This book provides a comprehensive guide with detailed explanations, illustrations and photographs of late-7th century to 11th century Anglo-Saxon Churches and stone sculpture. It is divided into four parts.The first part includes an extensive glossary explaining the terms likely to be encountered, it explains Celtic and Roman Church practices and the Synod of Whitby, how Anglo-Saxon churches were established and their plans, and also provides a summary to the settlements of the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Hiberno-Norse in England. The second part provides a comprehensive description of the construction and architectural features of extant Anglo-Saxon Churches including their walling, plinths and quoining, archways, doorways, windows and belfry-openings of whatever shape or format or wherever their location. It also explains features such as string-courses, pilaster-strips, pilaster-buttresses, hood-moulding and strip-work. Also included are extant Anglo-Saxon stairways and crypts. Explanations are included on porticus, galleries, the use of rooms in towers, roofs, church seating and other furnishing, balusters and baluster-shafts.The third part provides a comprehensive description of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian Decoration on stonework. It details all the designs and patterns involved including those which also have scenes depicting creatures, beasts, birds, serpents and humans, figures, and scenes from Christianity and Norse Mythology. It explains and provides examples of the stonework on which these designs and patterns appear namely standing crosses, cross-heads, cross-shafts and cross-bases; grave-markers, grave-covers, grave-slabs and grave-memorials and crosses; sarcophagi and shrine chests; wall friezes and wall panels; fonts; and sundials. The fourth part provides an alphabetical list of 183 recommended churches and museums with summarised information on their individual architectural features, and/or stone sculpture. Many of the churches are further expanded in detail in the text in the second and third parts. Also provided is a page and photographic index of all the churches and museums where they are referred to in the text. All the places referred to in the text have been personally visited by the author.

Der Band versammelt Beiträge aus verschiedenen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, die sich mentalen Konzepten, d.h. Vorstellungen oder Imaginationen der westeuropäischen mittelalterlichen Stadt widmen, die epochenübergreifend in unterschiedlichsten narrativen, diskursiven und visuellen Repräsentationen in Erscheinung treten. Stadt wird in den Beiträgen nicht nur als Teil der historischen Realität der Vormoderne betrachtet, sondern auch als fester Bestandteil des kulturellen Wissens und der kulturellen Erinnerung in den Blick genommen. In einer interdisziplinären Zusammenschau von Beiträgen aus den Bereichen Germanistik, Theologie, Archäologie, Geschichtswissenschaft und Kunstgeschichte werden mentale Konzepte der Stadt in unterschiedlichen medialen Formaten untersucht, darunter Stadtchroniken, säkulare Malerei, biblische Texte, mittelalterliche Stadtpläne und höfische Romane.Durch die Vielfalt der untersuchten medialen Formate sowie der divergenten hermeneutischen Auseinandersetzungen wird deutlich, dass die kulturellen Vorstellungen von Stadt und Urbanität durch historische Spezifika, aber auch durch überzeitliche Muster, Topoi und Bedeutungskonzepte geprägt sind, die vielfach in der Antike und in christlichen Traditionen wurzeln.English abstractThis volume brings together contributions from different academic disciplines that are dedicated to mental concepts, i.e. notions, ideas or imaginings of the western European medieval city, which appear across epochs in different discursive and visual representations. The papers discuss the city not only as a component of the historical reality of pre-modernity but also as a part of the fixed inventory of cultural knowledge and memory. In an interdisciplinary exchange between specialists of German studies, theology, archaeology, history and art history, mental concepts of the city are examined in different media formats, including city chronicles, secular painting, biblical texts, medieval city plans and courtly novels.Through the diversity of the examined formats and hermeneutical confrontations, it becomes apparent that the cultural ideas associated with the city and urbanity are not only shaped by historical specifics but also by supertemporal constants, which are frequently rooted in antiquity and Christian traditions.

Old Norse literature abounds with descriptions of magic acts that allow ritual specialists of various kinds to manipulate the world around them, see into the future or the distant past, change weather conditions, influence the outcomes of battles, and more. While magic practitioners are known under myriad terms, the most iconic of them is the völva. As the central figure of the famous mythological poem Völuspá (The Prophecy of the Völva), the völva commands both respect and fear. In non-mythological texts similar women are portrayed as crucial albeit somewhat peculiar members of society. Always veiled in mystery, the völur and their kind have captured the academic and popular imagination for centuries.Bringing together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, this volume provides new insights into the reality of magic and its agents in the Viking world, beyond the pages of medieval texts. It explores new trajectories for the study of past mentalities, beliefs, and rituals as well as the tools employed in these practices and the individuals who wielded them. In doing so, the volume engages with several topical issues of Viking Age research, including the complex entanglements of mind and materiality, the cultural attitudes to animals and the natural world, and the cultural constructions of gender and sexuality. By addressing these complex themes, it offers a nuanced image of the völva and related magic workers in their cultural context. It will appeal to a broad, diverse, and international audience, including experts in the field of Viking and Old Norse studies but also various non-professional history enthusiasts.The Norse Sorceress: Mind and Materiality in the Viking World is a key output of the project Tanken bag Tingene (Thoughts behind Things) conducted at the National Museum of Denmark from 2020 to 2023 and funded by the Krogager Foundation.

