sense of them in their own terms. As well as these literal mappings of settlement space, something similar can be found in textual mappings, descriptions of places. Here too the form of streets can be seen to have symbolic and allegorical importance to their viewers, a case in point is the description of Chester by one of its residents, Lucian, in the later twelfth century, who comments on how:

 It [the city] has two excellent and equally straight streets, in the blessed shape of the cross; they meet each other crosswise and pierce each other, consequently making four from two, and reaching their ends in the four gates. The city thus shows itself, mystically and magnificently, to have dwelling in it the grace of the great King, who showed the twin law of the New and Old Testaments fulfilled through the mystery of his sacred cross, by means of the four evangelists.

 This metaphorical ‘mapping’ of Chester’s urban landscape by Lucian thus draws similar parallels between the city and Jerusalem to those that we might claim for Ricart’s depiction of Bristol. It shows too the need to place side-by-side both textual and visual medieval mappings of settlement spaces. Maps in the Middle Ages, as we have seen with both Bristol and Boarstall, were embedded in texts, and as cartographic historians are now beginning to show there is much scope for interpreting such ‘maps’ contextually. Doing so from a literary or an art historical perspective, rather than a ‘traditional’ landscape history (or archaeology) perspective, might help us not only to think more self-reflectively about what we do and how we do it, but also to read and map landscapes and settlements not necessarily literally but metaphorically, which of course was also how they were being perceived in the Middle Ages by the likes of Lucian of Chester.

Plans and planning

 Already, from looking at the symbolic significance of certain forms, as in the processional route at Bruges, and the Christian iconography of shapes traced by streets, we have some basis to look at what meanings forms might have had, and what perceptions they reveal. When it comes to considering questions of planning, there are very few contemporary accounts telling who was involved and why and how things were done. What we have often are simply the physical forms left behind. But if viewed contextually, as with the shapes mapped out by the citizens’ feet at Bruges, and by Ricart’s and Rede’s images of Bristol and Boarstall, there is some scope to think through not only the meaning of plan-forms, of the layouts of streets and plots laid out on the ground, but also meanings in the act of planning itself. Both might help take us closer to medieval perceptions of settlement and landscape.

 Visual geometries

The imagined geometrical form of Jerusalem, localized in the descriptions of Bristol and Chester, did of course also exist in the physical layouts of certain settlements of the Middle Ages. Some places were given highly geometrical forms. It was not that these were ‘planned’ and others were not – for planning could and did give rise to all kinds of forms, not just regular ones. Instead, there is something significant in choosing to lay out a plan to a precise geometry. A case in point is a new town called Grenade sur Garonne in south-west France, a bastide founded in around 1290 by Eustace de Beaumarchais.

 Grenade has a highly orthogonal layout comprising straight streets intersecting at right-angles, with a central market place. Its geometrical form is of course only fully appreciated through mapping it, from viewing it from above. At the time the town was laid out this view was only open to the town’s designer, assuming they created a plan of it first, as well as the Almighty, He who had designed all. Was Grenade’s geometry designed to please God? After all, the universe itself was, according to Christian cosmology, geometrically ordered. God himself was the artifex principalis, the divine geometer. In Grenade’s layout then, although we know nothing of its designer something of their thinking becomes evident through mapping out the town’s design. Like God himself, they too practiced with compass and rule, and they too were creators.

 The geometrical design for Grenade was particularly sophisticated too, for it was based upon an architectural principle of rotating squares used at the time especially to create pinnacles to adorn churches and cathedrals. In a sense, the way the plan of Grenade was visualized by its creator may also, likewise, have been as a kind of three-dimensional space, a virtual pinnacle if you like, pointing skywards to the Creator. On hearing this, many have said to me, “well Grenade is a special case”, or that all this is all work of my imagination and says little of how the layout was seen at the time. Of course, we simply do not know, and never will really know, what was thought about such plans and planning at the time if we stick with conventional written sources which say so little about the people and processes involved in settlement planning in the Middle Ages. Cases such as Grenade point to possibilities, but only when viewed contextually. There are, from elsewhere, other indications that towns were being first designed on parchment, and that those involved used geometry in their work and saw themselves, and were seen by others, as somehow mystical.

 A plan of Talamone in Tuscany appears to be contemporary with when the town was laid out for example, and its precise geometrical form traced by compass and rule shows a working out, a design, using geometry, to create a circular quartered form that has obvious parallels with contemporary images of the heavenly and earthly Jerusalem, and indeed also the form of the wider world as depicted on mappaemundi. This shared geometry links city with cosmos, the local with the universal, and thus points to a deeper symbolic meaning in the forms used in the planning of street and plot layouts.

 Performed geometries

Back at Belfast in February I showed an extract taken from an account of the construction of a new set of defences around Ardres in Flanders. It is an account by Lambert of Ardres, writing in around 1200. Why I think this is a useful description is because of the picture Lambert paints of Simon, the master in charge of works whose activities he describes in laudatory terms. We are told

 Both knights and burgesses and oftentimes priests or monks, came not daily only, but again and again every day, to refresh their bodies and see so marvellous a sight. For who but a man stupefied and deadened by age or cares, could have failed to rejoice in the sight of that Master Simon the Dyker, so learned in geometrical work, pacing with rod in hand, and with all a master's dignity, and setting out hither and thither, not so much with that actual rod as with the spiritual rod of his mind, the work which in imagination he had already conceived?

