Regional identities Angles and Saxons?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The West ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Southern Scandinavia ◽  
Burial Rites

Writing in the early eighth century, Bede described how three separate peoples— the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—had settled in Britain some three hundred years earlier, and ever since the genesis of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ scholarship in the nineteenth century archaeologists have sought to identify discrete areas of Anglian, Saxon, and Jutish settlement (e.g. Leeds 1912; 1936; 1945; Fox 1923, 284–95). The identification of these peoples was based upon different artefact styles and burial rites, with most attention being paid to brooches. The degree of variation in the composition of brooch assemblages across eastern England is shown in Table 9.1. Cruciform brooches with cast side knobs, for example, were thought to have been ‘Anglian’, and saucer brooches ‘Saxon’ (although even in the early twentieth century Leeds (1912) had started to doubt the attribution of applied brooches to the West Saxons). In recent years, however, this traditional ‘culturehistorical’ approach towards interpreting the archaeological record has been questioned, as it is now recognized that, rather than being imported from mainland Europe during the early to mid fifth century, regional differences in artefact assemblages emerged over the course of the late fifth to late sixth centuries (e.g. Hines 1984; 1999; Hilund Nielsen 1995; Lucy 2000; Owen- Crocker 2004; 2011; Penn and Brugmann 2007; Walton Rogers 2007; Brugmann 2011; Dickinson 2011; Hills 2011). In early to mid fifth-century England, in contrast, it now appears that Germanic material culture was in fact relatively homogeneous, with objects typical of ‘Saxon’ areas on the continent being found in so-called ‘Anglian’ areas of England, and vice versa. The earliest material from East Anglia, for example—equal-arm, supporting-arm, and early cruciform brooches—are most closely paralleled in the Lower Elbe region of Saxony, with the distinctive ‘Anglian’ identity of EastAnglia onlyemerging through later contact with southern Scandinavia (Hines 1984; Carver 1989, 147, 152; Hills and Lucy 2013, 38–9). Indeed, many elements of the classic suite of early Anglo-Saxon material culture actually developed within Britain as opposed to having been created on the continent (Hills 2003, 104–7; Owen-Crocker 2004, 13), with new identities beingmade in Britain rather than being imported frommainland Europe (Hills 2011, 10).

The native British

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
Archaeological Investigation ◽  
Farming Communities ◽  
Southern Scandinavia ◽  
New Settlements

By the fourth century AD, the landscape of Roman Britain was densely settled and archaeological surveys and excavations have consistently shown that most lowland areas supported farming communities, including on the heavier claylands (Smith et al. 2016). Thereafter the character of the archaeological record changes dramatically with the appearance of settlements, cemeteries, and material culture whose ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural affinities lay in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia (Chapters 8–9). All too often, however, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England is discussed in a way that implies that settlements characterized by Grubenhäuser and cemeteries furnished with Germanic grave goods were characteristic of the whole of eastern England (e.g. Welch 1992; Lucy 2000; Tipper 2004; Hamerow 2012), whereas detailed local studies have suggested that this was not the case. In areas such as Sussex (Welch 1983) and Lincolnshire (Green 2012) evidence for Anglo-Saxon colonization has only been found in certain parts of the landscape, and the potential reasons for ‘blank’ spots in the distribution of Anglo-Saxon settlement are complex: they may in part simply reflect areas where there has been less archaeological investigation, or that these areas were unattractive for settlement. There is, however, another possibility: that these distributions are not a record of where people were and were not living, but a reflection of how the cultural identity of early medieval communities varied from area to area, and that some of these identities are archaeologically less visible than others. There has long been speculation that at least some of the ‘blank areas’ in the distributions of Anglo-Saxon settlements and cemeteries reflect the places where native British populations remained in control of the landscape. West (1985, 168), for example, noted the lack of early Anglo-Saxon settlement on the East Anglian claylands, and speculated that this is where a substantial Romano- British population remained: ‘did they survive somehow, perhaps in a basically aceramic condition, or were they, in the main, drawn to the new settlements on the lighter soils to become slaves or some subordinate stratum of society, as indicated by later documentary evidence, or was the population drastically reduced by pestilence or genocide?’ (West 1985, 168).

‘He’ll latin-runes tellan in his horror-coat standing’

2021 ◽  
pp. 170-208
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Contested Space

Chapter 4 focuses on the area across the east coast of Britain first thought to have been settled by post-Roman migrants, that of the East Anglian and Lincolnshire fenland, and the exploration of this contested space in ‘Angle-Land’. In the part of ‘Angle-Land’ focused on the fen Jones engages in a poetic search for the lost Britons of the early medieval fen by reading the eighth-century Anglo-Latin Vita Sancti Guthlaci Auctore Felice alongside recent archaeological finds from Caistor-by-Norwich. This chapter proposes that this search ultimately questions the extent of the foreignness of the Welsh in this supposedly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ space, allowing Jones to reimagine Guthlac as an Anglo-Welsh saint and to create a new macaronic language for twentieth-century Britain.

