Description
A radical rethinking of the Anglo-Saxon world that draws on the latest archaeological discoveries
This beautifully illustrated book draws on the latest archaeological discoveries to present a radical reappraisal of the Anglo-Saxon built environment and its inhabitants. John Blair, one of the world's leading experts on this transformative era in England's early history, explains the origins of towns, manor houses, and castles in a completely new way, and sheds new light on the important functions of buildings and settlements in shaping people's lives during the age of the Venerable Bede and King Alfred.
Building Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates how hundreds of recent excavations enable us to grasp for the first time how regionally diverse the built environment of the Anglo-Saxons truly was. Blair identifies a zone of eastern England with access to the North Sea whose economy, prosperity, and timber buildings had more in common with the Low Countries and Scandinavia than the rest of England. The origins of villages and their field systems emerge with a new clarity, as does the royal administrative organization of the kingdom of Mercia, which dominated central England for two centuries.
Featuring a wealth of color illustrations throughout, Building Anglo-Saxon England explores how the natural landscape was modified to accommodate human activity, and how many settlements--secular and religious—were laid out with geometrical precisi
Chapter
Visible and Invisible Building Cultures: What Did Houses Really Look Like?
In the Glare of the Headlamps: Pottery, Wooden Vessels, and the Distortions of Survival
Order in the Built Environment: Monuments, Planning, and Linear Modules
A Regional Framework for This Book
A Chronological Framework for This Book
Chapter 3: Landscapes of the Mind: The Built Environment in the Anglo-Saxon Consciousness
Houses for Immortals: Unseen Residents in a Conceptual Landscape
Houses for the Living: Life Cycles in Timber and the Transience of Earthly Dwellings
Living with the Supernatural: Ritual Space in the Homestead
Houses for Eternity: Monumentalising the Sacred in the Landscape
A Mediterranean Religion in a Northern World: Two Cultures or One?
Earth Moving and Ideology
PART II: The First Transformation, circa 600–700
Chapter 4: Landscapes of Power and Wealth
Centres and Peripheries: Royal Residence and Recreation
The Mobile Environment of Royal Life
The Background and Context of Seventh-Century Elite Sites
The Great Hall Complexes: A Mode of Ostentatious Display
The Great Hall Complexes: Local Territorial Contexts
The Monasticisation of Royal Sites and the Era of Monastic Supremacy
Retrospect: Gain and Loss in an Age of Transformations
Chapter 5: The Construction of Settlement: Rural and Commercial Spaces
‘Wandering Settlement’ or ‘Static Development’? Form and Regionality in English Settlements before 650
Circular Space: Concentrically Defined Zones and Radial Planning in the Insular Tradition
Rectilinear Space: Gromatic Surveying and Grid-Planning
The Seventh-Century Settlement Revolution: Organisation and Enclosure
Grid-Planning in East Midland Settlements: The Diffusion of a Monastic Mode?
Urbanism in a Nonurban World: Holy Cities and Commercial Cities
The Major Emporia before 700
Why Did So Much Change in the Seventh Century?
PART III: Consolidation, circa 700–920
Chapter 6: Landscape Organisation and Economy in the Mercian Age
Royal Ambitions and Monastic Assets: Compromise, Reform, and Predation in the Age of King Æthelbald
Infrastructure: Linear Earthworks
Functional Place Names in -tūn: A World of Central Clusters, Not Complex Centres
Mercian Centres and burh-tūnas: Eight Case Studies
Mercian Territorial Organisation: Routes, Frontiers, and the Control of Kent
Parallel Arrangements in Wessex
Parallel Arrangements in Northumbria
The Fruits of a Developed Infrastructure: Mercia’s Golden Age, 780–820
Chapter 7: Defence, Industry, and Commerce: From Central Clusters to Complex Centres
The ‘Burghal’ Problem: The Tyranny of a Construct
Reoccupied Iron Age Forts and Roman Towns
Minor Earthwork Enclosures
Major Formally Planned Defended Sites
Intensification at the Grass Roots: Production, Processing, and Manufacture in the Rural Landscape
Varieties of wīc: The Emporia and Beyond
Centres and wīc-type Peripheries in Polyfocal Clusters: Two Alternative Outcomes
A Precocious Urban Axis: London, Rochester, and Canterbury
Regrouping and Concentration, circa 850–920
Continuities: Trade, Production, and the Vikings
Chapter 8: Rural Settlement and the ‘Making of the English Village’
Continuities and the Later Ninth Century: Rural Settlement Submerged?
The Components of Settlement: Buildings, Groups of Buildings, and the Elusiveness of Great Halls
Rural Settlements, circa 700–920: The Evidence
Interpreting Semi-Nucleations: Settlement Structure in an ‘Infield-Outfield’ Economy
Evolution or Design? Lordly and Spiritual Power within the Village
Spanning the ‘Viking Age’
PART IV: The Second Transformation, 920–1000
Chapter 9: Growth and Reconstruction: The Human Landscape Remodelled
Intensification at All Levels: The Mid-Tenth- Century Watershed
Gridded and Non-Gridded Settlements in the Eastern Zone and Beyond
Spreading Southwestward: The Expanding Zone of Visible Settlement
Arable Intensification, Open Fields, and the Shift to Heavier Soils
Countryside and Town: A New Dichotomy
Major Urban Places: The Formation of Townscapes and the Definition of House Plots
Minor Urban Places: The Enduring Substratum of Markets and Minsters
Chapter 10: Free Farmers and Emergent Lords: Towards the Manorial Landscape
Differentiation and Complexity in Houses
Differentiation and Complexity in Domestic Compounds
Coexistent Halls: The Relatives Next Door?
Boundaries, Enclosures, and Gates: The ‘Burhgeat’ Problem Revisited
Who Was Then the Gentleman?
PART V: Beyond Anglo-Saxon Landscapes
Chapter 11: The Eleventh Century: A New Built Environment
Churches and the ‘Romanesque Revolution’
Rural Communities and Settlements
Illustration Sources and Credits
Building Anglo-Saxon England
Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.
