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Early Medieval Settlements: The Archaeology of Rural Communities in North-West Europe 400-900 (Medieval History and Archaeology) PDF

240 Pages·2003·1.22 MB·English
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Medieval History and Archaeology General Editors JOHN BLAIR HELENA HAMEROW Early Medieval Settlements EARLY MEDIEVAL SETTLEMENTS The Archaeology of Rural Communities in Northwest Europe 400–900 HELENA HAMEROW 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox26dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Helena Hamerow 2002 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hamerow, Helena. Early medieval settlements: the archaeology of rural communities in Northwest Europe, 400–900/Helena Hamerow. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Europe, Western—Antiquities. 2. Land settlement—Europe, Western. 3. Agricultural geography—Europe, Western. 4. Agriculture—Europe, Western—History. 5. Europe, Western—Rural conditions—History. I. Title. D125 .H36 2002 940.1—dc21 2002067186 ISBN 0–19–924697–1 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset in Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by T.J. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall To Eric and Max Preface and Acknowledgements The idea for this book sprang from doctoral research undertaken in the 1980s into the development of the Anglo-Saxon settlement at Mucking, in Essex. At that time, no early medieval settlement had been excavated in Britain on a scale comparable to Mucking, where, in the 1960s and 1970s, some 18 hectares of a multi-period landscape had been investigated (Jones and Jones 1975; Hamerow 1993). Published reports of large-scale settlement excavations in northwest Europe—especially Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands—and conversa- tions with continental colleagues about their interpretations of these settlements provided the key to understanding Mucking’s development. They also convinced me that a greater familiarity with the innovative research being undertaken on the other side of the North Sea would enrich our interpretations of early medieval settlements in England, despite certain differences in excavation methods and in the character of the settlements themselves. It is difficult, however, to introduce Anglophone—and often monoglot— students (and colleagues, for that matter), with limited access to foreign publica- tions, to these sites; this crucial body of evidence for how the peoples of early medieval northwest Europe lived has therefore been largely neglected by Anglo-Saxon archaeologists and historians. While countless pages have been devoted to early medieval burial rites and how social identity and social struc- ture may (or may not) be reflected in cemeteries, there is little in the way of a general overview of the evidence for rural settlements between the collapse of the western Empire and the rise of the ‘Successor States’.1 Yet the history of this period is in fundamental ways the history of rural settlements. This book was written in the hope that such a survey will provide a way into the rich and rapidly increasing archaeological evidence for early medieval settlements, and will encourage us to examine Anglo-Saxon settlements within their wider European context.2 In seeking to provide a synthesis and overview of archaeological sites in several different countries, I have relied heavily upon colleagues who have shown unstinting generosity in providing access to unpublished material and information. This book is based to a very large extent on their work, both 1 Chapelot and Fossier’s The Village and House in the Middle Ages(first published in 1980 and trans- lated into English in 1985) forms a notable exception, but it deals with the whole of the Middle Ages, draws heavily on later written sources and is now over twenty years out of date. 2 It is in the nature of any book dealing primarily with archaeological evidence, that the rate of discov- ery of that evidence outstrips the author’s ability to write about it. Indeed, some of the interpretations offered in the following pages may already have been superseded or overturned by new work. I have, regrettably, been unable in all but a few cases to take account of work published after 1999. viii Preface and Acknowledgements published and unpublished, and I have benefited greatly from their hospitality and readiness to respond to countless queries. I am particularly indebted to Danny Gerrets, Anthonie Heidinga, Hauke Jöns, Claude Lorren, Michael Müller-Wille, Palle Ø. Sørensen, Jan Lanting, Peter Vang Petersen, Arno Verhoeven, Uta von Freeden, H. T. Waterbolk, Rotraut Wolf, and Haio Zim- merman. I am also grateful to the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Sachsenforschung, whose Sachsensymposia have been a vital source of stimulating ideas and whose members have provided both assistance and friendship. Those colleagues who kindly read parts or all of earlier drafts have, by their comments, improved my original text enormously and I am greatly indebted to Debbie Banham, John Blair, Tania Dickinson, Ros Faith, David Hinton, Catherine Mortimer, Marijke van der Veen, and Chris Wickham for their encouragement and in- sights. The following institutions generously made available their libraries and expertise: Niedersächsisches Institut für historische Küstenforschung, Wilhelmshaven; Römisch-Germanische Kommission, Frankfurt; the Groningen Institute of Archaeology; National Museet, Copenhagen; Centre de Recherches Archéologiques Médiévales, Université de Caen; Amsterdam Archaeological Centre; Württembergisches Landesmuseum, Stuttgart; Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte der Christian-Albrechts Universität, Kiel; Rijksdienst voor het Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek, Amersfoort. The following also generously provided unpublished information: Torben Egeberg Hansen, Gill Hey, Hauke Jöns, John Newman, Jörn Schuster, Ian Scott, Astrid Tummuscheit, and Hermann Witte. The illustrations were drawn by Yvonne Beadnell and Alison Wilkins, to whom I am grateful not only for their skills as illustrators, but also for their patience when faced with pleas for ‘just one more’ alteration. The research for this book was supported by a Special Research Award from the University of Durham and by the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford. I am grateful to colleagues in both institutions for providing the support, moral and practical, needed to see this project to completion. Contents List of Illustrations xi 1. Rural Communities in Early Medieval Europe: Archaeological Approaches and Frameworks 1 2. Houses and Households: The Archaeology of Buildings 12 3. Settlement Structure and Social Space 52 4. Land and Power: Settlements in their Territorial Context 100 5. The Forces of Production: Crop and Animal Husbandry 125 6. Rural Centres, Trade, and Non-Agrarian Production 156 7. Epilogue: Trajectories and Turning-Points 191 References 195 Index 221

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