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This book traces the development of a group of anonymous, vernacular, annalistic chronicles—‘the Anglo-Saxon chronicles’—from their genesis at the court of King Alfred to their end at the Fenland monastery of Peterborough. It reconsiders them in the light of wider European scholarship on the politics of history-writing. It covers all surviving manuscript chronicles, with detailed attention being paid to palaeography, layout, and content, and identifies key lost texts. It is concerned with production, scribe-authors, patrons, and audiences. The centuries these chronicles cover were critical to the making of England and saw its conquest by Scandinavians and Normans. They have long been part of the English national story. The book considers the impact of this on their study and editing. It stresses their multiplicity, whilst identifying a tradition of writing vernacular history. It sees that tradition as an expression of the ideology of a southern elite engaged in the conquest and assimilation of old kingdoms north of the Thames, Trent, and Humber. The book connects many chronicles to bishops and especially to archbishops of York and Canterbury. Vernacular chronicling is seen, not as propaganda, but as engaged history-writing closely connected to the court, whose networks and personnel were central to the production of chronicles and their continuation. The disappearance of the English-speaking elite after the Norman Conquest had profound impacts on them, repositioning their authors in relation to the court and royal power, and ultimately resulting in the end of the tradition of vernacular chronicling.

This book is the first to investigate how Anglo‐Saxon society dealt with social outcasts. The study begins in the period immediately following Roman rule and ends in the century following the Norman Conquest. This period, the 5th to 11th centuries, witnessed the conversion to Christianity, the emergence of the late Saxon state, and the development of the landscape of Domesday Book. While the study of early Anglo‐Saxon cemeteries and churchyards of the Christian period is well established, a substantial body of excavated and documented evidence for human burial in a range of other contexts has remained neglected until now. This book thus reveals for the first time a nuanced and varied approach to burial rites in Anglo‐Saxon England, particularly relating to individuals cast out from mainstream society. Although impressive written evidence survives, archaeology is uniquely placed to investigate the earliest period of post‐Roman society, the 5th to 7th centuries, where documents are lacking and to provide an independent assessment of documented situations in the later part of the period. The landscape setting of unusual human burials provides insights into the chronology of territorial arrangements and how features such as boundaries and pre‐existing monuments, such as barrows and linear earthworks, were perceived by the Anglo‐Saxons. Overall, the book argues that modes of outcast burial show a clear pattern of development from the pre‐Christian centuries, where deviant burials are found only in community cemeteries, to a situation whereby locally determined rites, such as crossroads burial, existed alongside formal measures imposed from the 7th century ad in the context of kingdom formation.

Farming was the basis of the wealth that made England worth invading, twice, in the eleventh century. This book uses a wide range of evidence to investigate how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food and other agricultural products that sustained English economy, society and culture before the Norman Conquest. Part one draws on written and pictorial sources, archaeology, place-names and the history of the English language to discover what crops and livestock people raised, and what tools and techniques were used to produce them. In part two, a series of landscape studies explores how these could have been combined into working agricultural regimes in different parts of the country, using place-names, maps and the landscape itself. A picture emerges of an agriculture that changed from an essentially prehistoric state in the sub-Roman period to what was recognisably the beginning of a tradition that only ended with the Second World War. Anglo-Saxon farming was not only sustainable, because it had to be, but infinitely adaptable, to different soils and geology, and to a climate changing as unpredictably as it is today.

