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BRITAIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
by
PRYOR, FRANCIS
Presents a radical reassessment of Britain in the middle ages. The author shows that the Middle Ages were actually the time when the modern world was born. This was when Britain moved from Late Antiquity into a recognizable world of fixed roads and parishes, and familiar institutions, such as the church and local government, came into being.
Stock: In Stock, Delivery: Standard 2-3 Days (inc BFPO), £2.65
Format: Hardback
Published: 05/06/2006
Publisher: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 0007203616
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Reviewed By: |
History Today |
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Date: |
01/09/2006 |
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Viewers of Channel Four’s Time Team programme will know Francis Pryor: a big bearded cheerful prehistorian, poring over a trench to explain what the evidence means, or relaxing in the pub at the end of the day and speculating how it fits together. This book resembles him: enthusiastic, outdoors and convivial. Reading it is like going with him around sites or sitting with him in his favourite drinking holes, St Mary’s Vaults in Stamford and Hob in the Well in King’s Lynn, hearing him talk about his life, his work and his theories.
Britain in the Middle Ages confesses to not being a complete or systematic history of medieval Britain, or even of its archaeology. Rather it is a personal view, based on wide reading and many digs, picking out topics of interest. Following two similar books on Britain bc and Britain ad, it takes up the story in the mid-seventh century when the Anglo-Saxons were well established in England, and ends in the middle of the sixteenth, with the dissolution of the monasteries.
It falls into two parts, about equal in length – up to the Norman Conquest and after it – with four chapters in each. In these it ranges widely, so that most topics you would expect to find surface somewhere: bridges, castles, cemeteries, churches, coins, landscape, mills, monasteries, pottery, towns and villages. The geographical range is narrower. Pryor’s homeland is the Fens, where he also farms, and this is mainly a book about the East Midlands, with little coverage of Wales, Scotland, or the West of England.
The author’s reading of the Middle Ages reflects the breadth of his interests and the fact that his favourite era is the prehistoric. He takes a long view, cautioning us against identifying revolutions and cataclysms, and arguing the case for continuity, evolution and variety. He admits the limitations of archaeology – in itself it scarcely records the Norman Conquest – and constantly advises against building too much on evidence that is likely to change in volume in the future or be turned round by other discoveries. Equally and rightly he points out the shortcomings of documentary history. As a farmer, he suggests that future archaeologists may find more about how livestock was disposed of in the Foot and Mouth epidemic than historians will from farm records!
All medieval historians will endorse his positive appraisal of the period. The Middle Ages were not just an era of squelching roads and squalid housing. The pottery known as Ipswich Ware was made in huge quantities as early as the eighth and ninth centuries, virtually mass produced, and traded all over England long before the country was unified. The eleventh-century wooden bridge across the Trent at Hemington used ‘innovative and so far unique’ techniques of carpentry. Water-mills were powered by leats of water carried down oak-lined shoots to drive horizontal wheels attached to lava millstones, the lava imported from the Continent because of its lightness and hardness.
The tendency of the author to follow his interests, along with his restricted geography, mean that this is not a thorough guide to medieval archaeology. For students, one would still recommend an overview like David Hinton’s Archaeology, Economy and Society (1990). For the rest of us, however, Pryor provides a readable and enjoyable survey, simply and clearly explained, with 25 coloured plates and over 40 maps and line drawings. And it is a friendly book – one rarely comes across a scholar so enthusiastic and generous about other people’s work. If someone had given it to me when I was fifteen, I might well have ended up as an archaeologist rather than as a historian!
Nicholas Orme is the author of Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Tudor England (Yale University Press, 2006).
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