English Landscapes and Identities

The project on which the book was based synthesized all the major available sources of information on English archaeology for the period from 1500 BC to AD 1086, providing an overview of the history of the English landscape from the Bronze Age to the Norman invasion. The result is the first account of the English landscape over a crucial 2500-year period when people created many of the features still visible today. It also provides a celebration of many centuries of archaeological work, especially the intensive investigations that have taken place since the 1960s, when frequent large-scale work has transformed our understanding of England’s past.

Greek Christianity in Medieval Italy

Chapter 2 offers a historical narrative of Greek Christianity in medieval southern Italy from the era of Byzantine rule in the early Middle Ages to the fifteenth century. It begins with the transformation of Byzantine Italy during the era of Iconoclasm (8th–9th centuries) and the Macedonian dynasty (9th–11th centuries). Faced with the external crisis of Islamic invasion and the internal political crises that resulted, the Byzantine authorities placed southern Italy under the patriarchate of Constantinople and established a military government (the katepanikion) over the region, bringing settlers from Greece and Anatolia to reinforce the Greek presence there. It then describes the impact of the Norman invasion of the eleventh century, noting the hostilities that flared between Greek and Latin Christians in southern Italy as a result. Next, the chapter moves on to address the aftermath of the Norman conquest for the Italo-Greeks, discussing the so-called ‘Italo-Greek Renaissance’ of the twelfth century and Norman patronage of Greek ecclesiastical institutions such as the Patiron of Rossano and the Holy Saviour of Messina. It then details the changing circumstances of the thirteenth century, with the demise of the Norman Hauteville dynasty and the arrival of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. It also highlights the significance of the Fourth Crusade and the Fourth Lateran Council as developments that heralded increased papal interference in Italo-Greek affairs. Lastly, the chapter examines the impact of the Angevin conquest and the relegation of the southern Italian Greeks to an ethnic minority within the hierarchy of the Roman Church.

Sir Walter Scott and the Medievalist Novel

This chapter focuses primarily on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and the novels—including Scott’s subsequent crusading fictions—that paid tribute to it through their engagement with roughly the same period of English history. In the hands of writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Kingsley, the historical novel after Scott tended to present the Norman invasion as an enduringly formative moment in the making of modern imperial Britain. Popular fictions by Charlotte Yonge and G. A. Henty, composed for child readers, were similarly inspired by Scott, though in their reductive rewriting of Ivanhoe they further contributed to Scott’s ‘descent to the school-room’. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (1883), by contrast, I will argue in conclusion, recovers the playfully reflexive scepticism of Ivanhoe and detaches the adolescence of its confused hero from any idea of an analogous national emergence.

English spelling: where do -tion and -sion come from?

In Issue 135 (Volume 34, Number 3, September 2018) of English Today there was an article by Blasius Achiri-Taboh entitled ‘English spelling: Adding /ʃən/ (or /ʒən/) to base-words and changing from -tion to -sion.’ The author's stated aim was to provide help for deciding the forms of these words and whether -tion or -sion was the correct ending. All the words he cited were ones that can be traced back to Latin or French. That is to say, they are Latinate words that became part of the English language either in a French form as a result of the Norman invasion in the 11th century or later as a modification of a classical form in the Renaissance period. This historical fact was not mentioned in the article. I acknowledge that the purpose of the article was to give guidelines for spelling, particularly perhaps for non-native speakers, and that it might be going too far to suggest that, if you wanted to be able to spell these words correctly, you could learn Latin and maybe French too, but it seemed to me that the author's assertions misrepresented the nature of those English words. I should like therefore to discuss certain points of the article, in the order they were presented.

Medieval Castles of Britain and Ireland from the 11th to the 15th Century

The study of this subject has a long pedigree, from the late 18th and 19th centuries, although material of this date has varying degrees of authority in the light of more recent work since the 1960s. The first castles in England appear in the 1050s, built by Norman favorites of King Edward the Confessor (r. 1042–1066) and were few in numbered and mainly in the English county of Herefordshire, on the border with Wales. Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, earth-and-timber castles of both the motte and bailey and the ringwork forms were built throughout England, in towns and in the countryside, and where the Normans moved into Wales and Scotland. The first castles in Ireland appear after the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169; the matter of medieval private fortifications in pre-Norman areas is not discussed here. Some of the first castles were built in stone from the beginning, examples being the Tower of London, Chepstow in Monmouthshire and Richmond in Yorkshire. The development of the masonry castle as fortification, home, and administrative center is a feature of the history of medieval architecture. The great tower or keep is a dominant feature of the 12th- and 13th-century castle, although these towers can be found as late as the 15th century. Strong defenses through twin-towered gatehouses and mural towers along the curtain walls are hallmarks of defenses, but these towers also provided accommodation. Domestic features such as halls, private chambers, kitchens, stables, and other ancillary buildings would be found in the interiors, while gardens either inside the walls or immediately outside are known from documentary sources. The later Middle Ages, from the 14th century, witnessed few new castles built, apart from the tower houses of Ireland and Scotland, but in England in particular there was a growing sophistication in the domestic ranges built both by the monarch and the great lords of the land. While several of the major castles remain occupied as homes, many earth and timber structures had a limited life, particularly in England, with examples of longer use elsewhere, while others suffered in the British civil wars between king and parliament of the 1640s.

The Transmission of Irish Law in the Fourteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: Exploring the Social and Historical Contexts

This paper seeks to examine the contexts in which the Old Irish law tracts were transmitted in the period following the church reforms and Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century, focusing primarily on the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Within these time frames two major themes will be appraised: 1) the English attitudes towards the practice of Irish law, and 2) the roles of the medieval lawyers and/or their patrons in political life. The central aim of this paper is twofold; firstly to shed light on the historical and social contexts in which the legal materials were later transmitted, and secondly, based on this, to posit some theories as to the possible incentives behind the transmission of the law tracts in these periods.