It has long been assumed that England lay outside the Western European tradition of castle-building until after the Norman Conquest of 1066. It is now becoming apparent that Anglo-Saxon lords were constructing free-standing towers at their residences all across England during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Initially these towers were exclusively of timber, and quite modest in scale. There followed the ‘tower-nave’ churches, towers with only a tiny chapel located inside, which appear to have had a dual function as buildings of elite worship and symbols of secular power and authority. This book gathers together the evidence for these remarkable buildings, many of which still stand incorporated into the fabric of Norman and later parish churches and castles. It traces their origin in monasteries, where kings and bishops drew upon Continental European practice to construct centrally planned, tower-like chapels for private worship and burial, and to mark gates and important entrances, particularly within the context of the tenth-century Monastic Reform. Adopted by the secular aristocracy to adorn their own manorial sites, many of the known examples would have provided strategic advantage as watchtowers over roads, rivers, and beacon systems, and acted as focal points for the mustering of troops. The tower-nave form persisted into early Norman England, where it may have influenced a variety of high-status building types. The aim of this book is to establish the tower-nave as an important Anglo-Saxon building type, and to explore the social, architectural, and landscape contexts in which they operated.

Association in a guild or fraternity was an extremely common experience in medieval Europe. This book asks why so many people wished to belong to these highly miscellaneous groups (only rarely confined to a single craft), whose social diversity was of their essence. It finds a partial answer in the challenging material circumstances of the later Middle Ages, but a fuller one in contemporary debates surrounding the identity and fulfilment of the individual, and the problematic question of his or her relationship to a larger society. These debates are contextualized in a longer history which continues to be pertinent today. Unlike previous studies, the book’s focus is not on the guilds as institutions but on the social and moral processes which were catalysed by participation. These bodies are shown to have founded schools, built bridges, managed almshouses, governed small towns, shaped religious ritual, and commemorated the dead. Informing and transcending all of these activities, however, was the perception that association in a fraternity could be a catalyst of personal change. Members cultivated friendship between individuals on the understanding that the fulfilment of human potential depended upon a mutually transformative engagement with others. The peasants, artisans, and professionals who joined the guilds sought to change both their society and themselves. The study sheds light on the conception and construction of society in the Middle Ages, and suggests further that this evidence has implications for how we see ourselves.

The battle of Bannockburn, fought on the fields south of Stirling at midsummer 1314, is the best-known event in the history of Medieval Scotland. It was a unique event. The clash of two armies, each led by a king, followed a clear challenge to a battle to determine the status of Scotland and its survival as a separate realm. As a key point in the Anglo-Scottish wars of the fourteenth century, the battle has been extensively discussed, but Bannockburn was also a pivotal event in the history of the British Isles. This book analyses the road to Bannockburn, the campaign of 1314 and the aftermath of the fight. It demonstrates that, in both its context and legacy, the battle had a central significance in the shaping of nations and identities in the late Medieval British Isles.

This book explores the origins and development of regional variation in landscape character across southern Britain during the medieval period. The ‘long eighth century’, between the late seventh and the early ninth centuries, is highlighted as having seen significant changes in how the countryside was managed, with further developments around the tenth century. While villages and open fields were created in the central zone of England (for example in the East Midlands down as far as Somerset), there were also significant changes with regard to how the landscape was exploited and managed in areas such as the south‐west of England and East Anglia. A number of major boundaries in landscape character are identified, such as the Blackdown and Quantock Hills in the South‐West, and the Gipping and Lark valleys in East Anglia, and it is suggested that these have their origins in the pre‐medieval period. In the twelfth century the concept of managing the landscape through villages and open fields was exported into newly conquered southern Wales where major differences in landscape character reflect areas of English, Welsh, and Flemish settlement.

In thirteenth-century England, circumstance and personality converged to produce an episcopate uncommonly dedicated not only to its pastoral mission but also to the defence of the kingdom and the oversight of royal government. This cohort was bound by corporate solidarity and possessed an authority to reform the king—and so influence political events—unknown to the episcopates of other kingdoms. These bishops took a central part in the dramatic events of the reigns of King John and Henry III, throughout rebellion, civil war, and invasion from France, and the turbulent years of minority government and Henry’s early personal rule. They acted as peacemakers, supporting royal power when it was threatened, for the sake of regnal peace, but also using their unique authority to reform the king when his illegal actions threatened to provoke his barons to rebellion. This situation changed, however, between 1258 and 1265, when around half of England’s bishops set aside their loyalty to the king and joined a group of magnates, led by Simon de Montfort, in England’s first revolution, appropriating royal powers in order to establish a new form of government: conciliar rule. As members of Montfort’s regime, they helped to govern England, as well as constructing arguments to justify the new order. This book examines the interaction between the bishops’ actions on the ground and their culture, identity, and political thought. In so doing it reveals how the Montfortian bishops were forced to construct a new philosophy of power in the crucible of political crisis.

