Where the Middle Ages Begin
The study examines burials associated with Roman structures, and churches on or near Roman buildings, to demonstrate that the physical remains of Roman structures had a significant impact on the religious landscape of Anglo-Saxon England despite the apparent discontinuity between many Roman and early-medieval landscapes.
Martin Golberg, Senior Curator at the National Museums of Scotland, travelled to the British Museum to give audiences perspective on the various pieces in the exhibit as well as an introduction to what constitutes “Celtic” art.
Martin Wall takes us on a journey into a period that still remains mysterious, into regions and countries long forgotten, such as Mercia and Northumbria.
A summary of a paper given by Professor Christina Lee at the University of Nottingham’s “Making the Medieval Relevant” Conference.
This article takes literary representations of Cnut, the Danish conqueror of England, as a case study of the construction of English identity in the eleventh century.
In actual fact, the bulk of contemporary evidence — which happens to be material rather than textual — clearly argues that the people of fifth- and early sixth-century eastern Britain were much more involved in subsistence agriculture than warfare, and that most people during much of this period lived in highly circumscribed worlds in a ranked, rather than a steeply hierarchical, society
The dominant literate culture of early medieval England – male, European, and Christian – often represented itself through comparison to exotic beings and monsters, in traditions developed from native mythologies, and Classical and Biblical sources.
Major themes in the zooarchaeological record regarding livestock and animal husbandry in England from the 5th to 11th Centuries AD are reviewed.
Much has been written about how the Anglo- Saxons measured time, but relatively little about why, or in what circumstances. When did it seem important to note the year or the month, the day or the hour?
Jay Gates, Nicole Marafioti and Valerie Allen speak about Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England
Four videos from Woodlands.co.uk on how trees were used in the Middle Ages
How did the Anglo-Saxons think about history?
Late last year, over 5200 silver coins was found by a metal detectorist in England. Now, the public will get a taste of this hoard, when 21 coins go on a special exhibit at at Bucks County Museum.
Sometime between around 687 and 700, a distraught father brought his raving son, in a wagon, to the island of Lindisfarne, where the holy relics of Saint Cuthbert were kept.
The glittering and gleaming artifacts that can be found in Anglo-Saxon archaeological sites capture the imagination, conjuring up images of a warrior culture that displayed its wealth through wearable objects.
For centuries two holidays were celebrated by neighboring peoples on the same day. The people were the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons, and their holidays were Lughnasa and Lammas respectively.
This paper presents some new observations concerning the construction of the Sutton Hoo helmet, as a point of entry to a wider discussion of pre-Christian religious and ideological links across Scandinavia.
The last twenty-five years have seen huge advances made in the way that battlefields can be recorded and understood through archaeological techniques, but these methods have only recently been accepted as a useful complement to traditional military history.
It is somewhat surprising that we find very little in the way of propaganda bent on stressing positive changes that Christianity could bring, propaganda of the kind that Bishop Daniel of Winchester scripted for Boniface in the oft-cited letter which he advised the missionary to lure converts by contrasting the economic prosperity of Christian communities with the backwardness of the non-Christian.
The International Medieval Congress is taking place at the University of Leeds, I’m on hand this week to report on the conference. This blog post reports on my first session.
What little historical records we have pertaining to Queen Eadgifu tell us she exercised considerable power.
Christians far from Egypt have drawn inspiration from the Life of St Antony, including England’s two most popular pre-Conquest hermit saints
Chest burials, in which the body is interred in a wooden chest with a hinged lid, are one of the most characteristic funerary practices of the middle Anglo-Saxon period in northern England.
Magic was a regular part of daily life in pre-Christian Europe, as it was and still is in many other parts of the world. In this context, the term ‘magic’ is distinct from its modern usage which is better described as optical illusion.
Most historians now acknowledge that Hastings was indeed a close-run affair, won more by luck and perhaps generalship than because of fundamental structural or tactical differences in the forces or disparities in their military technologies.
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