 Simon was presumably an expert in matters of excavation and ditch digging, but not simply a ditch-digger; he is a surveyor, “learned in geometrical work” who could “make straight the ways”. What “geometrical work” was Simon learned in? How did he employ it in “setting out hither and thither”, and what does Lambert mean when he says “not so much with that actual rod as with the spiritual rod of his mind”? The “work which in imagination he had already conceived” might suggest Simon was setting out the defences through implementing what he had in his mind’s eye, drawing upon previous experience. Yet Lambert also tells us of those “ever in the forefront, the masters of the work, weighing all that was done in the scales of their geometrical plan”. A “geometrical plan” - had Simon sketched out a design for the work? Lambert’s account points not only to the role of an individual educated specialist in fashioning changes in the urban landscape, but also reveals something of the processes by which they worked.

 As well as giving some insight into the practicalities of the design and planning process involved at Ardres, Lambert’s choice of language hints there is some deeper meaning attached to the “geometrical work”, in his use of geometry “to make straight the ways” for example. Such wording has resonance with Old and New Testament Scripture (in Isaiah chapter 40 where the prophet exhorts us to “prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God”, and in Luke chapter 3, where we read “the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways shall be made smooth”). And it was Hugh of St Victor who wrote “the taut cord shows the path of the true faith”, an apt metaphor that ties the practice of surveying with the Scriptural meaning of making of straight lines.

 Again therefore, when it came to ‘planning’, that is planning in the sense of both fashioning a ground-plan and also preparing for and forward-thinking, for those involved, and for those who witnessed them, there were clear Christian meanings in what was being done. Plans and planning, like maps and mapping, were thus far from neutral and inert in the Middle Ages, and hint at perceptions held of material and imagined settlement spaces by those who inhabited and interpreted them. It is through the performance of planning that settlement spaces came into being, and through them too that planning had meaning.

 Conclusion

 The question posed in my title derives from Naomi Kline’s book, Maps of Medieval Thought, which is a recent contextual study of the Hereford mappa mundi. In her book, Kline looks at how the Hereford map was understood as an ‘aid to memory and association’ by those who saw it. For its viewers, she argues, the map ‘can be considered within the personal context of artistic memory and of medieval thought’ for it both reflected and reinforced perceptions of the earthly realm and wider world. It struck me that what Kline was attempting to do in interpreting the Hereford map was akin to the aims of POMLAS, to try to connect and capture a sense of how landscapes and settlements were seen and understood by those who inhabited them. Clearly, settlement spaces can be and are interpreted by us in all sorts of ways as ‘maps’ of medieval thought. Today I have outlined just two that I find useful, thinking through the eidetic process of mapping and self-reflection, and through understanding the ideas and practices of those who made maps and plans in the Middle Ages.

 What came out of the Belfast POMLAS papers was an airing of differing views on how we might approach medieval perceptions of landscape and settlement. It was not so much of a divide between two opposing camps, with those for it and those against, but more a range, a spectrum, with some at either ends of the scale but the majority somewhere on the centre ground. There are bound to be disciplinary differences, but for me POMLAS is a kind of leveling exercise between our different disciplines. For example, the cultural theory that has so much influenced geographers’ recent thinking on mapping and landscape has come especially from literary criticism. It offers a challenge and I think now is the time to engage with it to attempt a more integrative approach to medieval landscape and settlement. What I have tried to outline is my particular approach. If we are going to deal with issues of 'perception' and 'meaning', we have to deal with these theoretical debates - particularly matters of epistemology.

 Perception is not static but fluid and contingent, and perhaps before we start to try to understand medieval perceptions it might be worth thinking first more carefully about wider issues, such as cognition, memory and performance, for which of course we will need to turn to broader theoretical debates rather than remain in the security and safety of those narrower empirical concerns that so often absorb us as historians of medieval landscape and settlement.

[1] See http://www.britarch.ac.uk/msrg/POMLAS%20Workshop%201%20Belfast.htm

 

Colonisation and the clash of cultures

Catherine A M Clarke

 This discussion took its cue from Steve Rippon’s suggestion that ‘we need to think more about how writers write about landscapes’, exploring medieval representations of reclaimed or newly colonised land from the perspective of a literary scholar. General reflections on the value and challenges of using literary sources were related to three texts: Felix’s Life of St Guthlac, a short panegyric from the Glastonbury Chronicle, and a poem to Little Downham from the twelfth-century Ely Libellus.