This book overturns many of the traditional assumptions about the nature and purpose of castle-building in the middle ages. It demolishes the traditional belief that castles were overwhelmingly military in their function, showing how this was simply one aspect of a more complicated whole, and sets out to recreate the medieval understanding of castles as symbolically fortified places of all kinds. It places castles in the context of medieval culture and society, as ancient walled post-Roman towns and prestigious religious enclaves to transitory campaign forts. Going back to the original sources, the book proposes a new and subtler understanding of the function and symbolism of castles as well as insights into the lives of the people who inhabited them. Fortresses were only occasionally caught up in war, but constantly were central to the ordinary life of all classes: of the nobility and gentry, of widows and heiresses, of prelates and clergy, of peasantry and townspeople alike. The book presents and explores this broad social panorama.

This book is a guide to the complete range of medieval scholarship undertaken in twentieth-century Britain: history, archaeology, language and culture. Some of the twenty-nine chapters here focus on changes in research method or on the achievements of individual scholars, others are the personal account of a lifetime's work in a discipline. Many outline the ways in which subjects may develop in the twenty-first century. The book sets British scholarship in its international context and contains useful bibliographies.

London’s civic ceremonies marked the relationships between the mayors and the crown, but also between denizens and their government, gild wardens and members, masters and apprentices, and parishioners and their church. London, like all premodern cities, was made up of immigrants. The number of people who were citizens (who enjoyed the “freedom of the city”) was a small proportion of the inhabitants. The newly arrived had to be taught the civic culture of the city so that the city could function peacefully. Ritual and ceremony played a key role in the acculturation process. In a society in which hierarchical authority was most commonly determined by the inheritance of title and office or sanctified by ordination, elected civic officials relied on rituals to cement their authority, power, and dominance. Since the term of office was a year, the election and inauguration of city officials had to be very public, and the robes of office had to distinguish the officers so that everyone would know who they were. Apprentices entering the city to take up a trade were educated in civic culture by their masters. Gilds also provided experience in leadership through gild governance. Again, rituals, oath swearing, and distinctive livery marked their belonging. Those who rebelled against authority and who broke the civic ordinances were made spectacles of through ritual humiliations so that others could learn from their example. At the parish level, and even at the level of the street, civic behavior was taught through example, proclamations, and ballads.

This book provides the first comprehensive study of city‐states in medieval Europe for more than a century. Rather than highlighting the political and cultural achievements of city‐states, above all those of central and northern Italy, it offers a detailed comparison of city‐states in an urban belt which spanned the Alps from Italy to Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries, focusing on their territorial expansion: Why, how, and with what consequences did cities as communal polities succeed (or fail) in their efforts to construct landed territories and so become sovereign states in their own right. For the first time there is full coverage of the Swiss city‐states and the imperial cities of Germany. In contrast to the typologies of city‐states put forward by social and political scientists the study argues that city‐states were not a spent force in early modern Europe, but survived by transformation and adaption. Furthermore, it suggests that a historical framework for the city‐state which embraces both time and space should be sought in a regional approach which does not treat city‐states in isolation but within their wider geopolitical context.

This book is a biography of the underappreciated eleventh-century Scandinavian warlord-turned-Anglo-Saxon monarch who united the English and Danish crowns to forge a North Sea empire: Cnut. The book offers a fascinating reappraisal of Cnut, one of the most misunderstood of the Anglo-Saxon kings: the powerful Danish warlord who conquered England and created a North Sea empire in the eleventh century. The book draws from a wealth of written and archaeological sources to provide the most detailed accounting to date of the life and accomplishments of a remarkable figure in European history, a forward-thinking warrior-turned-statesman who created a new Anglo-Danish regime through designed internationalism.

