Criticism of Henry II's expedition to Ireland in William of Canterbury's miracles of St Thomas Becket

The long collection of miracles of St Thomas Becket written by William, a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, between 1172 and c.1179 is, like many other examples of the genre, a rich source for attitudes towards sanctity, relics, and pilgrimage. A far more unusual feature of William's text is the author's criticism of the recent English presence in Ireland. William's comments on this score amount to a loaded stretching of the normal parameters of his textual medium, resulting in an evaluative engagement with current affairs of the sort that we would more normally associate with reflective forms of history-writing. William's criticism focused in particular upon the expedition to Ireland undertaken by King Henry II (October 1171–April 1172), inverting the very rhetoric that Henry had used to justify his Irish adventure. William was not himself Irish, as has sometimes been supposed, nor was he registering his institution's frustrations about its exclusion from the new ecclesiastical order in Ireland, as might be implied by the traditional but questionable ‘Canterbury plot’ interpretation of the much-debated papal bull Laudabiliter. Instead, William was skilfully engaging with current debates about the rectitude of Henry II's Irish expedition, and more broadly contesting emerging prejudices about England's ‘uncultivated’ neighbours, in order to effect a subtle critique of the king's involvement in Becket's murder.     

Collectanea

In emphasizing equivalences with conceptions of evil eye, accounts of Ethiopian buda understate the capacity of these beings to transform into hyenas. The case study presented here highlights how this element of the buda belief reveals a social realm that extends beyond the strictly human.     

The Landes de Gascogne (southwest France): periglacial desert and cultural frontier during the Palaeolithic

During the last glacial period, a large part of the Aquitaine basin (southwest France) was a periglacial desert comprising coversands with low-relief dune fields surrounded by loess accumulations. OSL and radiocarbon dates show that the phase of maximum sand deposition coincides with Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 2. Peats and gleyic palaeosoils intercalated within the sands at some sites indicate that vegetation cover was able to develop locally during short events, possibly D–O interstadials, due to raised groundwater levels in interdunal depressions. Few Palaeolithic sites have been discovered in the coversand area in contrast to the peripheral loess region. Systematic survey along a future highway corridor demonstrates that this paucity of sites is not the result of insufficient survey nor deep site burial, but rather reflects an archaeological reality. This strongly suggests that the sand area was not attractive for hunter–gatherer populations due to its reduced levels of water resources, and available vegetation and animal biomass. The distribution of cultural markers such as art items and projectile points also shows that the coversand area probably acted as a barrier separating two different cultural sub-areas, one in the Pyrenees and Cantabria, the other in the Périgord. As a consequence, the commonly accepted view that southwest France, as a whole, served as a refugia during the cold and arid phases of the Pleistocene should be replaced by a more complex one that reflects the fact that a large part of the territory was almost unoccupied and that human populations were concentrated along alluvial valleys.