The Henry VII and Elizabeth of York marriage bed, rediscovered in 2010, is an exceptional piece of late medieval English royal furniture: no other equivalent example of secular domestic furniture is known to have survived, and, indeed, precious little woodwork from this period remains outside of ecclesiastical settings. As a tour-de-force of medieval royal woodwork, the bed offers an unprecedented insight into elite domestic furniture from this period.Since its rediscovery, the bed has been subjected to a wide array of investigation by furniture specialists, medieval historians, design historians and scientists. Emerging from a decade-long multidisciplinary research project, this book is the first sustained account of the bed: it shows how numerous disciplines covering the arts and conservation sciences can be brought together to assess and interpret such rare historic survivals.Broken down into thematic chapters, the book explores the bed’s form and structure, context, iconography, wood, paint, physical history, provenance – including its curious reproduction by George Shaw in Victorian England – and relationship with known surviving Tudor furniture, as well as Georgian and Victorian Gothic Revival beds. Although thought to be a 19th-century fake, this book presents historical, archival and scientific evidence to show, beyond doubt, the bed’s late medieval age.Whilst grounded upon research presented at a 2019 conference funded by the Institute of Conservation and held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the book incorporates additional historical and scientific discoveries made since the conference. Written by a range of scientists, historians and specialist researchers, this volume is a multi-disciplinary work of immeasurable value to readers from numerous disciplines.

Sir George Buc (1560-1622), one of the careful antiquarian scholars of the English Renaissance, is famous in literary history as Master of Revels under King James I, a position in which he was responsible for censorship of Shakespeare’s later plays. His own work has never received the attention and assessment it merits. In 1619 Sir George wrote The History of King Richard the Third, a study of Richard’s life and reign and a defence of his historical reputation against the Tudor chroniclers’ slanders. Sane, objective, and carefully documented, this work has taken over 350 years to reach us in the form the author intended. In the late 1960s-early 1970s Arthur Kincaid embarked on creating the first authentic edition of Sir George Buc’s History from the badly fire-damaged manuscript draft, now in the British Library. Thus, he uncovered Sir George Buc’s original scholarly work, which for centuries had suffered the infamy of having been plagiarized and distorted by his great-nephew, whose name was, coincidentally, George Buck. This book presents George Buc’s History, painstakingly reconstructed from the original text. In this edition Kincaid has thoroughly updated and revised his introduction, discussing Sir George’s position in the literary and scholarly world of his day, and tracing the mystery of the text’s transmission. Extensive notes document the facts of Richard’s reign and controversies surrounding them.

The College of St George at Windsor Castle was founded by Edward III in 1348 to support the newly created Order of the Garter, and to this day fulfils the same primary purpose. The domestic buildings provided for the Warden, Canons and Priest-Vicars – now the Deanery and Canons Cloister – are an astonishing survival: despite enlargement and alteration over the centuries, a significant amount of the mid-fourteenth-century fabric survives, though often hidden from view. A recent programme of refurbishment and conservation revealed much hitherto unknown evidence for the way the buildings were constructed, their fittings and decoration and their subsequent evolution. The author maintained a continuous ‘watching brief’ throughout the refurbishment works, the results of which are published here for the first time. The archaeological evidence is supplemented by the excellent survival of documentation, both for the initial construction of the buildings and their subsequent development: we know the precise date of each stage of construction, the cost and even the names of the workmen involved. The post-medieval history of the buildings is also highly significant, and for this period we have the benefit of knowing more about the deans and canons who influenced the ways their dwellings developed, and of a continued wealth of documentary evidence.

Sublime calligraphy, marvellous art, and amazing initials, have charmed and captivated the audience of the Book of Kells for over twelve hundred years. This remarkable illuminated Gospel book attracts the attention of scholars as well as those more generally interested in the fabulous artefacts of the past.Everybody knows it was made by an extensive team of scribes and artists. Donncha MacGabhann knew that too. However, he was certain that a thorough examination could clearly identify the various contributions of its creators.His life and work as an artist and teacher inspired the belief that a close visual study could solve some of its enduring puzzles. The deeper he delved, the more he was convinced that Kells is entirely the work of two individuals. This evolved into a novel paradigm through which he came to know and understand the manuscript. Following years of meticulous research, this book tells the story of Kells’ two Masters and their collaboration to create a Gospel book of unprecedented magnificence. Most poignantly, it reveals the struggle of the lone survivor of the two-man team to attempt the completion of their magnum opus.The most important outcomes of this book go far beyond the simple attribution of work to different hands. Much more significantly, it affords insights into the imagination which inspired its creators, especially the unique vision of Kells’ great Scribe-Artist. Collectively, these new perspectives reveal a previously unknown ‘Book of Kells,’ one which, as it were, has remained hidden in plain sight.Challenging long-held theories is no small matter, and in doing so this radical study attempts to be comprehensive. The abundance of evidence may at times seem extravagant in its detail, for both specialists and non-specialists. The reader is therefore encouraged to find their own path in exploring The Book of Kells – A Masterwork Revealed: Creators, Collaboration, and Campaigns.

