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A Social History of England
A Social History of England, 900–1200
The years between 900 and 1200 saw transformative social change in Europe, including the creation of extensive town-dwelling populations and the proliferation of feudalised elites and bureaucratic monarchies. In England these developments were complicated and accelerated by repeated episodes of invasion, migration and changes of regime. In this book, scholars from disciplines including history, archaeology and literature reflect on the major trends which shaped English society in these years of transition and select key themes which encapsulate the period. The authors explore the landscape of England, its mineral wealth, its towns and rural life, the health, behaviour and obligations of its inhabitants, patterns of spiritual and intellectual life and the polyglot nature of its population and culture. What emerges is an insight into the complexity, diversity and richness of this formative period of English history.
470 pages, Hardcover
First published April 21, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 8, 2021
This seemed very strong for a history with multiple authors. I’ve rarely really liked that kind. It had good coverage but was readable. They must have just picked good authors when they put the book together.
August 24, 2021
A Social History of England 900-1200, Crick and Van Houts (Eds), 2011, 454 pages all in
This book was a chance find in Waterstones; a useful book on this period, amidst the more questionable ones on the shelves. Whilst it is not a beginner's book, it is one that anyone not that au-fait with aspects of the later period would benefit from reading. It provides some great overviews to the topics covered. The format is that each part begins with a a full length paper that discusses the main points and this is then followed by shorter, but more specialist entries. The papers are mostly descriptive, without anyone having the space to argue much in the way of a new point, but whilst that made it difficult to review, short of saying what they contained, it does give a good spread of knowledge in a large number of areas.
Part 1
Land use and People, Robin Fleming,
This was a thoroughly enjoyable paper that concentrated on how the land affected the people and how they made the most of the land. There's lots of interesting facts in here and in 23 pages Fleming managed to articulate a heck of a lot.
Water and Land, Stephen Rippon
This was a very short, but also very interesting paper. It took in fens, watermills, canals and the perception of wetlands. The section on marsh reclamation was great, with Rippon showing how they were a worked landscape during the Roman period, but as the drainage ditches and flood defences fell into disrepair they then had to be reclaimed anew. It would have been nice if this paper had been longer, as it felt all too brief.
Forest and Upland, Oliver Rackham
This was another short but sweet paper that looked at the recording of woods and their use, prior to a very short examination of upland areas. Really little more than an overview, but good to read all the same.
Mineral Resources, Peter Claughton
This paper focussed on salt, iron, lead and silver production plus building stone. Salt production persisted from the Roman period all the way through, but the others only resumed with the rise of something beyond a subsistence economy in the middle Saxon period and in some instances also after easily scavenged Roman production was no longer available. Like so many other entries so far in this book, this was short and just made me want to know more.
Health and Disease, Carole Rawcliffe
This was a thoroughly depressing paper to read. It described how poor nutrition, poor hygiene, dangerous working conditions, inadequate housing and so on all combined in a perfect storm of unpleasantness. It properly put me off eating my snap. Whilst it made for grim reading, Rawcliffe really brought home to you the precariousness of life and health in Anglo-Saxon England.
Part 2
Authority and Community Bruce O'Brien
This was an enjoyable wide-ranging introduction to the main aspects concerning where authority and community interacted. It took in the creation of law and its operation at a local level, with comments on how lordship and family loyalties were affected by this.
Lordship and Labour, Stephen Baxter
This was a thorough paper that discussed the rise and rise of the nobility and the decline of the peasantry. It takes into account the growth in the number of peasants and the much smaller increase in land under cultivation, making the point that this led to smaller peasant holdings and an increase in dependency upon often predatory lords.
Order and Justice, John Hudson
A short paper that was split between the disorder of King Stephen's reign and that of Æthelræd II It took in quite a bit and provided much more detail than you'd expect over so few pages.
War and Violence, John Hudson
This paper took in chivalry, armies, battle tactics, sieges and other forms of violence such as ravaging and feuds. It was quite disappointing to see the old chestnut about Anglo-Saxons arriving at battles on horseback and fighting on foot.
Family, marriage and kinship, Elizabeth Van Houts
This was a very good paper, where I learnt quite a bit about the female and domestic side of the era. It discusses the importance of kin in assisting with legal issues and the decline in the importance of wider kin in contrast to commendatory lordship. However, the most interesting section dealt with the wills of women and re-marriage.