 The topics of ‘colonisation’ and ‘the perception of new landscapes’ provide particularly interesting room for interdisciplinary discussion, calling attention to the complexities, challenges and benefits of these approaches. When examining new landscapes and processes of colonisation, we can’t simply expect to use literary sources to corroborate or ‘back up’ the historical and archaeological evidence. In fact, the different kinds of evidence can actually speak against each other in very significant ways. Those differences and apparent contradictions can give us the opportunity to look not only at the realities of land colonisation and management, but also at the ideological work which those processes are made to do in literary texts and contemporary cultural contexts. The textual representation and cultural or symbolic value of those processes can be very different from the historical, agricultural or economic realities, but can tell us valid stories about cultural practice and belief, and force us to think carefully about the distinctions between actualities and perceptions.

 Mark Gardiner spoke at the Exeter workshop, for example, about Felix’s Life of St Guthlac as a text which presents the East Anglian fens of the Middle Saxon period as a hostile, wild environment – when in fact they were already being exploited as a resource-rich area and were undergoing extensive settlement. John Hines has also recently looked at the Life of St Guthlac and has suggested that its narrative of one brave saint claiming a hostile site in the fens represents a kind of symbolic engagement with the processes of colonisation and settlement going on in the region in the period. So, while it seems that Felix’s Life of St Guthlac doesn’t give us an accurate picture of the fenland in the Middle Saxon period – re-imagining the fens instead as a threatening, remote, haunted landscape – we can perhaps uncover within it an interest in colonisation and settlement which is highly engaged with contemporary concerns and practice.

 There is also compelling evidence for the appropriation of the Guthlac cult by Glastonbury Abbey in the early post-Conquest period. At first, this seems a rather odd borrowing of a saint whose shrine is based at Crowland in Lincolnshire, and the culting of Guthlac at Glastonbury has been dismissed in various ways as either confusion with a Glastonbury abbot Guthlac, a spurious political strategy, or just plain accident. Yet, once again, contemporary practices of land management and colonisation may offer some answers. Prose and verse Lives of St Guthlac all focus on the saint’s settlement of a difficult, hostile wetland site, and his subsequent transformation of it into a delightful pastoral place – a locus amoenus. The spiritual symbolism of this is clear: the reclamation and cultivation of this piece of land forms an allegory for the cultivation of the Christian soul. At the time of its culting of Guthlac, Glastonbury Abbey is engaged in major projects of land reclamation and defence across the Somerset Levels. The cult of Guthlac, with its central narrative of land reclamation and cultivation, provided a vital spiritual mythology for Glastonbury. The Guthlac cult allowed the Abbey to explore and exploit the symbolic spiritual potentials of its land management practices, transforming agricultural and economic practicalities into a powerful metaphor for spiritual cultivation and refinement.

 These examples related to Guthlac do perhaps offer, then, a direct (though complex and coded) relationship between land management practices and their representation through literature and cultural performance. Yet other literary texts appear to completely contradict what we know about land colonisation and management from other kinds of sources. Texts from Glastonbury which describe the abbey’s landscape directly quite simply deny the existence of any issues of land management or defence. A typical poem in John of Glastonbury’s Chronicle (c. 1350) claims that the Abbey land ‘brings forth all things of its own accord’, ‘needs no farmers to till the fields’ and that ‘there is no cultivation save that which nature provides.’ The poem also draws on imagery resonant with the mythical Avalon or biblical Eden – both crucial metaphors in the Abbey’s strategies of self-fashioning. Here we have a rather extreme example of how textual evidence can speak against the archaeological story – in this case denying the arduous realities of land management in the local area in favour of a myth of natural fertility and effortless exploitation. There’s obviously an ideological, political imperative for this: Glastonbury’s assertion of its status as a miraculous, magical location. The evidence of panegyric texts like this, alongside the evidence for the Glastonbury Guthlac cult, shows that the Abbey mythologised itself in two different – and mutually exclusive – ways: by at once exploiting and also denying the ongoing projects of colonisation, settlement and land management in the Abbey estates.

 Finally, moving to a different wetland location, a poem in the twelfth-century Ely Libellus praises the Ely subsidiary site of Little Downham. This intriguing text again draws on conventional locus amoenus imagery to present Little Downham as ‘a delightful place, rich, fertile, glad, / Where ploughland gives fertility enough’. Again, we have an elision of the issues of land management which would certainly have been a practical concern for this island site in the East Anglian fens. The whole poem is full of highly classicising allusions which celebrate the effortless perfection of the location – apparently contradicting what we know from other sources. But if we look closely, there are hints about the realities of land reclamation, drainage and defence. The monastic site at Downham is presented as a delightful enclosed garden or cloister – but many of the terms used are ambiguous and equally suggest a fortress or earthwork defences. For example, the site is enclosed with ‘ramparts’ (terrarum). Throughout the poem, there are words which suggest effort and contrivance – like the expression ‘things are contrived’ (res agitur) in the final line. It is also significant that the garden to which Downham is compared is not the biblical Eden, but the mythical Garden of the Hesperides, where Hercules performed one of his mythic labours. The idea of labour and effort is constantly hinted at in the background. So, on the surface, this text speaks against our knowledge (from other kinds of sources) of land management in the medieval fens. But whilst it explicitly claims one thing – the natural fertility and ease of the location – the ambivalent language and imagery continually hint at the challenges and labours of colonising new land.