Kingdoms and regiones: The documentary evidence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon
Keyword(s):  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
The South ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Early Medieval Period ◽  
East Midlands

During the early medieval period eastern England was occupied by two major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms—the East Saxons and East Angles—alongside a region that Bede referred to as ‘Middle Anglia’. There has been a widespread assumption that Essex (‘the East Saxons’) and Suffolk and Norfolk (the ‘South Folk’ and ‘North Folk’ of East Anglia) were direct successors to these Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (e.g. Carver 1989, fig. 10.1; 2005, 498; Yorke 1990, 46, 61; Warner 1996, 4, plate 1; Pestell 2004, 12; Chester-Kadwell 2009, 46; Kemble 2012, 8; Gascoyne and Radford 2013, 176; Reynolds 2013, fig. 4), which would imply a strong degree of territorial continuity from at least the early medieval period through to the present day. There is, however, a recognition in the Regional Research Framework that regional differences within early medieval society across eastern England have seen little investigation (Medlycott 2011b, 58), something that the following chapters hope to address. This chapter will explore the documentary evidence for these early medieval kingdoms and their relationship to later counties, before turning to the archaeological evidence for Anglo- Saxon immigrants and their relationship to the native British population in Chapters 8–10. The clear differences between the Northern Thames Basin, East Anglia, and the South East Midlands that are still evident during the seventh to ninth centuries are outlined in Chapter 11. Finally, Chapter 12 explores the boundaries of the early medieval kingdoms, and in particular the series of dykes constructed in south-eastern Cambridgeshire.Table 7.1 provides a timeline of key historical dates for early medieval England, and key developments within the archaeological record. The earliest list of territorial entities is the Tribal Hidage. The original document has been lost—it only survives in a variety of later forms—but it is thought to have been written between the mid seventh and the ninth centuries (Hart 1970; 1977; Davies and Vierck 1974, 224–7; Yorke 1990, 10; Blair 1991, 8; 1999; Harrington and Welch 2014, 1). The Tribal Hidage lists at least thirteen peoples in and around eastern England, some of whom clearly occupied quite extensive areas, such as the East Angles (assessed as 30,000 hides), East Saxons (7,000 hides), and the Cilternsætna (4,000 hides).

Creating the cloud-tent-ship conceit in Exodus

2011 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 103-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miranda Wilcox
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Old English ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
God's People ◽  
Pastoral Relationship ◽  
Interpretative Framework

AbstractThe enigmatic description of the columna nubis in lines 71b–92 of the Old English Exodus juxtaposes images of substances that shield God's people from their hostile environment; understanding the relations among these protective coverings requires cultural and literary knowledge not explicitly articulated in Exodus. Metaphors and typologies developed in Arator's sixth-century Historia apostolica and subsequently conventionalized in Bede's eighth-century Expositio actuum Apostolorum, texts used in the Anglo-Saxon monastic curriculum, provide an interpretative framework for the complicated accretion of images in Exodus. Using insights about metaphorical processing from cognitive science, this article argues that the Exodus-poet crafted a sophisticated tripartite conceit to generate a pastoral relationship with his audience, first by adapting metaphoric mappings from Arator and Bede and then by extending their domains with culturally specific entailments about how ships and tents functioned as protective covers in Anglo-Saxon material culture.

One British Thing: A Fifth-Century Ceramic Beaker

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-178
Author(s):  
Robin Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon

AbstractA post-Roman folded beaker allows us to see traditional Romano-British material culture and material practices continuing into the fifth century and helps us understand the problem of the blanket labeling of all objects made after ca. 400 as “Anglo-Saxon.”

Britain and Ireland, 100–700 CE

2019 ◽  
pp. 601-622
Author(s):  
David Petts
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Burial Rites ◽  
Stone Carving ◽  
Church Structures ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reviews the evidence for the archaeology of early Christianity in Britain and Ireland. Here, the church had its origins in the areas that lay within the Roman Empire in the fourth century but rapidly expanded north and west in the early fifth century following the end of Roman rule. The evidence for church structures is limited and often ambiguous, with securely identifiable sites not appearing to any extent until the seventh century. There is a range of material culture that can be linked to the early church from the fourth to the seventh centuries; in particular, there are strong traditions of epigraphy and increasingly decorative stone carving from most areas. The conversion to Christianity also impacted burial rites, although the relationship between belief and mortuary traditions is not a simple one.

The Early Medieval Textiles at Maaseik, Belgium

1985 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mildred Budny ◽  
Dominic Tweddle
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The West ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article offers an account of the components, the structure and the history of the so-calledcasulaandvelaminaof Sts Harlindis and Relindis preserved at the Church of St Catherine at Maaseik in Belgium as relics of the two sisters who founded the nearby abbey of Aldeneik (where the textiles were kept throughout the Middle Ages). The compositecasulaof Sts Harlindis and Relindis includes the earliest surviving group of Anglo-Saxon embroideries, dating to the late eighth century or the early ninth. Probably similarly Anglo-Saxon, a set of silk tablet-woven braids brocaded with gold associated with the embroideries offers a missing link in the surviving corpus of Anglo-Saxon braids. The ‘David silk’ with its Latin inscription and distinctly western European design dating from the eighth century or the early ninth offers a rare witness to the art of silk-weaving in the West at so early a date. Thevelamenof St Harlindis, more or less intact, represents a remarkable early medieval vestment, garment or cloth made up of two types of woven silk cloths, tablet-woven braids brocaded with gold, gilded copper bosses, pearls and beads. Thevelamenof St Relindis, in contrast, represents the stripped remains—reduced to the lining and the fringed ends—of another composite textile. Originally it was probably luxurious, so as to match the two other composite early medieval textile relics from Aldeneik. As a whole, the group contributes greatly to knowledge of early medieval textiles of various kinds.