Poor and Powerless, David Pelteret
This paper mostly concerned slaves and if you wish to read more, then Pelteret's full book will be for you. In addition to the reduction in slavery (and why), there is a brief examination of possible reasons behind financial ruin, and alternative solutions, such as prostitution and crime. It closes with a look at charity from the powerful to the powerless.
Part 3
Towns and their hinterlands, David Griffiths
This has a useful definition of a town by the late Susan Reynolds and I think that whatever terminology we may use, the Anglo-Saxons would have known a town when they saw one. This covers the rise of towns, nucleation, changing agricultural practices and much more besides. One sentence in this paper contained two surprising errors. 855 being given for the Mycel Here arriving and Kent being a satellite of Mercia at this point. Otherwise, this was a good review of where we stand on the topic of towns and their hinterlands.
Commerce and Markets, Richard Britnell
This paper took a cautious view of what can be inferred about early markets. It opens by examining the situation in 900 and then shows developments (where they can be evidenced) up to 1200. It takes in increasing royal control and formalisation as well as the amount of coinage in circulation.
Urban Planning, Julia Barrow
Barrow shows that whilst an urban settlement could come from different nuclei, fortifications were often important, but not always for their primary purpose. Instead, they presented an opportunity to redevelop existing sites, or formed the basis for later expansion. The presence of the elite (secular and religious), also carried influence, but this could be a case of their residences requiring extra space to house the population of their hall or religious foundation.
Urban populations and associations, Charles West
This wasn't a bad paper, but the discussion wasn't easy to divide up into pre and post conquest, hence the Anglo-Saxon sections didn't jump out. There was plenty of good stuff in here, but not enough on Anglo-Saxon Gilds to really grab me.
Part 4
Invasion and Migration, Elizabeth van Houts
There doesn't seem to be many papers that deal with migration, whereas plenty of books have been written on invasions. It would have been nice to have learnt more about migration. However, apart from it being an elite endeavour, with exile forming a portion of it, this didn't really get down to the level of detail that I'd have liked. The same can be said of the mention of Anglo-Saxons who went East after Hastings – this was only 2-3 lines.
Ethnicity and Acculturation, DM Hadley
This opened by discussing the historiography of the topic before it went on to look at how the Danes acculturated quite quickly. Although there are many -by place-names, the archaeological finds in these areas strongly suggest a hybrid culture. Hadley then discusses the processes of acculturation, with the church (and being seen to honour the English church) being one route, whilst co-opting the English elite (or by) was another.
Intermarriage, E Van Houts
I found this one hard to get into. It mostly dealt with the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, although marriages after Cnut's take over did feature.
The Jews, Anna Sapir Abulafia
This was very much a post 1066 paper and although it was interesting and well written, it was focussed on a period beyond the one that I'm interested in.
Part 5
Religion and Belief, Carl Watkins
This paper took in the rise of papal authority, the regularising of practice, penance, afterlife, the rise of monasticism and much more. It was a good general survey, but unfortunately didn't separate out the pre-1066 history from the post, hence it always felt like a bit of a turn up when something Anglo-Saxon was mentioned.
Rites of passage and pastoral care, Sarah Hamilton
This was pleasantly longer than many of the other (non-introductory) papers and so you could get your teeth into it more. Hamilton pointed out that the ideal picture of pastoral care and observation of rites was much more messy on the ground. Despite this, there was a real investment in the infrastructure of faith, not only books, but especially assets that marked rites of passage, such as baptismal fonts and church cemeteries. Hamilton mislabelled Archbishop Wulfstan II as the I, who was in many ways a much more interesting figure.
Saints and Cults, Paul Anthony Hayward
This was a cracking paper. Hayward shows that interest in the cults of saints came and went in waves. It was not usually driven by financial ambition, as texts were produced in Latin, the areas around shrines weren't built for mass traffic (but for elite veneration by the clergy) and much of the literature made a point about the favour of the saint not being for sale, but only going to the devout. Instead saints were usually the subject of benign neglect until they were used as authority to either support or reject changes, such as those introduced by Bishop Aethelwold, who was prominent in reforming houses. His promotion of St Swithun and the miracles associated with him, gave support for his programme of reform.
Public Spectacle, Tom Licence
This was quite a densely written paper that squeezed a lot into its space. Although it took in executions, popular plays and so on, I found the section on translations of saints' relics the most interesting element.
Textual Communities (Latin), Teresa Webber
This was pretty interesting and as a bonus, it is divided into historical eras, so that you can find all that you want pretty easily. It deals with liturgy, saints lives and Latin learning, discussing the curriculum and levels of learning in England.