 The examples examined here make it clear that we can’t always rely on the archaeological / historical and literary sources to ‘back each other up’, and call attention to the difficulties of assimilating textual and material evidence. What do we do when a text tells a different story from our interpretation of, say, the archaeological evidence? With the Little Downham poem, we can unpick it and uncover something more consonant with our understanding of the realities of medieval land management. But what do we do with a text like Felix’s Life of St Guthlac, which insists on the fens as a hostile, unexplored wilderness; or the Glastonbury Chronicle which claims that the Abbey lands need no cultivation? The difference of the textual material from the material evidence doesn’t imply deficit or failing – or render it less useful in comparative work. Instead, this difference forms the space within which we can begin to recover medieval ‘perceptions’. Here we are forced to confront medieval representations – the constructedness and ideologically-driven nature of the world depicted in texts. Texts, of course, aren’t straightforward mediators of reality – in literature, landscape is always made to do ideological work of one kind or another. Although we must be cautious about the ways in which we try to be ‘interdisciplinary’, bringing together these different kinds of sources can enrich – and, crucially, complicate – our understanding of a topic in productive ways.

 Carley and Townsend, The Chronicle of Glastonbury Abbey: An Edition, Translation and Study of John of Glastonbury’s Cronica sive Antiquitates Glastoniensis Ecclesie (Woodbridge, 1985)

Catherine A M Clarke, Literary Landscape and the Idea of England, 700-1400 (Cambridge, 2006) ‘The allegory of landscape: land reclamation and defence at Glastonbury Abbey’ in On Allegory: Aspects and Approaches from Chaucer to Shakespeare, ed. Mary Carr et al (Newcastle, forthcoming 2008)

Janet Fairweather, Liber Eliensis (Woodbridge, 2005)

John Hines, Voices in the Past: English Literature and Archaeology (Cambridge, 2004)

Session 3:

Colonisation and the Clash of Cultures: the perception of new landscapes

Steve Rippon

The Exeter session - on New People, New Farms - of POMLAS saw discussion between a group of archaeologists, historians, and historical geographers, from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, drawn from universities, government bodies and commercial archaeology.          

The first two sessions examined issues of landscape change potentially brought about by conquest and/or migration. Although this has been debated within archaeology and history for many years, it remains a very topical issue in the light of current issues facing Britain and the rest of Europe. There remain problems in identifying ethnic identity in the archaeological record, and a tendency to talk in very general terms about issues such as the extent of the Anglo-Saxon migrations. One view of the evidence, however, suggests that instead we should be looking at regional patterns with areas such as northern East Anglia (Norfolk and north and east Suffolk) clearly seeing a very different experience to areas further south; there is far greater evidence for Anglian settlement in East Anglia than there is Saxon settlement in the kingdom of the East Saxons. The Anglo-Norman expansion into Ireland and Scotland provides us with other examples of how new people could influence the landscape though we must remember that much of our literary evidence for these periods may confuse perception (which may or may not be accurate) of the landscape before and after conquest and colonisation, and depictions of, for example, the native people and their landscape by newcomers, that may be deliberately misleading.     

The second session examined perceptions of landscapes that were not ideally suited to arable-based agriculture: uplands and wetlands. Traditional, Postonian, models of marginality were found wanting as such environments can provide a wealth of natural resources, including areas of grazing. This does, however, raise the issue of whether the well-preserved archaeology in such areas really tell us anything about landscape and society as a whole, or just these particular environments (ie how should modern-day archaeologists perceive this aspects of their resource). Once again, we can also study documentary accounts of these landscapes, when it becomes clear that the perception of different writers depended very much on whether they reflect a well-informed local view, or the potentially less-reliable outsiders perspective.

New People: New Farms

Paul Stamper

Steve Rippon’s valuable summation of the seminar papers, and Catherine Clarke’s stimulating introduction of some possible dimensions which the more literary sources bring to any discussion of colonisation in the Middle Ages, prompted animated discussion. One interesting topic, which may bear fuller examination, was whether those who promoted the expansion of settlement and cultivation in the medieval centuries – apart from the Cisterians: arguably a special case - had any motive beyond the purely economic. Was there any sense of social or other duty in their actions, and are there any parallels to be drawn with the ideals and concepts of improvement which were so much a part of the Enlightenment half a millennium later ?

 

Session 4:

Belonging, identity, communication and interaction

Kate Giles

 Introduction

The York workshop was the last of the four POMLAS workshops to be held, and ran with the theme ‘Belonging, identity, communication and interaction’. In our mission statement we encouraged speakers, discussants and delegates to think about how communities perceived their landscapes, questioning what influence pre-medieval landscape features had on those inhabiting particular medieval settlements? We wanted to explore the construction and experience of different forms of identity in the landscape, and indeed, how communities may have manipulated the landscape to structure particular forms of identity? Furthermore, we wanted to consider what material culture could tell us about wider cultural forms of contact; how we can get at the networks and contexts of communication through the analysis of artefacts, as well as routeways and road networks, places of assembly and aspects of language, such as place-names and dialect. Finally, we wanted to make important links with another AHRC-funded network on historic landscapes, by considering the legacy of medieval landscapes within the post-medieval period. Throughout, we were reminded of the aims of the AHRC’s Landscape and Environment project and the themes of performance, mobility and memory are ones which we seemed to return to in discussion and debate.

