SEA CHANGE: NEW EVIDENCE FOR MESOLITHIC AND EARLY NEOLITHIC PRESENCE IN THE CHANNEL ISLANDS WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO GUERNSEY AND THE RISING HOLOCENE SEA

This paper summarizes the results of recent research on the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods in the Channel Islands and focuses on the integration of new information into the long‐ running efforts to explain the processes by which the Neolithic became established in Guernsey and the other Channel Islands. This research builds on Kinnes's work on the complex monument at Les Fouaillages, Guernsey in the early 1980s and the review by Patton of Neolithic communities in the Channel Islands in 1995. Many rescue and research excavations in Guernsey have provided new evidence which informs the complex relationships between Guernsey, the other Channel Islands and the north‐west of France at the time of the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic. Analysis of the data takes into account recent French research (and in particular Cassen et al. 2000 and Guyodo and Hamon 2005 ). Also, at the time of writing, Kinnes's work on Les Fouaillages is being prepared for publication ( Kinnes et al. forthcoming , see below). The developments are discussed against new and existing data for rising sea levels and the consequent isolation of Guernsey as an island.     

‘I call the people.’ Church bells in fourteenth-century Catalunya

Bells were an inescapable part of fourteenth-century urban life. They signalled the hours of the day and times for prayers; they warned of tempests and enemy armies; they heralded masses, funerals, and deaths. The pealing of bells brought men, women, and children together, choreographing communal behaviour in time and space. Bells echoed the vox Domini, calling out the deaths of holy men and women, celebrating the working of miracles. The ubiquitous presence of bells reflected the omnipresence of God in the medieval world. Their echoes transformed private moments into collective experiences, elevating the mundane into the miraculous. Scholars have rarely examined the religious aspects of bells, looking instead at their more practical side, especially their utilisation as markers of time and the allegedly concurrent rise of mercantile culture. This article approaches bells from the viewpoints of those men and women who heard them and wanted them rung. Focusing on sources from Christian clerics, we see that medieval men rang the bells with clear, but many possible, purposes in mind. By marking time and prayers, Christian church bells helped to create and facilitate communities within dioceses, spurring and choreographing their actions. During funerals, bells broadcast private moments, giving them communal significance. The transformative, creative function of bells is clearest in their role in miracles. In Manresa, the vision experienced by a few became a community affair when the church bells gathered the people; the bells transformed an ordinary day into one where the people, as a community, received divine favour. Finally, with the deaths of holy persons, the tolling of bells transformed private, even anonymous deaths, into moments of wonder as God’s hand touched the world.The pealing of bells defined Christian communities in the Mediterranean and, at the same time as rulers and elites throughout the region were seeking to control minority groups, those same groups were seeking to exercise control over the sounds within their own communities. Through the pealing of bells, churchmen across Catalunya sought to direct the thoughts and prayers of their listeners. When the Christian clerics of Catalunya rang their churches’ bells, they had specific aims in mind, yet, as the evidence demonstrates, the pealing of the bells never meant just one thing. This article demonstrates that there is much more to understanding medieval bells than knowing ‘for whom the bell tolls’; we have to look at the listeners as much as the ringers in order to understand their cultural significance in medieval Europe. This article is a first step in how such a study could be begun.     

Cities of God? Medieval urban forms and their Christian symbolism

Situated in the context of recent geographical engagements with 'landscape', this paper combines 'morphological' and 'iconographic' landscape interpretations to examine how urban forms were perceived in late medieval Europe. To date, morphological studies have mapped the medieval city either by classifying urban layouts according to particular types, or by analysing plan forms of particular towns and cities to reveal their spatial evolution. This paper outlines a third way, an 'iconographic' approach, which shows how urban forms in the Middle Ages conveyed Christian symbolism. Three such 'mappings' explore this thesis: the first uses textual and visual representations which show that the city was understood as a scaled-down world – a microcosm – linking city and cosmos in the medieval mind; the second 'mapping' develops this theme further and suggests that urban landscapes were inscribed with symbolic form through their layout on the ground; while the third looks at how Christian symbolism of urban forms was performed through the urban landscape in perennial religious processions. Each of these 'mappings' points to the symbolic, mystical significance urban form had in the Middle Ages, based on religious faith, and they thus offer a deepened appreciation of how urban landscapes were represented, constructed and experienced at the time.     

MEDIEVAL GLASS FROM ROCCA DI ASOLO (NORTHERN ITALY): AN ARCHAEOMETRIC STUDY

An archaeometric study was performed on 33 medieval glass samples from Rocca di Asolo (northern Italy), in order to study the raw materials employed in their production, identify analogies with medieval glass from the Mediterranean area and possible relationships between chemical composition and type and/or production technique, contextualize the various phases of the site and extend data on Italian medieval glass. The samples are soda–lime–silica in composition, with natron as flux for early medieval glasses and soda ash for the high and late medieval ones. Compositional groups were identified, consistent with the major compositional groups identified in the western Mediterranean during the first millennium AD . In particular, Asolo natron glass is consistent with the HIMT group and recycled Roman glass; soda ash glass was produced with the same type of flux (Levantine ash) but a different silica source (siliceous pebbles, and more or less pure sand). Cobalt was the colouring agent used to obtain blue glass; analytical data indicate that at least two different sources of Co were exploited during the late medieval period. Some data, analytical and historical, suggest a Venetian provenance for the high/late medieval glass and a relationship between type of object (beaker or bottle) and chemical composition.     