scholarly journals Typhoeus and Etna in Hesiod, Pindar, and (Pseudo-)Aeschylus

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Currie
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Mount Etna ◽  
The West ◽  
Prometheus Bound ◽  
Canonical Status

This paper discusses the suspected reading †ἀïδνῆς in Hes. Theog. 860 and proposes the emendation οὔρεος ἐν βήσσῃς, <ε>ἰν Αἴτνῃ παιπαλοέσσῃ. The interpretative consequences of thus introducing into the text a reference to Mount Etna are then explored. The immediately following passage, ll. 861-867, is reinterpreted in the light of a preceding reference to the Sicilian volcano. Not only Hesiod, but also Homer is argued to have knowledge of volcanism. Hesiod’s simple, unelaborated reference to Typhoeus’ defeat at Mount Etna implies that the association of Typhoeus with Mount Etna was made by Greeks before Hesiod; it can plausibly be connected to Greek colonising or proto-colonising activity in the eighth century BCE. The Typhonomachy would be only one of several mythological episodes in early Greek hexameter poetry to be localised in the West. Finally, the arguable presence of the Typhoeus-Etna link in Hesiod’s Theogony significantly increases the likelihood that the closely related descriptions of Typhoeus in passages of Pindar (from Pyth. 1, Pyth. 8, Ol. 4, and frr. 92-3 Maehler) and the (Pseudo-)Aeschylean Prometheus Bound do not depend on each other, but on a lost early hexameter account of the Typhonomachy (perhaps, but not necessarily, the Cyclical Titanomachy) that had attained canonical status by the fifth century BCE. Thus also one popular argument for a late dating of the Prometheus Bound, and for its non-Aeschylean authorship, would need to be discarded.

scholarly journals Chance and Necessity in Zhu Xi's Conceptions of Heaven and Tradition

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-162
Author(s):  
Joseph Adler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Biblical Theology ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Confucian Tradition ◽  
Unique Combination ◽  
The West ◽  
Confucian Thought ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Discussion of the relationship between chance and necessity in the West goes back at least to Democritus in the fifth century  BCE , and was highlighted again in the twentieth century by Jacques Monod in Chance and Necessity. Monod contrasted “teleonomic” (directional but not directed) biological evolution with “teleologic” (purpose-driven) Biblical theology. This article uses that distinction in examining Zhu Xi’s concepts of Heaven (in particular the “mandate” or “givenness” of Heaven) and tradition (focusing on the normative Confucian tradition, the “succession of the Way” or daotong). The result sheds light on the unique combination of rationality and transcendence in Neo-Confucian thought.

The boundaries of early medieval kingship

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Knock Out ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Economic Zones

In the past the study of early medieval kingdoms has mostly been a singledisciplinary activity based upon the extremely limited documentary sources, with boundaries back-projected from much later evidence (e.g. Bailey 1989, fig. 8.1). What is presented in this study, in contrast, is an attempt to have a more archaeologically and landscape-based discussion that includes using the distributions of cultural indicators such as artefact types, architectural forms, burial practices, and the locations of particular sites that appear to have been positioned in liminal locations. Three phases in the development of these kingdoms can be distinguished: • The fifth to sixth centuries (emergent kingdoms): the period of Grubenhäuser and Anglo-Saxon burials associated with a suite of material culture showing marked regional affinities. Anglo-Saxon kingdoms existed by the end of this period, and a broad consensus has emerged that they were formed through the amalgamation of a series of smaller regiones (e.g. Arnold 1988; Bassett 1989a; Yorke 1990; Scull 1993; 1999; Harrington and Welch 2014). This model—which Bassett (1989b) has compared to a football knock-out competition—is, however, based largely upon the fragmentary and very partial documentary record (see Chapter 7), and it does not explain the close correspondence of the boundaries between the fifth- to sixth-century socio-economic zones spheres identified here and those of the Iron Age and Roman periods. • The seventh and eighth centuries (mature kingdoms): a new suite of material culture (e.g. East Anglian and East Saxon coinage, and Ipswich Ware) whose circulation in part appears to have been restricted to the polities within which they were produced. The authority of the East Saxon kings had started to decline during the latter part of this period, although East Anglia survived. • The ninth century (the declining kingdoms): the East Saxon kingdom virtually disappeared and become a territory within Wessex. The distributions of later eighth- and ninth-century inscribed coinage, and distinctive artefact types such as silver wire inlaid strap ends, suggest that the East Anglian socio-economic sphere, and the kingdom that was based upon it, survived within the same boundaries that had emerged by the fifth and sixth centuries until it was overrun by the Danes in the 870s.

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