In our summary of the workshop today, we’d like to use these themes to structure our presentation, drawing on and returning to the papers and discussions of the day and trying to see where this leaves us in terms of the overall aims of the workshop and indeed, of the AHRC project as whole.

Initially, however, we wanted to start by thinking about the issue of perception itself.

Medieval perceptions?

Through all the workshops we have been wrestling with the issue of ‘perception’. The issue may have been covered by other workshop chairs already but I felt it would be useful to return to it here. During the York workshop we returned to the issue of what we mean by perception

• What perception meant to medieval communities – ‘cultural sensibility’ (different kinds of medieval community, different levels of perception and understanding)
• How this is transformed by later perceptions (post-med, 18^th century)
• How we get at perception using landscape as an analytical framework – theoretical and methodological issues…

In his paper, David Austin addressed some of these issues, arguing that as academics, we need to engage with contemporary medieval philosophies, particularly Platonic thought, as a way of getting to grips with the multiple perceptions of landscapes and settlements  which may have operated in the past.

I think this is something that we need to address in the plenary. This project might not have envisaged and indeed, might shy away from, engaging with complex philosophical ideas. However, if we are to get at perception we need to think about how we get at what Stephen Daniels encouraged us to think of as the cultural sensibility (cf with ‘world view(s)’, templates) of past communities. One method, Austin suggested was to engage critically with medieval culture, including poetry, such as that of Dafydd. And many of our speakers did indeed engage with other sources – such as the Life of St. Wilfrid used by Sarah Semple to think about the ways in which communities used landscape features, or Matthew Townend’s use of the Trondheim poem of the sacred nail to think about linguistic complexity. But we need to acknowledge the need for a critical approach to such sources; to their rhetoric, their agenda (it may be unfashionable but still we need to think about rel of archaeology to documentary sources therefore). This comes back to another point raised by David in discussion, which is about our ability to get at ‘intention’ in the construction of meaning in the past.

Related to this is the need to understand that the analytical framework of landscapes is a palimpsest whose meanings are partially obscured/erased and transformed by the cultural sensibilities of other past and present communities – ourselves included. Jon Finch encouraged us to think about this in his study of the multiple and complex meanings and tensions in 18^th century perceptions of open fields as primitive and barbaric  - evidence of mindless repetition of practice in the face of discourses of improvement…..but also features such as deer parks, woodlands and ruins as elements of antiquity incorporated into picturesque landscapes.

The theoretical framework

The issue of perception inevitably then, takes us towards the issue of theory…something that Chris has asked us to be careful about in our presentations. It is, I think inevitable and desireable that we think critically about the kinds of theories, methodologies and practices we want to use to write new kinds of medieval settlement stories.

It was interesting at York that a name cropping up several times in discussion was that of the prehistorian, Richard Bradley…as a model for thinking through ideas of movement, performance. But we should remind ourselves that this is but one mode of interpretation open to us. The potential – but also the problem for us as medievalists is that the sheer amount of evidence we have both opens up the possibilities of getting at perception, but also constrains us in many ways from the more imaginative/creative approaches used by our prehistoric colleagues. We need to use this to our advantage – to select the most useful/apposite approaches. This might include, as David Austin demonstrated collaborating with poets, artists, photographers, actors. It might involve anthropological, sociological theory (we can look at US hist arch for this) but also from cultural geography – again come back to this in debate.

So, having set up some more wide-ranging questions/issues for discussion, I want to turn to consider how the speakers at the York conference attempted to do this in practice.

Perceptions of landscapes: antecedent features in the landscape

Not surprisingly, many of our speakers focused on case studies of local, or regional landscapes. One of the most interesting issues was the issue of the perception and use of earlier, often prehistoric features, such as barrows, but also hill forts, field boundaries and lynchets.

Sarah Semple emphasized the significance of visually prominent features such as Thunderbarrow, as territorial markers within landscapes. Such features, she argued, inform us about perceptions predicated on local knowledge and mobility through landscape. Andrew Reynold’s paper, too, demonstrated how prehistoric features such as Wansdyke (Wodin’s dyke), Wodin’s barrow or Adam’s grave, were similarly appropriated and re-named as important visual foci or waymarkers for those moving through landscapes, along small networks of paths and roads. Here, then we might begin to see how medieval perceptions were bound up with the cultural memories not just of places, but also of movement and journeys through places by means not simply of the well-known Roman roads but also small herepaths and trackways. Clues as to the perception of these small-scale communication networks could be gleaned, for example,  by the identification of inter-visibility between beacon sites in Wiltshire, between Yatesbury and Marlborough.

