Presidential Address

1941 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. M. Stenton
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Anglo Saxon

The place-names which illustrate the character of Anglo-Saxon heathenism have a special claim on the attention of historians. To scholars such as Bede, who wrote when English paganism was still within the range of living memory, it was a detestable superstition, which could not be ignored, but should not be described. Eighth-century writers, and, in particular, Bede, have preserved the names of a number of heathen gods, and recorded the occasion of a number of heathen festivals; they refer to temples, to idols, to altars, and to sacrifices, and their language suggests the existence of different ranks within the heathen priesthood. But it is only a dim impression of the pagan foreworld which can be recovered from their writings, and the points at which it can be reinforced by quotation from later authorities are very few.

Presidential Address: The Historical Bearing of Place-Name Studies; England in the Sixth Century

1939 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. M. Stenton
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
New Evidence

During the last twenty years, the study of English place names has placed a large body of new evidence at the service of those who are interested in the earliest phases of Anglo-Saxon history. It may at once be admitted that the study has sometimes shown its vitality by becoming controversial, and that much of the evidence may be interpreted in more than one way. It is gradually becoming clear that when all the available material has been collected and discussed, there will remain a very large number of place-names of which no conclusive interpretation is ever likely to be given.

An Anglo-Saxon mass for St Willibrord and its later liturgical uses

1995 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Nicholas Orchard
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Commons

Of all the services held in a saint's honour in the course of his or her feast-day, mass was the most important: and central to the mass were the prayers invoking the saint's intercession said by the celebrant. Together with the canon, these ‘proper’ prayers – by the ninth century normally a collect (collecta), secret (super oblata or secreta), preface (prefatio) and postcommunion (ad complendum or postcommunio) – formed the backbone around which chant and readings were arranged, and they were gathered together in the sacramentary, the book used by the celebrant alone. Further forms might be provided as ‘alternatives’ (aliae orationes); for the conclusion of mass (super populum); and occasionally, for vespers of the day before the feast and of the feast itself (ad vesperas), but generally speaking, these are rare. As ‘informal’ cults became formal, or prize relics came to hand, so the need for new suites of prayers arose. These could be composed afresh, ‘borrowed’ from existing saints' masses (an easy option, necessitating little more than the insertion of the new saint's name in the relevant prayers); or if the precentor's creative powers failed him completely, they could be taken from the ‘commons’, that is, from the series of ready-made masses contained in almost every medieval sacramentary or missal for a ‘confessor’, a ‘martyr’ or a ‘virgin’, and so on. Some houses attracted the services of gifted writers; other seem not to have been so fortunate. It is my intention to analyse here the genesis and dissemination of a mass from a house of the former class which throws interesting light on the liturgical links between England and the Continent in the eighth century.

The Maaseik embroideries

1984 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 65-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mildred Budny ◽  
Dominic Tweddle
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Form Part ◽  
The Church ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Middle Ages

Among the relics in the treasury of the church of St Catherine at Maaseik in Limburg, Belgium, there are some luxurious embroideries which form part of the so-called casula (probably ‘chasuble’) of Sts Harlindis and Relindis (pls. I–VI). It was preserved throughout the Middle Ages at the abbey church of Aldeneik (which these sister-saints founded in the early eighth century) and was moved to nearby Maaseik in 1571. Although traditionally regarded as the handiwork of Harlindis and Relindis themselves, the embroideries cannot date from as early as their time, and they must have been made in Anglo-Saxon England. Indeed, they represent the earliest surviving examples of the highly prized English art of embroidery which became famous later in the Middle Ages as opus anglicanum.