Textual Communities (vernacular), Elaine Treharne
Although I initially found this to be heavier going than some of the papers, it was a good read. In the 10 pages allotted, Treharne covered a lot of ground, including learning, the use and survival of vernacular texts. She demonstrates the wide variety of what we have and makes you wish that there were more survivals. Especially from the North.
Part 6
Learning and Training, Julia Crick
This was a paper that was both thorough going and nice to read. Crick discussed both formal learning in monastic or court schools and informal training, mostly through watching others. It was fascinating to read the implied on the job practical training for medical types, which can be inferred from the medical texts not covering the basics and assuming a level of expertise from the student prior to reading.
Information and its retrieval, Nicholas Karn
This felt a little bit technical to begin with, but soon got into its stride. Karn went into oral and written methods of retaining data, as well as talking about chance survivals and the possible amount of what hasn't come down to us.
Esoteric Knowledge, Andy Orchard
This was an engagingly written paper. Esoteric can cover a lot of unusual stuff and you certainly got your money's worth here. A lot of it was pre-900, but it was no worse off for including Bede and Aldhelm, who sounds like he'd have been much more lively at a party. The only thing I wasn't keen on was the repetition (like van Houts) of the late story of Sweyn's sister being bumped off during the St Brice's Day massacre.
Medical practice and theory, Carole Rawcliffe
Another interesting paper. Rawcliffe shows that Anglo-Saxon medical practice was practical, with some of the apparently magical advice, such as gathering vervain on Midsummer's Day, being quite sensible as this is when it begins to flower and is at its freshest and most useful. She points out that the 'magical' side has often been concentrated on at the expense of the practical, with Cameron having identified 130 of the 186 plants listed in the Old English Herbarium as still in medical use today.
Subversion, Martha Bayless
This could have been titled the Medieval sense of humour. Bayless shows that although there were people who believed that decorum was all important (mostly churchmen, but that could just be a result of source survival bias), there were plenty of people happy to make a joke or find a quip. I rather suspect that if Scott Bennett (if you've never seen him, look him up) were to go back in time, he'd still make a good living as a comedian. He'd probably get booked by many of the monasteries.
This book was a chance find in Waterstones; a useful book on this period, amidst the more questionable ones on the shelves. Whilst it is not a beginner's book, it is one that anyone not that au-fait with aspects of the later period would benefit from reading. It provides some great overviews to the topics covered. The format is that each part begins with a a full length paper that discusses the main points and this is then followed by shorter, but more specialist entries. The papers are mostly descriptive, without anyone having the space to argue much in the way of a new point, but whilst that made it difficult to review, short of saying what they contained, it does give a good spread of knowledge in a large number of areas.
Part 1
Land use and People, Robin Fleming,
This was a thoroughly enjoyable paper that concentrated on how the land affected the people and how they made the most of the land. There's lots of interesting facts in here and in 23 pages Fleming managed to articulate a heck of a lot.
Water and Land, Stephen Rippon
This was a very short, but also very interesting paper. It took in fens, watermills, canals and the perception of wetlands. The section on marsh reclamation was great, with Rippon showing how they were a worked landscape during the Roman period, but as the drainage ditches and flood defences fell into disrepair they then had to be reclaimed anew. It would have been nice if this paper had been longer, as it felt all too brief.
Forest and Upland, Oliver Rackham
This was another short but sweet paper that looked at the recording of woods and their use, prior to a very short examination of upland areas. Really little more than an overview, but good to read all the same.
Mineral Resources, Peter Claughton
This paper focussed on salt, iron, lead and silver production plus building stone. Salt production persisted from the Roman period all the way through, but the others only resumed with the rise of something beyond a subsistence economy in the middle Saxon period and in some instances also after easily scavenged Roman production was no longer available. Like so many other entries so far in this book, this was short and just made me want to know more.
Health and Disease, Carole Rawcliffe
This was a thoroughly depressing paper to read. It described how poor nutrition, poor hygiene, dangerous working conditions, inadequate housing and so on all combined in a perfect storm of unpleasantness. It properly put me off eating my snap. Whilst it made for grim reading, Rawcliffe really brought home to you the precariousness of life and health in Anglo-Saxon England.
Part 2
Authority and Community Bruce O'Brien
This was an enjoyable wide-ranging introduction to the main aspects concerning where authority and community interacted. It took in the creation of law and its operation at a local level, with comments on how lordship and family loyalties were affected by this.