Sarah Semple also reminded us that prehistoric monuments were also used in other ways, to structure distinctive senses of identity through burial different kinds of burial practice between the 5^th-7^th centuries. In Wiltshire, such practices were intrusive, whereas in West Sussex they tended to be associative.  In Lincolnshire, Dawn Hadley  also showed us a prehistoric barrow appeared to be incorporated into a settlement of West Halton in the 7^th century. However, returning to our issue of cultural sensibility, encouraging us to think critically, both about how medieval communities ‘re-worked’ earlier landscape features (for socio-economic, perhaps as much as ritual reasons), and how later stories/legends (such as that of the early monastic foundation in the area) overlaid sites with subsequent meanings/assumptions. These papers emphasized the need for an understanding of the contemporary appearance and experience of medieval landscapes – and of features such as woods, waterways – for example in West Sussex (Semple) West Halton (Hadley).

The issue of lordship, landscape and settlement was addressed by a number of these speakers. For Semple, the complex territorial markers of West Sussex both structured and reflected and the large numbers of petty kingdoms and fragmented political structures of the period. For Hadley, the complex processes of alienation and systems of lordship in the 7 neighbouring settlements around West Halton, raised important questions about what different kinds of people, at different levels of the community (sokemen, unfree peasants) may have perceived as the horizons of their settlement?

In his paper, David Stocker challenged us to move beyond the rather functional, socio-economic view of the ‘village moment’, towards a more ideological and political understanding of the ‘landscape archaeology of religion’. He showed how the systematic study of 60 (formerly) nucleated village plan forms in Lincolnshire shed light on patterns of foundation: manorial enclosures, gates of manorial enclosures but also high percentage near green or open space  so active role of community and peasantry, sokemen? …an example discussed in detail at Wharram Percy the following day.

David also reminded us that the ritual aspects of settlement were no less important in the high-late medieval periods than in the early medieval period. In discussion, he and Richard Morris reminded us that the community of the dead were considered part of the community of the living throughout the period.  Here we might return to our unwillingness as late medievalists to engage with this kind of perception…happy to think about power…less happy to think about belief, superstition…(note Belfast discussions here).

The issue of identity – and perceptions of it, was tackled not just through landscapes but also through two others kinds of sources: artefacts and linguistic evidence. Both Gabor Thomas and Matthew Townend explored the inter-relationship of indigenous and Scandinavian perceptions of identity. For Thomas metalwork evidence in particular, threw up possibilities about the diverse uses of material culture – to signal strong regional differences along the east coast during the 10^th and 11^th centuries; in other areas, to smooth over cultural differences and dichotomies Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian. Thomas challenged some of our perceptions of the mimetic meanings of artifacts, showing how the meaning of Carolingian martial sets  were appropriated and transformed by high status women in Scandinavia.

In contrast, Matt Townend argued for a more direct relationship between Scandinavian surnames and ethnic identity, noting the conservatism of Norse naming practices, and their use to signal real and meaningful regional and local differences in the pre- and post-Conquest communities of North Yorkshire.

These papers were a reminder that engaging with a complex range of material culture also means engaging with a range of different cultural strategies, where individuals might use language and artifacts in very different ways, to do different things.

Conclusion

I want to end then, by returning to the themes emerging from our workshop of belonging, identity, communication and interaction, and with a slide which juxtaposes an image from Andrew Reynolds – of the ephemeral evidence of assembly sites, and with a photograph of a bell from Burdale, which we visited on our field visit after the conference. The first is reminder of that perceptions of identity were contingent both upon movement and moments within landscapes – permanent settlements and much more materially ephemeral traces - but traces embedded in the social practices and cultural memories of these communities. The second is a reminder that just as apparently functional evidence (a bell..of a chapel? Recycled here?) might also be interpreted in a symbolic way (priestly burial)…so we have to move beyond our familiar, functional interpretations of settlements, and look beyond, to the ritual and symbolic practices and beliefs, which framed the cultural sensibilities of the individuals and communities who inhabited these meaningful landscapes.

 

Discussing Belonging, identity, communication and interaction 

Chris Gerrard

Following on from Kate Giles’ summary of the York papers, I would like to make three points, the first on fieldwork and presentation of results, the second on re-use and finally on exploring identity. In doing so I will reflect on my own recent experiences in writing up two fieldwork projects at Clarendon in Wiltshire and at Shapwick in Somerset.