The Progress of English Place-Name Studies since 1901

Antiquity ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 35 (140) ◽  
pp. 281-285
Author(s):  
Bruce Dickins
Keyword(s):  
Emeritus Professor ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The West ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
The University

In this article, Professor Bruce Dickins, Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Cambridge and sometime Director of the Survey, takes the opportunity of the publication of two general surveys of English Place-Names and of three volumes of the West Riding Survey, to discuss the development of English Place-Name Studies in the last sixty years. The books he here discusses are:–THE ORIGIN OF ENGLISH PLACE-NAMES by P. H. Reaney. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960 (second impression 1961). pp. x + 278. 32s. net.ENGLISH PLACE-NAMES. By Kenneth Cameron. London, Batsford. 1961. pp. 256 and 8 plates. 30$. net.THE PLACE-NAMES OF THE WEST RIDING OF YORKSHIRE. By A. H. Smith. Parts I-III (English Place-Name Society, Vols. XXX-XXXII). Cambridge, University Press, 1961. pp. xii + 346 + map, pp. xii + 322 + map, pp. xiv + 278 + map. 35s. net per volume.

Food from the Water: Fishing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
Fish Consumption ◽  
Aquatic Environments ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Isotope Evidence ◽  
Do So

Fishing and fish consumption in Anglo-Saxon England has always garnered the interest of historians and archaeologists. However, very often, much of the research has been considered in isolation from other findings. In order to gain as full a picture as possible of what fishing and fish consumption meant to the Anglo-Saxons it is necessary to gather all forms of evidence and examine them together. This chapter will endeavour to do so by combining zooarchaeological and material (fish hooks and net sinkers as well as weirs) data alongside recent discussions of isotope evidence to uncover who within Anglo-Saxon England consumed fish, but also to discover if there were regional and chronological variations in fish consumption. Place-names and iconographic representations of fish may help further understand the changing perceptions of fish, if indeed people’s view of fish and aquatic environments were changing. While this chapter is unlikely to answer fully all the questions surrounding fishing and fish consumption in Anglo-Saxon England, it will shed some light on what information we are currently able to extract from the data of this fascinating area of Anglo-Saxon life.

Water in the Landscape: Charters, Laws and Place Names

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Della Hooke
Keyword(s):  
Local Identity ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Rivers And Streams ◽  
Territorial Boundaries

As one of the essentials of life, water was never far away from early medieval consciousness. Access to sources of water might influence the demarcation of territorial boundaries, especially of the small estates that were emerging in this period, and the location of settlement. The documentary records that survive provide insights as to how the Anglo-Saxons and sometimes, too, their predecessors, viewed their surroundings. Many place-names contain references to water and might help to provide a picture of the landscape and how it was used. In this period, fishing weirs and mills were increasing in number and find mention in both names and the documents; some rivers were also valuable lines of water communication offering routes for the transfer of both people and goods. On a smaller scale, the names given to local watercourses might reflect the nature of the rivers and streams themselves or hint at the nature of the countryside around and its local wildlife. They might also express a sense of local identity but were often coined by travellers and administrators. Some of these aspects of water and the environment of Anglo-Saxon England will be explored here.

‘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.

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 Vikings in England: a review

1975 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 181-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Fellows Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Life Time ◽  
Present Review ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Domesday Book ◽  
First Time

In the preface to F. M. Stenton's collected papers Lady Stenton notes that the publication ofAnglo-Saxon Englandin 1943 marked the culmination of a life-time spent largely preparing for and writing a book in which ‘place-names, coins and charters, wills and pleas, archaeology and the laws of the Anglo-Saxons were all for the first time adequately used to produce a balanced narrative, supported by Domesday Book and the twelfth-century charters which made it easier to understand the earlier material’. Indeed, with the exception of archaeology, Sir Frank had been actively engaged in all these fields of research, as is revealed by the list of his published works, and it seemed unlikely at the time that it would ever be necessary to make major adjustments to the view of the Scandinavian settlements that he presented. Only twelve years had passed, however, when voices of dissent began to arise and the first of three papers that were to herald two decades of controversy about the Vikings in England was published. The present review examines the most significant contributions to the ensuing debate and considers whether it has, in fact, been necessary to depart substantially from the views held by Stenton.

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