Wild Birds of the Italian Middle Ages: Diet,Environment and Society

ABSTRACT

Wild birds are intrinsically associated with our perception of the Middle Ages. They often feature in heraldic designs, paintings, and books of hours; few human activities typify the medieval period better than falconry. Prominent in medieval iconography, wild birds feature less frequently in written sources (as they were rarely the subject of trade transactions or legal documents) but they can be abundant in archaeological sites. In this paper we highlight the nature of wild bird exploitation in Italian medieval societies, ranging from their role as food items to their status and symbolic importance. A survey of 13 Italian medieval sites corresponding to 19 ‘period sites’, dated from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, reveals the occurrence of more than 100 species (certainly an under-estimate of the actual number). Anseriformes and Columbiformes played a prominent role in the mid- and late medieval Italian diet, though Passeriformes and wild Galliformes were also important. In the late Middle Ages, there is an increase in species diversity and in the role of hunting as an important marker of social status.     

Age-dependent cortical bone loss in a medieval population

Age-dependent cortical bone loss was studied in a skeletal assemblage from a British medieval site using metacarpal radiogrammetry. Significant loss of bone was found in the females but not in the males. The magnitude of bone loss in the older females relative to their younger counterparts was found to be similar to that reported for modern European subjects. Low cortical bone was associated with healed fractures of the highly trabecular bone of the axial skeleton, and this observation is suggestive that weakening of the skeleton due to loss of bone substance precipitated such fractures, as it does in modern Western women. The broad similarities between the medieval and modern data may call into question the importance of lifestyle factors in influencing the severity of osteoporosis, at least as far as loss of cortical bone is concerned.     

Medieval and Modern C2: Command and Control in the Field during Western Europe’s Long Twelfth Century (1095–1225)

‘Command and control’ has become ever more important in the postmodern military world even though there is no universal consensus among contemporary militaries on what ‘command and control’ encompasses. Military histories, manuals and handbooks of the Anglo-American world concede that classical armies and leaders understood the concepts but dismiss eras like the long twelfth century entirely or present them with a lack of understanding or context. Why is this? This can be partially answered through the following factors: (1) the nature of ancient vs. medieval source material; (2) perceived lack of professionalism in medieval armies; (3) the existence of discrete tactical formations in the ancient world but not medieval; (4) the perceived existence of a professional officer class or political career in the ancient world but not the medieval; and (5) the nature of ancient and medieval authority and strategic, operational and tactical objectives. Twelfth-century commanders exhibited command and control although they faced different challenges compared to their ancient or modern counterparts.     

Loving Friends: Surviving Widowhood in Late Medieval Westminster

Although medieval moralists routinely warned against women socialising with either men or women, this article argues that friendships were instrumental in helping women survive widowhood. In medieval Europe, widowhood was frequently a time of vulnerability and poverty. Unscrupulous businessmen and other opportunists often preyed upon widows. Looking at the different ways men and women in Westminster made their wills and analysing those chosen to administer them reveals that widows frequently turned to the husbands of their friends to execute their wills and oversee their estates.     

5. WHAT DO MEDIEVAL BUILDINGS MEAN?

The aim of this article is to review and reconsider what scholars, including historians, archaeologists, and those in other disciplines, are trying to get at when they attempt a “social interpretation” of English late medieval domestic buildings. I focus on the definition and interpretation of “meaning,” and I examine critically a series of concepts routinely deployed in social interpretations in the past, including my own work, such as type, zeitgeist, and intention. I argue that some of these concepts and interpretive moves are problematic and rather than aiding in our understanding, raise further questions in their turn about how buildings were lived in and understood by their medieval inhabitants. I argue for a shift in language and jargon away from “planning” and “meaning” to that of “lived experience”. I explore such a possible shift with reference to different understandings of and debates over the late medieval castle of Bodiam in southeastern England. Such a shift from meaning to lived experience raises fresh challenges for the development and empirical evaluation of interdisciplinary research on medieval buildings, but it also raises fresh possibilities and insights.     

A Study of the Folklore on the Coasts of Connacht,Ireland

During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, it was commonplace among historians that the common people of medieval England had remained substantially pagan in their religious beliefs. Christianity, according to this view, was essentially the faith of the elite, with the populace embracing what was at best a dual allegiance to the new and old religions. This view has now disappeared, and the time seems right to take stock of medieval popular religion in England with a view to solving three problems: why did the concept of a pagan medieval populace develop, flourish for so long and then decline; what is the actual evidence for medieval popular belief; and what new perspectives can be taken on medieval English Christianity by employing comparisons with paganism?     