Throughout history rivers have been a hub for human settlement and have long been a key part of local livelihoods, history and culture, as well as still playing a present-day role in providing services and leisure to people who live around them. It is no coincidence that all four of the earliest human civilisations were formed on great rivers: the Nile, Euphrates, Indus and Yellow rivers all saw great human aggregation along them. The most ancient and vital architectural structures linked to the use of rivers are bridges. There are a wide range of medieval bridge structures, some very simple in their construction, to amazing triumphs of design and engineering comparable with the great churches of the period. They stand today as proof of the great importance of transport networks in the Middle Ages and of the size and sophistication of the medieval economy. These bridges were built in some of the most difficult places, across broad flood plains, deep tidal waters, and steep upland valleys, and they withstood all but the most catastrophic floods. Yet their beauty, from simplistic to ornate, remains for us to appreciate. Medieval Bridges of Southern England has been organised geographically into tours, and covers the governmental regions of Southwest England, London, and Southeast England. There are exactly 100 bridges included. There is an introduction and background information about the medieval period of English history at the beginning and there are beautiful full colour photographs throughout the book.

This richly illustrated book presents the first comprehensive study of the making and marketing of pottery in medieval Ireland. Focusing on a well-preserved 14th-century pottery production centre which was excavated in 2006 at Highhays, outside the walls of the renowned Anglo-Norman town of Kilkenny in south-east Ireland, the authors describe its kiln, workshops and working areas, as well as its ‘Highhays Ware’ products: jugs, jars, cooking-pots, money-boxes and ridge tiles. Foremost amongst the outputs from the kiln site were high-quality, wheel-thrown, green-glazed jugs that were closely modelled on French Saintonge and Bristol Redcliffe archetypes and the volume describes the distinctive processes, kiln-firing technology and raw materials that were employed to produce these, and the other wares, represented on the site. The book also presents the results of an innovative plasma spectrometry and petrological analysis of Highhays Ware, which facilitated identification of the source for the raw potting clays areas – located at a considerable distance from Highhays in north county Kilkenny – used in its production, in addition to allowing for a study of the uncharacteristically broad distribution of the ware throughout the south-east of Ireland. The authors also place the production of pottery at Highhays in its broader context by presenting an overall review of the archaeological and historical evidence for pottery making and consumption in medieval Ireland, as well as by exploring the cultural background and social status of potters in the Anglo-Norman colony. Supporting the analysis and interpretation of the Highhays site and its assemblage are specialist and scientific contributions on the pottery, tiles, ceramic production material, metal finds, coins and archaeobotanical and animal bone remains from the site, archaeomagnetic and radiocarbon dating and plasma spectrometry and petrological analysis.

In the early Middle Ages, a network of maritime trading towns – emporia – emerged along the northern coasts of Europe. These early urban sites are among archaeology’s most notable contributions to our knowledge of the period between the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire and the growth of a maritime-oriented world in the Viking Age. Ribe, on the western coast of Denmark, is one of these sites. In 2017-18 the Northern Emporium research project conducted seminal research excavations, which provided new foundations for the study of this nodal point between Western Europe, Scandinavia, and the world beyond. This first volume presents the results of these excavations and analyses to piece together the history of the emporium and its social fabric. The research employs novel, high-definition methods to explore the networks of the site, integrating an extensive use of geoarchaeology and 3D stratigraphic recording with intensive environmental sampling and artefact recovery, resulting in more than 100,000 artefact finds. The results transform our understanding of key points of the early history of the North Sea region. Through the remains of dwellings and workshops – the traces left by traders, sailors, weavers, tailors, comb makers, and skilled producers of glass beads and metal ornaments – we follow the creation of Viking Age social networks, along with some of the most iconic artistic products of this world and the daily lives of some of its notable inhabitants.

