Social Distancing in Medieval Buildings

Today, social distancing is important for ensuring that COVID-19 doesn’t spread through society. However, in the Middle Ages, it was quite different. This article is a few of my thoughts on the physical and cultural divisions found within medieval buildings.

The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture, edited by Jennifer M. Feltman and Sarah Thompson (a review)

ISBN 978-0-8153-9673-4

Published by Routledge, £120 (e-book £40.49)

The first section of this book is about essence and continuity; of this, only the first chapter is about the built environment. The authors consider the recreation or reconstruction of buildings and artworks, mainly how there can be continuity of meaning and function. Particularly with the rebuilding of churches, such as St. Peter’s (Rome), here Nicola Camerlenghi proposes the idea of the old and new buildings represent a time-space worm – two things existing in different places at the same and different times with the same functions and meanings. The other key concept is that of Theseus’ ship – every part was replaced, one-by-one throughout the journey. Did the same ship return as the one that set off on the voyage? This is often true of medieval buildings, particularly timber-framed structure; these buildings were maintained and repaired over centuries; eventually, most of the timbers were replaced. Therefore, is there a point when such a building stops being medieval or is it always medieval?

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Medieval Buildings of Oxfordshire

I recently had the opportunity to visit a number of medieval buildings in Oxfordshire.  The occasion? My wedding. The buildings? The church of St James the Great in Fulbrook and The Shaven Crown Inn (a medieval hostelry now converted into a pub and hotel) in Shipton under Wychwood.

Both these villages are near the forest of Wychwood and on the Cotswold Hills in the west of Oxfordshire. The landscape is a mixture of woodlands, grasslands for sheep grazing, and arable fields. The vast majority of buildings are constructed from the warm, honeycomb yellow Cotswold limestone. Wychwood Forest was once a vast wooded landscape, unfortunately much diminished in the 1850s; it was a royal forest and much of the surrounding areas were under medieval forest law. Shipton was the centre of an Anglo-Saxon royal estate with a minster parochia.

Leeds International Medieval Congress 2020 Call for papers: Crossing borders between domestic and agriculture buildings

Call for Papers for a session at IMC Leeds, 6-9 July 2020

Organizer: Duncan Berryman, Queen’s University Belfast

Crossing borders between domestic and agriculture buildings

 

There is often an invisible boundary between the domestic and the agricultural spaces within medieval settlements and dwellings. The extent to which this was evident in the Middle Ages or whether it is a figment of our modern viewpoint is something that needs to be explored. Domesticity and agriculture were closely entwined in the Middle Ages, particularly as the vast majority of the population lived in rural settlements and were engaged in agricultural activities. The image of peasants living side-by-side with their animals is common, but to what extent is it reality or a modern misconception? Studies of elite domestic buildings often neglect to consider the agricultural buildings located nearby.

This session (or sessions) seeks to explore the relationship between domestic and agricultural spheres of medieval settlements. It is primarily interested in the interactions between people and buildings, but it is also interested in understanding agricultural buildings in their social and landscape contexts. Other topics for discussion include (but not limited to):

• Agricultural buildings in literature
• Economics of buildings
• Agricultural practices
• Agricultural Landscapes
• Settlement studies
• Zooarchaeology of rural settlements

If you are interested, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biography to Duncan Berryman. General enquires and expressions of interest in the session can be sent as well.

Deadline for abstracts is Monday 21st September.

 

Please remember that you can only present one paper at the IMC. Further information about the conference can be found here – https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/

Brunt Buildings, Part 2: an unwanted sequel

Unfortunately, this seems to be a time for the burning of buildings of national and international importance.  Last year Belfast saw the destruction of Bank Buildings, and Belfast is still recovering and coming to terms with the loss. Thankfully Primark has committed to restoring the building. However, on Monday 15th April 2019 we received the terrible news that two more historic buildings went up in flames. The fire at Notre-Dame de Paris was the most publicised in the media, but Monday also saw a fire in the building known as King Solomon’s Stables in the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in Jerusalem.

Women in buildings

This is the first in a series of posts here where I reflect on the role/experience of minority groups in and around medieval buildings. I’ve always been interested in the experiences of ‘ordinary’ people around buildings, but a recent workshop on medieval buildings at TCD reminded me that ‘minority’ groups (particularly women) are seriously neglected in the public representations of buildings. Therefore, I’d like to use this space to begin to explore these ideas a bit further and to increase the public coverage and awareness of these issues. I shall start here by discussing women in buildings.

