Where the Middle Ages Begin
The primary aim of this text is the analysis and report of the skeletal human remains from the excavation of the late Anglo-Saxon settlement and cemetery at Bishopstone, East Sussex. The analysis of the skeletal remains covered the basic data: sex, age, stature, palaeopathology and dental pathology.
Unlike the preceding millennium, which had seen the upheavals of the Roman conquest and then growing Anglo-Saxon influence, and the related socioeconomic transformations reflected, for example, in the emergence, virtual desertion and then revival of an urban hierarchy, the post-Conquest Medieval period was one of relative social, political and economic continuity.
The first aspect to be examined is the extent of harvest failures within different crop sectors. The second issue is to what degree was the Great Famine of 1314-22 a subsistence crisis…My project is based on over 3,000 manorial and monastic accounts compiled between c.1310 and 1350.
In the period when agriculture dominated almost every aspect of daily life, the lords and wealthy peasants relied on paid labourers for farming business, yardlanders hired labourers to work with them, whilst moderate and landless villagers worked for hire. Agrarian wage labour is a window on the economy as well as on agricultural society.
Standards of hygiene in the Middle Ages appeared high enough to prevent diseases as medieval Europeans, contrary to popular beliefs, bathed quite often. However, contact with domestic animals, which were frequently kept in the part of the house reserved for human activity, exposed people to animal-related diseases passed to humans via insects.
Overpopulation in the Scandinavian countries created the Viking society, whose tradesmen, settlers and sea warriors had a considerable influences on the European countries. In return, influenced by what they saw, they brought back goods of all kinds, probably also seeds and posssibly plants.
It requires an enormous burden of proof for any microscopic organism to be held responsible for killing roughly 30-40 percent of the population of Europe, or an estimated 17 to 28 million people from 1347-1352. Since the isolation and description of Yersinia pestis at the end of the “golden age” of microbiology in 1894, by the Swiss-French bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, it is widely held that the small bacterium was responsible for the Black Death and several more pandemics that followed in Europe and Asia.
During this period, the role of the landed aristocracy was changing. With the creation of a professional standing army, in which soldiers were paid a wage, and the use of foreign mercenaries (think of the Swiss Guard), the traditional military function of the nobility receded.
A reading of Malthus’s text reveals that his argument was essentially religious—violation of his “principle” of population was a violation of god’s will…
The Black Death of 1347-50 has fascinated both researchers and lay people for over six hundred years1. The medieval epidemic had profound consequences both culturally and demographically and it did much to shape human history.
At the time of Domesday Book a great part of the county, perhaps a third, or even more, was tree clad, and while by the thirteenth century the proportion had fallen.
Based on five Early Medieval cemetery populations from different parts of Lower Austria and Vienna, this work analyses, by applying methods such as mortality profiling, macroscopic examination and stable isotope analysis, other possible contributing factors to these sex differences in life expectancy.
The study will create a huge database of around 80,000 immigrants who lived in England between 1330 and 1550.
This paper examines adult age-specific mortality patterns of one of the most devastating epidemics in recorded history, the Black Death of A.D. 1347-1351.
Is it necessary to assume an apartheid-like social structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England? By John E Pattison Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 275 no. 1650 (2008) Abstract: It has recently been argued that there was an apartheid-like social structure operating in Early Anglo-Saxon England. This was proposed in order to explain […]
Facing the Black Death: perceptions and reactions of university medical practitioners ARRIZABALAGA, JON Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, Cambridge University Press (1994) Abstract Between late 1347 and early 1348 a great disaster, which is nowadays known as the Black Death, began to spread all over Europe. By 1351 thís terrifying plague, which plunged […]
Serbian Medieval Urban Settlements Rastislava, Stojsavljević Branislava, Đurđev Bojana, Đerčan Geographica Pannonica, Volume 15, Issue 3 (2011) Abstract This research paper should point out general characteristics of Serbian medieval towns with special review of their formation, development and disappearance and short comparison with general characteristics of medieval towns in other parts of Europe. The fairly poor literature dealing […]
The Plague of Justinian and Other Scourges: An analysis of the Anomalies in the Development of the Iron Age population in Finland Seger, Tapio Fornvännen, 77 (1982) Abstract In this paper the corpus of excavated and dated Iron Age burial grounds in Finland is quantitatively analyzed with various statislical methods in order to isolate and define […]
Plague Mortality and Demographic Depression in Later Medieval England Poos, L.R. (Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge) THE YALE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE, 54, (1981) Abstract Both direct and indirect evidence implies that England experienced a lengthy period of stagnant or declining population during the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Black Death of 1348-1349 had brought […]
The first settlers of Iceland: an isotopic approach to colonisation By T. Douglas Price and Hildur Gestsdottir Antiquity, Vol. 80 (2006) Abstract: The colonisation of the North Atlantic from the eighth century AD was the earliest expansion of European populations to the west. Norse and Celtic voyagers are recorded as reaching and settling in Iceland, […]
Making bridges over cultural differences – The Podlasie case By Barbara Mazur Building Bridges: Proceedings of the Fourth international conference of The Consumer Citizenship Network, Sofia, Bulgaria 2007, edited by Dag Tangen and Victoria Thoresen (Hedmark University College, 2008) Introduction: Geographical and historical conditions have made Podlaskie Voivodeship a place of coexistence of various nations […]
New perspectives on mortality in medieval England: a comparison of Winchester and New Colleges (c.1390-1540) with Benedictine monasteries at Canterbury, Westminster and Durham By Rebecca Oakes Paper given at Death, disease, environment and social status: new approaches to mortality in England 1380-1860, held at the University of Cambridge (2009) Introduction: The late medieval period is […]
The Anglo-Saxon Influence on Romano-Britain: Research past and present By Charlotte Russell Durham Anthropology Journal, Volume 13:1 (2005) Abstract: The Romano-British to Anglo-Saxon transition in Britain is one of the most striking transitions seen in the archaeological record. Changes in burial practice between these periods, along with historical, anthropological, environmental and linguistic evidence have all […]
One important recent theme emerging from the literature on early modern Europe is that some of the key structural and institutional changes that are responsible for the increases in incomes may have taken place rather early, in the late medieval period or in the era of the Black Death.
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