The Domesday Book, commissioned in December 1085 by order of William The Conqueror, is generally thought to have been used to assess wealth and assets to collect taxes, and represents an incredible wealth of information on land-use, local economies, and even land disputes between neighbours. This innovative analysis of the Domesday book from the perspective of a professional land surveyor and valuer aims to calculate a timetable for its creation, along with analysing the survey’s purpose, the nature of the data collected, and how it was used. By reverse-engineering the survey, Simon Keith proposes that while the document was an outstanding administrative success as a survey, it was in fact a fiscal failure which was never used directly to collect any taxes. This fascinating study examines the foundation of the well-established, successful and sophisticated hidage assessments upon which the Domesday book was built, discusses the likely timeline of the survey, and examines the logistical problems which are universal to surveyors throughout history.

The majority of literature about the Viking period, based on artefacts or written sources, covers battles, kings, chiefs and mercenaries, long distance travel and colonisation, trade, and settlement. Less is said about the life of those that stayed at home, or those that immigrated into Scandinavia, whether voluntarily or by force. This book uses results from the examination of a substantial corpus of Swedish osteological material to discuss aspects of demography and health in the Viking period – those which would have been visible and recognisable in the faces or physical appearances of the individuals concerned. It explores the effects of migration, from the spread of new diseases such as leprosy to patterns of movement and integration of immigrants into society. The skeletal material also allows the study of levels of violence, attitudes towards disablement, and the care provided by Viking communities. An overview of the worldwide phenomenon of modified teeth also gives insight into the practice of deliberate physical embellishment and body modification. The interdisciplinary approach to questions regarding ordinary life presented here will broaden the knowledge about society during the Viking Age. The synthesis of the Swedish unburnt human skeletal remains dated to the Viking age will be a valuable resource for future research, and provides an in-depth view on Viking age society.

The latest volume of the British Historic Towns Atlas series covers the internationally-renowned city of Oxford. Famed for its university and its many outstanding historic buildings, the volume presents in mapped form the history of its topographical development. From its prehistoric setting, through its contentious Anglo-Saxon foundation, the medieval establishment of its university, and its sporadic growth after that, the Atlas charts how it became a nineteenth-century city dominated by colleges, churches, university buildings, and its associated publishing industry. The Atlas is presented as a large-format portfolio containing a series of maps showing the city at key points in its history, many illustrations of its buildings and streets, maps to show its setting, and reproduction early maps of the city. A readable text introduces and explains the maps, giving the reader a thorough grounding in how and why Oxford developed, and an explanation of its changing fortunes. A supplementary chapter brings the situation up to date. Whilst many histories of the university have been written, the Atlas concentrates on the topographic development of Oxford as a settlement, and explains it in mapped form. A comprehensive gazetteer lists every building and street shown on the maps, with a short history and references for further reading.

For the first time seasonality is placed at the centre of the study of rural settlement. Using a Europe-wide approach, it provides a primer of examples, of techniques and of ideas for the identification and understanding of seasonal settlement. As such, it marks an important new step in the interpretation of the use of the countryside by historic communities linked to the annual passage of the year. The particular studies are introduced by an opening essay which draws wider conclusions about the study of seasonal settlement, followed by 31 papers by authors from all parts of Europe and beyond. By its very nature ephemeral, seasonal settlement in the medieval and early modern periods is less well researched than permanent settlement. It is often presumed that seasonal settlement is the result of transhumance, but it was only one facet of seasonal settlement. It was also necessitated by other forms of economic activity, such as fishing, charcoal-burning, or iron-smelting, including settlements of pastoralists such as nomads, drovers, herders as well as labourers’ huts within the farming context. The season a settlement was occupied varied from one activity to another and from one place to another - summer is good for grazing in many mountainous areas, but winter proved best for some industrial processes. While upland and mountainous settlements built of stone are easily recognised, those that use wood and more perishable materials are less obvious. Despite this, the settlements of nomadic pastoralists in both tundra and desert or of fishermen in the Baltic region are nonetheless identifiable. Yet for all that definitive recognition of seasonal settlement is rarely possible on archaeological grounds alone. Although material remains can be of particular importance, generally it is the combination of documentary information, ethnography, geographical context and palaeo-environmental data that provide frameworks for interpreting seasonal settlements.

A detailed report on excavation of early historic features at Forteviot in eastern Scotland by the University of Glasgow's Strathearn Environs and Royal Forteviot (SERF) Project. Features include a potential royal palace and early church, with a discussion of their relationship with prehistoric remains. This report also includes a detailed analysis of early medieval sculpture from the Forteviot area.

Winchester’s identity as a royal centre became well established between the ninth and twelfth centuries, closely tied to the significance of the religious communities who lived within and without the city walls. The reach of power of Winchester was felt throughout England and into the Continent through the relationships of the bishops, the power fluctuations of the Norman period, the pursuit of arts and history writing, the reach of the city’s saints, and more. The essays contained in this volume present early medieval Winchester not as a city alone, but a city emmeshed in wider political, social, and cultural movements and, in many cases, providing examples of authority and power that are representative of early medieval England as a whole.