Living Near the Sea: The Organisation of Frisia in Early Medieval Times

2019 ◽  
pp. 369-391
Author(s):  
Egge Knol
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
General Picture ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Sea

Across the North Sea from England was a land that was known in the early Middle Ages, as part of it is today, as Frisia. This largely marshy land was a good place to live for those who managed to adjust to its potentially extreme but fertile habitat. Despite many archaeological observations and finds, our view of their social organisation is not very clear, and in part derived from better-documented parallels elsewhere. This chapter will first briefly describe the former landscape and its archaeological record, before dealing with the organisation of Frisia. Its focus will be on the northern part of Frisia. The aim of the chapter is to offer a general picture, based on recent research, of this country oriented towards the North Sea and its maintaining of close links to early medieval England.

Maritime and River Traders, Landing Places, and Emporia Ports in the Merovingian Period in and Around the Low Countries

2020 ◽  
pp. 763-796
Author(s):  
Dries Tys
Keyword(s):  
North Sea ◽  
Institutional Economics ◽  
New Institutional Economics ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Sea

The origin, rise, and dynamics of coastal trade and landing places in the North Sea area between the sixth and eighth centuries must be understood in relation to how coastal regions and seascapes acted as arenas of contact, dialogue, and transition. Although the free coastal societies of the early medieval period were involved in regional to interregional or long-distance trade networks, their economic agency must be understood from a bottom-up perspective. That is, their reproduction strategies must be studied in their own right, independent from any teleological construction about the development of trade, markets, or towns for that matter. This means that the early medieval coastal networks of exchange were much more complex and diverse than advocated by the simple emporium network model, which connected the major archaeological sites along the North Sea coast. Instead, coastal and riverine dwellers often possessed some form of free status and large degrees of autonomy, in part due to the specific environmental conditions of the landscapes in which they dwelled. The wide estuarine region of the Low Countries, between coastal Flanders in the south and Friesland in the north, a region with vast hinterlands and a central position in northwestern Europe, makes these developments particularly clear. This chapter thus pushes back against longstanding assumptions in scholarly research, which include overemphasis of the influence of large landowners over peasant economies, and on the prioritization of easily retrievable luxuries over less visible indicators of bulk trade (such as wood, wool, and more), gift exchange, and market trade. The approach used here demonstrates that well-known emporia or larger ports of trade were embedded in the economic activities and networks of their respective hinterlands. Early medieval coastal societies and their dynamics are thus better understood from the perspective of integrated governance and economy (“new institutional economics”) in a regional setting.

Ethnic Identity and the Archaeology of the aduentus Saxonum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Harland
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
Roman World ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
Alternative Understanding

For centuries, archaeologists have excavated the soils of Britain to uncover finds from the early medieval past. These finds have been used to reconstruct the alleged communities, migration patterns, and expressions of identity of coherent groups who can be regarded as ethnic 'Anglo-Saxons'. Even in the modern day, when social constructionism has been largely accepted by scholars, this paradigm still persists. <br><br>This book challenges the ethnic paradigm. As the first historiographical study of approaches to ethnic identity in modern 'Anglo-Saxon' archaeology, it reveals these approaches to be incompatible with current scholarly understandings of ethnicity. Drawing upon post-structuralist approaches to self and community, it highlights the empirical difficulties the archaeology of ethnicity in early medieval Britain faces, and proposes steps toward an alternative understanding of the role played by the communities of lowland Britain - both migrants from across the North Sea and those already present - in transforming the Roman world.

Moving across the North Sea

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Van de Noort
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Prestige Goods ◽  
The North ◽  
Southern Scandinavia ◽  
The Social ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
The Bronze Age

Movements between different lands around the North Sea have always been taking place. While the North Sea was evolving gradually, over the millennia, following the melting of the Devensian ice sheet, close contacts across what remained of the North Sea Plain never ceased, as evidenced by near-parallel developments of the Maglemosian-type tools in southern Scandinavia and Britain (Clark 1936), and by particular practices such as the deliberate deposition of barbed points (see chapter 3). Connections across the North Sea throughout the Mesolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic would have been made easier because of the number of islands surviving within the rising sea. The polished axes from Dogger Bank and Brown Bank either represent human presence on these islands in the early Neolithic or else indicate that the existence of these islands sometime in the pre-Neolithic past was embedded in the social memory of later periods. Both possibilities emphasize the fact that the North Sea was a knowable and visited place. Movements across the North Sea took various forms: as exchange between elites from different regions of exotic or ‘prestige’ goods, and possibly of marriage partners; as trade in both luxury and bulk commodities; and in the transfer of people, in some cases as individuals such as pilgrims and missionaries, and in other cases as groups of pirates or as part of larger-scale migrations. Over time, connectedness across the North Sea changed both in nature and in intensity; this was due in no small part to changes in the nature of the craft available. An outline of the movement of goods from the Neolithic through to the end of the Middle Ages illustrates this. Contacts across the North Sea for the Neolithic and the Bronze Age are demonstrated in the long-distance exchange of exotic objects and artefacts, including Beaker pottery, jewellery, or other adornments of gold, amber, faience, jet, and tin; also copper and bronze weapons and tools, and flint daggers, arrowheads, and wrist guards (e.g. Butler, 1963; O’Connor, 1980; Bradley 1984; Clarke, Cowie, and Foxon 1985).

An archaeological theory of the sea

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Van de Noort
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Archaeological Theory ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Early Medieval Period ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
The North Sea

Despite the wealth of information available on the North Sea, surprisingly few archaeologists have set out to study how people related to and connected to this sea, and other seas, in the past. In fact, we can distinguish four established traditions in archaeological research of the sea, all of which originated in the 20th century. First, many (or most) land-locked archaeologists working on any side of the North Sea have simply disregarded the sea itself, seeing it merely as the natural boundary of their study areas rather than considering its role in any significant way. At best, they are seeing the sea from the land, without genuinely engaging with it (cf. Cooney 2003: 323), although the panorama is slowly changing (e.g. cf. Bradley 1984 with Bradley 2007). Second, there are those archaeologists with an interest in long-distance exchange and exotic objects, who focused initially on the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods but have also been concerned, in more recent decades, with the early medieval period. Although these archaeologists have recognized the seas as conduits of long-distance exchange, they have rarely questioned how the practice of travel across the sea impacted on the social products of such exchange (e.g. Butler 1963, O’Connor 1980, Bradley 1984, Clarke, Cowie, and Foxon 1985, for the Neolithic and early Bronze Age; Hodges 1982, Loveluck and Tys 2006, for the early medieval period). Third, a group of archaeologists have studied the exploitation of the sea, especially for fish and salt, and the occupation and the reclamation of the edges of the sea in the Roman period and afterwards; but these studies have generally not strayed beyond the functional utilization of the sea and coast both for food and for land for food production (e.g. Clark 1961; Van den Broeke 1985; Andersen 1995, 2007; Rippon 2000; Smart 2003; Milner et al. 2004; De Kraker and Borger 2007). And fourth, maritime archaeologists’ focus has been on ships and waterside structures directly relating to shipping activities, but the development of a fuller appreciation of the significance of the sea and seafaring to past societies remains something of a distant aspiration (e.g. Ellmers 1972; McGrail 2003: 1).

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