Rhetoric and morale: a study of battle orations from the central middle ages

Courage and morale are often overlooked factors in medieval warfare. Nevertheless, they were as important in the middle ages as they are today. Although there is no psychological evidence of the type compiled in recent wars, the chroniclers of the central middle ages do provide a considerable amount of information about the different factors that stimulated the fighting spirit of medieval armies. They wrote hundreds of battle orations, harangues to the knights before or during combat, that show in detail the kinds of motive appeals the chroniclers believed would be most effective in building morale. This article analyzes battle orations as a rhetorical genre for the psychological insights they provide into the mentality of the medieval man at arms.     

The Ancient Origins of Medieval Fields: A Reassessment

This article questions the suggestions that have been made by a number of archaeologists and landscape historians concerning the Roman and prehistoric origins of large tracts of the medieval rural landscape in lowland England. It suggests that arguments for large-scale continuity of field systems, mainly based on the evidence of excavations and topographic analysis, are flawed because they fail to take fully into account the topographic contexts, and the practical functions, of field boundaries. When these matters are given due weight, much of the evidence cited in support of ‘continuity’ instead appears to suggest a significant degree of discontinuity, at least in terms of systems of land division, between Roman Britain and medieval England.     

EXPLORING IDENTITY AND PLACE: AN ANALYSIS OF THE PROVENANCE OF PASSAGE GRAVE STONES ON GUERNSEY AND JERSEY IN THE MIDDLE NEOLITHIC

Summary. This study examines the provenance of rock types used in the construction of Middle Neolithic passage grave stones on the islands of Guernsey and Jersey, focusing on the social dimensions of stone selection. The use of stones in passage grave construction includes both local and non-local rock types, which at some sites are organized in distinctive patterns. It is argued that the choice of stones was bound by concepts of identity, and that the communities which gathered to build these monuments may have used specific rock types to represent their community and their local mythologies. The relationship between identity and stone selection is supported both by analogy and by research into the role of landmarks in the development of local landscapes and ideology. The success of megalith provenance studies on Guernsey and Jersey suggests considerable potential for future research in other geologically diverse regions.     

Night Revels and Werewolfery in Calvinist Guernsey

From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, Guernsey's Calvinist régime sought to control the rival cultural attractions of night-time activities, enjoyed especially by the young. These included the vueille and “gadding” between parishes. Cases of disguising in 1624 and 1630, the former under a mare's skin, when examined alongside examples from the other Channel Islands, England and Wales, demonstrate analogies with hobby horse perambulations and the Mari Lwyd. A unique reference to vouarouvarie [werewolfery] also describes a rowdy nocturnal activity, here with elements drawn from medieval identifications of the werewolf with outlawry and the dead. Werewolfery in Calvinist Guernsey may also have involved the harassment of women.     

Painted Glass

The consideration of contemporary ‘designed landscapes’ around late medieval castles is now well-established. However, all too often the consideration of such a landscape is not accompanied by an equally detailed study of the building from which it was viewed, particularly the ‘viewing windows’—windows suggested to be deliberately placed within a building to provide a view over, across or towards a specific element of a designed landscape or the wider natural landscape. This paper discusses such windows, and also wall-walks, within the architectural context of one particular castle. It identifies three basic questions which should be asked in relation to any view (how did the viewer look, what were they looking at and why did they choose to look at it?), and seeks to demonstrate that windows and wall-walks intervene between the viewer and the view to the same degree as they facilitate the act of looking. An appreciation of these processes is crucial to understanding late medieval concepts of viewing.     

St Darerca and Her Sister Scholars: Women and Education in Medieval Ireland

This article examines largely neglected evidence for women's education in Irish saints’ Lives and integrates it with findings from other medieval Irish texts, such as chronicles, devotional works and poetry. The sources attest that education was available to at least some girls and women under male and female teachers in mixed and single–sex schools from the earliest days of the Irish church until the mid–fifteenth century. Their history points to the power, agency and authority open to medieval Irish women and the respect, affection, and admiration their brothers felt for them.     

Hostages in the Carolingian world (714–840)

The medieval hostage ( obses ) was a form of personal surety, a person deprived of liberty by a second person in order to guarantee an undertaking by a third person. Although they were used in private transactions, they normally appear in the early medieval sources in the context of relations between political entities. Close to seventy distinct hostage episodes are recorded in greater Francia and the Italian Peninsula in the period 714–840. Drawing on this evidence, as well as on the few surviving normative sources that refer to hostages, the present article develops a definition of hostages in the Carolingian period, examines the situations in which they were used, and argues that they must be seen as more than a simple means for securing agreements. In particular, grants of hostages might involve individuals beyond the trio of creditor–debtor–hostage, and they could transcend their immediate guaranteeing function to serve symbolic and political ends. The proper context for the study of hostages emerges as not legal but social and political relations.