Lordship and Labour, Stephen Baxter
This was a thorough paper that discussed the rise and rise of the nobility and the decline of the peasantry. It takes into account the growth in the number of peasants and the much smaller increase in land under cultivation, making the point that this led to smaller peasant holdings and an increase in dependency upon often predatory lords.
Order and Justice, John Hudson
A short paper that was split between the disorder of King Stephen's reign and that of Æthelræd II It took in quite a bit and provided much more detail than you'd expect over so few pages.
War and Violence, John Hudson
This paper took in chivalry, armies, battle tactics, sieges and other forms of violence such as ravaging and feuds. It was quite disappointing to see the old chestnut about Anglo-Saxons arriving at battles on horseback and fighting on foot.
Family, marriage and kinship, Elizabeth Van Houts
This was a very good paper, where I learnt quite a bit about the female and domestic side of the era. It discusses the importance of kin in assisting with legal issues and the decline in the importance of wider kin in contrast to commendatory lordship. However, the most interesting section dealt with the wills of women and re-marriage.
Poor and Powerless, David Pelteret
This paper mostly concerned slaves and if you wish to read more, then Pelteret's full book will be for you. In addition to the reduction in slavery (and why), there is a brief examination of possible reasons behind financial ruin, and alternative solutions, such as prostitution and crime. It closes with a look at charity from the powerful to the powerless.
Part 3
Towns and their hinterlands, David Griffiths
This has a useful definition of a town by the late Susan Reynolds and I think that whatever terminology we may use, the Anglo-Saxons would have known a town when they saw one. This covers the rise of towns, nucleation, changing agricultural practices and much more besides. One sentence in this paper contained two surprising errors. 855 being given for the Mycel Here arriving and Kent being a satellite of Mercia at this point. Otherwise, this was a good review of where we stand on the topic of towns and their hinterlands.
Commerce and Markets, Richard Britnell
This paper took a cautious view of what can be inferred about early markets. It opens by examining the situation in 900 and then shows developments (where they can be evidenced) up to 1200. It takes in increasing royal control and formalisation as well as the amount of coinage in circulation.
Urban Planning, Julia Barrow
Barrow shows that whilst an urban settlement could come from different nuclei, fortifications were often important, but not always for their primary purpose. Instead, they presented an opportunity to redevelop existing sites, or formed the basis for later expansion. The presence of the elite (secular and religious), also carried influence, but this could be a case of their residences requiring extra space to house the population of their hall or religious foundation.
Urban populations and associations, Charles West
This wasn't a bad paper, but the discussion wasn't easy to divide up into pre and post conquest, hence the Anglo-Saxon sections didn't jump out. There was plenty of good stuff in here, but not enough on Anglo-Saxon Gilds to really grab me.
Part 4
Invasion and Migration, Elizabeth van Houts
There doesn't seem to be many papers that deal with migration, whereas plenty of books have been written on invasions. It would have been nice to have learnt more about migration. However, apart from it being an elite endeavour, with exile forming a portion of it, this didn't really get down to the level of detail that I'd have liked. The same can be said of the mention of Anglo-Saxons who went East after Hastings – this was only 2-3 lines.
Ethnicity and Acculturation, DM Hadley
This opened by discussing the historiography of the topic before it went on to look at how the Danes acculturated quite quickly. Although there are many -by place-names, the archaeological finds in these areas strongly suggest a hybrid culture. Hadley then discusses the processes of acculturation, with the church (and being seen to honour the English church) being one route, whilst co-opting the English elite (or by) was another.
Intermarriage, E Van Houts
I found this one hard to get into. It mostly dealt with the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, although marriages after Cnut's take over did feature.
The Jews, Anna Sapir Abulafia
This was very much a post 1066 paper and although it was interesting and well written, it was focussed on a period beyond the one that I'm interested in.
Part 5
Religion and Belief, Carl Watkins
This paper took in the rise of papal authority, the regularising of practice, penance, afterlife, the rise of monasticism and much more. It was a good general survey, but unfortunately didn't separate out the pre-1066 history from the post, hence it always felt like a bit of a turn up when something Anglo-Saxon was mentioned.
Rites of passage and pastoral care, Sarah Hamilton
This was pleasantly longer than many of the other (non-introductory) papers and so you could get your teeth into it more. Hamilton pointed out that the ideal picture of pastoral care and observation of rites was much more messy on the ground. Despite this, there was a real investment in the infrastructure of faith, not only books, but especially assets that marked rites of passage, such as baptismal fonts and church cemeteries. Hamilton mislabelled Archbishop Wulfstan II as the I, who was in many ways a much more interesting figure.