Firstly, let’s not deceive ourselves, to perceive the medieval landscape is a task of great complexity, especially when our ethnographical case studies of pre-industrial societies tell us that so much knowledge was orally transmitted. And, in some respects, it’s not a new challenge. The aesthetic value of landscape is well exemplified in the works of Heywood Sumner in the first decades of the 20th century. Pick up your copy of Montaillou, a reconstruction of life in SE France in the 14th century first published in 1978, and you’ll see a chapter there called ‘the shepherds mental outlook’ (Le Roy Ladurie 1978). The concept of ‘setting’ is also a familiar one to the world of heritage and tourism (for an early statement on this, see the 1985 Convention for the Protection of the Architectural Heritage of Europe). Nevertheless, in so many respects the approaches now being advocated are borrowed from our prehistorian colleagues, who have been ‘thinking their way’ into landscapes for more than a decade (for example, Tilley 2004). It’s a debate I’ve followed at a distance, particularly so since it was medievalists like Mick Aston and William Hoskins who were being taken to task (for a review see Fleming 2006). What have I got out of it? Well, I’m confused about how I should modify my fieldwork practice to take these ideas on board. How do I record my sensuous geographies, my soundscapes and smellscapes (Howes 2005)? Would it be right to say that we should be as interested in the gaps and spaces as in sites and monuments, and does that place greater emphasis on large-scale geophysics, fieldwalking and other extensive techniques? And we should pay closer regard to natural landforms and how best to record them? We need debate in medieval archaeology to explore these issues further; explicit applications and interest are still hard to come by (but see Corbin 1998; Scarre and Lawson 2006; Woolgar 2006 and the ideas reviewed by Giles 2007 with the reply from Graves 2007).

I’m also curious about how to present my results? Do we pen imaginative reconstructions of medieval scenes, short narratives, in the ‘hyper-interpretative’ style of Mark Edmonds? This is something we’ve been trying for Shapwick, producing narratives for each phase of past activity. Actually Mick Aston started to do this ten years ago (Aston 1997). It’s not easy but I think it has potential. I found when I tried it that it challenged my inadequate understanding of the detail of medieval life, the clothing, the accents, the flow of conversations and so on. It also challenged my ability to write well enough, to turn pollen diagrams and faunal remains into trees and sheep. In that sense it’s rather like composing an archaeological reconstruction but literary excellence is not something archaeologist’s are often gifted with. And of course it’s necessarily constrained by our tastes. Andrew Fleming (2006) makes precisely this point in his own mock narrative ‘as he clubbed the odious bastard to death, he was conscious how well the skull would look in his wall-niche – something to give his wife a thrill when she did the dusting...’.

So, let’s talk about this? Are hyper-interpretative narratives to be a thing of the future in medieval landscape and settlement studies? and if they are, whose views do we represent and how?

My second point is inspired by two contributions to the York workshop. Sarah Semple talked about the 5th and 7th centuries in West Sussex and how monument re-use of barrows and enclosures helped to tie communities to physical symbols of the ancestral past.  But of course there are other re-used elements in the medieval archaeological record which say something about attitudes towards the past. Place- and field-names are an obvious example. Let me give you just one example, what does it tell us about attitudes to village formation when more ancient locations of earlier dispersed farmsteads and hamlets are remembered in late Saxon field-names? Who does the naming and when; why are some names fluid and others not? And could we not learn a great deal more about the medieval geographies and the process of naming by reading more anthropological research on pre-industrial European societies? We badly need a forum to explore these issues further.

One of the themes of the York conference was identity and, as Gabor Thomas explained in his contribution, artefacts too have something to say about medieval attitudes towards the past. There is huge potential here which we have only just begun to tap. At Shapwick, for example, there are several artefacts which I think of as being ‘out of time’ – mainly Roman artefacts in medieval contexts (Gerrard 2007). These include a broken hoe or rake, made of antler. Prehistorians have long been familiar with the idea that some of the deposits they excavate are placed there intentionally and one possibility is that this artefact has been deliberately ‘killed’; broken in two and then deposited. Other later medieval artefacts such as pilgrim badges were certainly deliberately mutilated before being disposed of ‘as if to take them out of circulation’ and the rake may be one of the items cleared from a house at a change of tenancy or at the death of the occupant. Its breakage might be understood as rupturing the connection with a particular individual or place. Other artefacts at Shapwick, similarly out of time, include Roman coins. To the finder they would have been exotic but unusable. Some were pierced and presumably suspended and displayed, perhaps on a thread around the neck. What message was intended by the wearer?  Perhaps the coins were used as a kind of secular badge and intended as a lucky charm, a kind of sympathetic magic to attract good fortune. Or were they thought to emulate higher status emblems and insignia which themselves drew upon the classical world?

My third point is more of a cautionary tale. During the write-up of the Shapwick Project, we wanted to consider the identity of the inhabitants of the later medieval village (Gerrard with Aston 2007). My experience here was that historians and archaeologists had already written at length about the different layers of administration - ecclesiastical, estate and so on, so the data was there, but not expressed with quite the same research questions in mind. Unlike Montaillou, there was nothing to tell us of the discomfort and danger, the rhythm of medieval work, friendships based on family relationships and so on. This kind of historical ‘eavesdropping’, which is another way of thinking of it, is made possible only because of the extensive depositions made to the Inquisition court in that case.

But as far as the spatial organisation of the village is concerned, this is clearly an area where the archaeologist can make a contribution, as David Stocker explained in his contribution at York. Shapwick village has a ladder plan, with equally sized plots. It is clearly a planned village. But although the basic elements were the same, the disposition of land use was not the same in each plot. Numbers and types of buildings, proportions of pasture, vegetable garden and scrumpy orchards; all these varied from plot to plot, so that walking down the main street of Shapwick these wouldn’t be homogeneous or indistinguishable. As Dawn Hadley points out for sites further north, this indicates a degree of agency on the part of the peasantry which even the most decisive seigneurial influence could not erase. There is a contrast to be drawn between the macro-scale at which fields and village layout were structured within a regulated framework of spatial order and the micro-scale where individual plots show considerable diversity of spaces and uses and fluidity over time too.