This book offers a history of ‘Scotland’ before Scotland existed, and before people even thought of this area as a single ‘country’. It traces the emergence and disappearance of various ethnic and political groups from Roman times till circa AD 900, and their shifting relationships. But it also calls into question what are often seen as straightforward and obvious concepts such as ‘ethnicity’, ‘Christian conversion’, ‘law’. While following a broad chronological narrative over nine centuries, and dealing with political and large-scale developments, it also explores in some depth the culture of the societies (and there were several) of the time. In addition to the more narrowly political dimension, it explores the texture of experience in people’s lives: how they imagined themselves and their own identities; how they saw their place in the world; how communities managed their own internal affairs such as marriage, childhood and social conflict; how people understood gender, wealth, political power and religious belief. Important texts which have sometimes been read rather naively are here read in new ways, identifying the commitments of their authors, and seeking the literary influences which shaped them (which means we must read and understand not only what early medieval writers wrote, but also what they were reading).

This book argues that Duke William of Normandy's claim to succeed Edward the Confessor on the throne of England profoundly influenced not only the practice of royal succession, but also played a large part in creating a novel structure of land tenure, dependent on the king. In these two fundamental respects, the attempt made in the aftermath of the Conquest to demonstrate seamless continuity with Anglo-Saxon England severed almost all continuity. A notable result was a society in which instability in succession at the top exacerbated instability lower down. The first serious attempt to address these problems began when arrangements were made, in 1153, for the succession to King Stephen. Henry II duly succeeded him, but claimed rather to have succeeded his grandfather, Henry I, Stephen's predecessor. Henry II's attempts to demonstrate continuity with his grandfather were modeled on William the Conqueror's treatment of Edward the Confessor. Just as William's fabricated history had been the foundation for the tenurial settlement recorded in Domesday Book, so Henry II's, in a different way, underpinned the early common law procedures which began to undermine aspects of that settlement. The official history of the Conquest played a crucial role not only in creating a new society, but in the development of that society.

We are born and die alone, and are often alone in between. But this is true of all human beings, in their millions. So in another sense we are not alone at all, quite the opposite. To manage other shared problems our species has devised organisms specific to each. The organisms specific to our shared solitudes are religions. Because of the paradox in which they originate, religions have a double character: private and public. There is no clearer example than Christianity. It could never have come into existence without some degree of organization, with its half-dozen early members or, thanks to development of Roman and Jewish traditions, millions. But the whole purpose of the organization was to cultivate, in each member, responses essentially private, known only to God. The public and private elements in Christianity are always in tension, usually a creative one; but sometimes not. Murray’s five essays, produced for various occasions, consider different aspects of this tension, creative or otherwise, in the western church between, approximately, the millennium and 1300.

Scholars of medieval power structures, feudal relations, monarchy, and ritual performance have long recognized that the early twelfth century was ground zero in the cultural, social, and political transformation of France from a weak and fragmented kingdom to one centralized under the leadership of a purposeful ruler. This book considers the role played by the crusaders in the development of the French monarchy. While the First Crusade was launched in 1095 ,the first French monarch did not join the movement until 1146, when Louis VII led the ill-fated Second Crusade. The failure of the French kings to join the crusading movement created a ‘crisis of crusading’ that the French royal court confronted in a variety of media, including texts, artwork, architecture, and rituals. The book finds that in a short span of time, members of the court fused the emerging crusade ideas with ancient notions of sacral kingship and nobility to fashion new, highly selective and flexible images of French history that exploited the unknown future of crusading to negotiate a space into which the self-fashioning of French kingship could insinuate itself. By the middle of the twelfth century, these negotiated images were being widely disseminated to a popular audience through various channels, thus contributing to the rise of the ‘crusading king’ as an idea ruler-type from the early thirteenth century onwards.