The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain: Enclosure and Transformation, c.1200–1750, edited by​ Patricia Skinner and Theresa Tyers​ (a review)

ISBN978-1-138-48474-0

Published by Routledge, £115

This is a small, but insightful book, bringing together a range of papers on gardens and gardening. This is a topic that is often overlooked recent scholarship; possibly it has been associated with agriculture or seen as a menial task carried out by peasants who needed the produce to live off. These papers present gardens in a new light, reflecting on the emotional and medicinal aspects of medieval and early modern gardens.

Burnt buildings and Gothic cathedrals: some thoughts on buildings and the memory of place

The loss of historic buildings is occurring with increasing frequency, whether through deliberate demolition or accidental destruction. The recent fire in Belfast’s Bank Buildings was a significant loss to the city, as this was an iconic building within the city centre. The large red-brick building is currently owned by Primark clothes shop and renovations were almost complete in the modern extension to the rear of the building.  The building has had a number of functions of the decades, one of which was the bank that gave the building its name, and, like most buildings, has undergone renovations and restorations. What has been evident in the discussions of this in the media is that it is not necessarily the physical material of the building that is important, but people’s perceptions of it. I’ll discuss our perceptions of materiality in another blog post, but here I want to focus on memory and experiences. Jake O’Kane has discussed this in a lot more engaging narrative than I could in his column in the Irish News. This made me think about how we experience buildings. One of the reasons that this building was so important to generations of Belfast residents was their individual and collective memories of interacting with the building. Many people will have entered the building to do their shopping, met with friends or had friends and relatives who worked in the building. These engagements and memories give the building a special place in our social memory. The fact that it is interactions that are important, rather than architecture, suggests why a building can change slowly over time with little complaints but a sudden alteration or its destruction can cause a massive public outcry.

Surely this can not be a modern phenomenon? Medieval people must have had a similar relationship with their buildings. Taverns were where you met with other townsfolk or villagers, and probably never saw lords and aristocrats. While churches were where all levels of society were visible, even if they didn’t interact, and were the setting for many important life milestones for the people of the community, such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Manorial farmyards were places where many villagers would have come together to work for the lord, so there was probably some comradery between the workers and memorable incidents and friendships. Thus buildings within Medieval settlements and towns will have been imbued with similar connotation as we place on modern buildings. And Medieval people were probably as likely to be shocked by massive changes in the appearance of buildings, such as the initial adoption of Gothic architecture. I recently visited the cathedral of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The shock of the visual effect of the huge amounts of decoration and the scale must be similar to that experienced by Medieval people when their Romanesque cathedral was extended or rebuilt in Gothic. We often think of lords wishing to make an impression of their wealth, authority, and international connections, or masons developing advanced techniques to ensure the buildings stood. What we rarely think about is how the villagers or townspeople felt when they saw their church being rebuilt in a modern style. It is likely that the people of the Middle Ages had similar thoughts to us when important buildings within the built environment change. New architecture and the removal of memories probably provoked similar reactions in the Middle Ages as they do today. Buildings archaeologists need to remember that modern thought is really not that modern and that how we experience buildings has many parallels with how Medieval people experienced their buildings.

Leeds International Medieval Congress 2018

It’s been a while since I last posted here, mainly because I was preparing for and attending the Leeds IMC, the worlds largest gathering of medievalists! This year almost 5,000 medievalists from across the world converged on the university of Leeds for a week long conference covering every imaginable subject area related to medieval studies. This was my third time attending the IMC and it is definitely one of the highlights of the year. Most of the Wednesday for me was given over to the three sessions that I co-organised for the Medieval Settlement Research Group, but the rest of the week was a packed schedule of sessions covering a wonderful range of topics, from burials and swords to castles and pain.

Building Anglo-Saxon England, by John Blair (a review)

ISBN 978-0-691-16298-0

Published by Princeton Press, £40

This beautifully produced volume presents the results of a major research project by Blair to reassess Anglo-Saxon settlement in light of the development led excavations of the later 21st century. Drawing on the recent works of Hamerow and Williamson (amongst others), Blair moves away from the traditional view of squalid settlements with most Anglo-Saxons living in holes in the ground. Blair also identifies Anglo-Saxon settlement in England as part of a European context, particularly associated with Scandinavia. We know that these houses were the homes of the people who we find in cemeteries and who farmed the landscape and produced the artefacts and coins found in excavations. Blair also notes that buildings were permanent symbols of identity; they are not like artefacts, which can be traded and transported over long distances. The choice of construction techniques, materials, and appearance were deliberately made to associate the inhabitants with a particular social group.