Saints and Cults, Paul Anthony Hayward
This was a cracking paper. Hayward shows that interest in the cults of saints came and went in waves. It was not usually driven by financial ambition, as texts were produced in Latin, the areas around shrines weren't built for mass traffic (but for elite veneration by the clergy) and much of the literature made a point about the favour of the saint not being for sale, but only going to the devout. Instead saints were usually the subject of benign neglect until they were used as authority to either support or reject changes, such as those introduced by Bishop Aethelwold, who was prominent in reforming houses. His promotion of St Swithun and the miracles associated with him, gave support for his programme of reform.
Public Spectacle, Tom Licence
This was quite a densely written paper that squeezed a lot into its space. Although it took in executions, popular plays and so on, I found the section on translations of saints' relics the most interesting element.
Textual Communities (Latin), Teresa Webber
This was pretty interesting and as a bonus, it is divided into historical eras, so that you can find all that you want pretty easily. It deals with liturgy, saints lives and Latin learning, discussing the curriculum and levels of learning in England.
Textual Communities (vernacular), Elaine Treharne
Although I initially found this to be heavier going than some of the papers, it was a good read. In the 10 pages allotted, Treharne covered a lot of ground, including learning, the use and survival of vernacular texts. She demonstrates the wide variety of what we have and makes you wish that there were more survivals. Especially from the North.
Part 6
Learning and Training, Julia Crick
This was a paper that was both thorough going and nice to read. Crick discussed both formal learning in monastic or court schools and informal training, mostly through watching others. It was fascinating to read the implied on the job practical training for medical types, which can be inferred from the medical texts not covering the basics and assuming a level of expertise from the student prior to reading.
Information and its retrieval, Nicholas Karn
This felt a little bit technical to begin with, but soon got into its stride. Karn went into oral and written methods of retaining data, as well as talking about chance survivals and the possible amount of what hasn't come down to us.
Esoteric Knowledge, Andy Orchard
This was an engagingly written paper. Esoteric can cover a lot of unusual stuff and you certainly got your money's worth here. A lot of it was pre-900, but it was no worse off for including Bede and Aldhelm, who sounds like he'd have been much more lively at a party. The only thing I wasn't keen on was the repetition (like van Houts) of the late story of Sweyn's sister being bumped off during the St Brice's Day massacre.
Medical practice and theory, Carole Rawcliffe
Another interesting paper. Rawcliffe shows that Anglo-Saxon medical practice was practical, with some of the apparently magical advice, such as gathering vervain on Midsummer's Day, being quite sensible as this is when it begins to flower and is at its freshest and most useful. She points out that the 'magical' side has often been concentrated on at the expense of the practical, with Cameron having identified 130 of the 186 plants listed in the Old English Herbarium as still in medical use today.
Subversion, Martha Bayless
This could have been titled the Medieval sense of humour. Bayless shows that although there were people who believed that decorum was all important (mostly churchmen, but that could just be a result of source survival bias), there were plenty of people happy to make a joke or find a quip. I rather suspect that if Scott Bennett (if you've never seen him, look him up) were to go back in time, he'd still make a good living as a comedian. He'd probably get booked by many of the monasteries.
December 12, 2018
A Social History of England
Edited by Crick & Van
Read it in Mass Market Paper-Back at 454 pages including maps, index, time-line, and further reading.
This was given to me in a Reddit Medieval Exchange, some time ago. It's actually a collection of papers from a series of writers/historians, each covering a topic or at least arranged to cover specific things/themes that are broken up more granularly into sub-sections also written by a multitude of contributors.
The Sections:
Land Use and People
Authority and Community
Towns and their Hinterlands
Invasion and Migration
Religion and Belief
Learning and Training
Certainly useful and interesting but not critical. Most of this information can be found in other periodic pieces but it does get into some granular and interesting things within each of the more focused sub-sections.
Edited by Crick & Van
Read it in Mass Market Paper-Back at 454 pages including maps, index, time-line, and further reading.
This was given to me in a Reddit Medieval Exchange, some time ago. It's actually a collection of papers from a series of writers/historians, each covering a topic or at least arranged to cover specific things/themes that are broken up more granularly into sub-sections also written by a multitude of contributors.
The Sections:
Land Use and People
Authority and Community
Towns and their Hinterlands
Invasion and Migration
Religion and Belief
Learning and Training
Certainly useful and interesting but not critical. Most of this information can be found in other periodic pieces but it does get into some granular and interesting things within each of the more focused sub-sections.
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