My hope was that artefacts would shed further light on this diversity and perhaps even show changing patterns over time. On the face of it the sample we retrieved from Shapwick seemed to have that kind of potential and would allow us to compare between assemblages of material culture from excavation, from test pits and garden bed collections from different plots in the same medieval village. In retrospect many of our samples were not large enough to use in this way. Globular jars for cooking and storage and glazed jugs for the table, for example, display little variety in forms and sources. There are no imports before the 16th century. Metal cooking pots and pewter are absent, as were keys, nor is there any evidence for sewing (no thimbles or needles) or recreation (no dice or parts of musical instruments), as there was at Wharram Percy for example.

When we look back in a decade or so, I hope the POMLAS plenary and its regional seminars will be seen as the start of some new directions in medieval settlement and landscape. I certainly believe that many of the ideas voiced have potential, though medieval archaeologists are notoriously inert when it comes to theory. What is needed now are more case studies which express better integration of theory and data. But I sensed no coherent view on the day, this was more of a celebration of the multi-vocality of medieval landscape and settlement studies than a ‘call to arms’.

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Fleming, A 2006. Post-processual Landscape Archaeology: a Critique, Cambridge Archeological Journal 16:3, 267-280

Gerrard, C M 2007. Not all archaeology is rubbish: the elusive life histories of three artefacts from Shapwick, Somerset. In M Costen (ed) People and Places. Essays in Honour of Mick Aston, 166-180. Oxford: Oxbow.

Gerrard, C M with Aston, M A, 2007. The Shapwick Project, Somerset. A Rural Landscape Explored. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 25. Leeds: SMA

Giles, K 2007. Seeing and believing: visuality and space in pre-modern England, World Archaeology 39(1), 105-21

Graves, C P 2007. Sensing and believing: exploring worlds of difference in pre-modern England: a contribution to the debate opened by Kate Giles, World Archaeology 39, 515-531

Howes, D (ed)  2005. Empires of the senses: the sensual culture reader. Oxford: Berg

Le Roy Ladurie, E 1978. Montaillou : Cathars and Catholics in a French village, 1294-1324. London: Scolar P

Scarre, C and Lawson, G (eds) 2006. Archaeoacoustics. McDonald Institute Monographs. Cambridge: McDonald Institute

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Ideas arising from the discussions at the POMLAS plenary

Chris Dyer and Neil Christie

We should beware of assuming that contemporaries shared the same perceptions: their views varied and could be in opposition. Landscapes could be contentious, especially in pastoral areas and uplands where the boundaries were invisible and rivals quarrelled over the same resource (e.g. sheep pasture), or the uses of the resources were in competition (e.g. hunting and farming).

Maps and plans, which are the key to understanding past landscapes, are value-laden sources, and this applies as much to recent OS maps, and our own archaeological plans, as to the maps drawn in the Middle Ages. Those compiling maps select what to show, and distort the information for their own ends, or in accordance with their ideas.

The problem was raised of pre-cartographic or non-cartographic understanding of their surroundings. Did the people who lived in a planned village appreciate the regularity of the plan?  Was the plan visible at ground level? Did people without cartography develop alternative mapping concepts, for example through place names and field names – i.e. maps in the mind?

Literature has more relevance to settlement and landscape studies than is commonly appreciated.  For example, the Middle English romance Havelock the Dane provides not just an origin myth for Grimsby, but also traditions about the Danish migration applicable to a whole region.

There were many references to prehistorians’ contributions to landscape history and perceptions, and the influence that their approach has had on those working on later periods. For example, the concept of inculturation had been used. We should also pay more attention to ideas deriving from ‘historical archaeology’. An example was given of the deposition of animal bones, which suggested magical or folkloric practices; perhaps post-medieval deposits, such as witch bottles, had a longer ancestry.

The problem of using imaginative interpretations was raised. The material evidence does not speak directly to us, and we have to devise meanings which are inevitably speculative. We have to be aware of an easily crossed dividing line between fiction and justified deductions.

We were aware that the field we sought to study and question is full and that gaps would inevitably occur in the workshop coverage.  The plenary thus sought also to ask what had been omitted from POMLAS?  Gender was there, but not very prominently; children had been omitted; likewise animals (though there had been much about pasture); midland landscapes were neglected, so the nucleated village and champion landscape had not been adequately represented. Even if these gaps could not be fully addressed, it is clear that discussion was stimulated, and the range of the audience identified that a varied set of interests contributed. It is of course crucial that interest, discussion and research questions continue to develop, and the AHRC-funded POMLAS workshops are an important step to pushing these forward.  Contributors, discussants, convenors and audiences are thus all thanked warmly for their time and support in making POMLAS a fruitful enterprise.