In 2003 archaeologists discovered an intact princely burial between busy Priory Crescent and the railway line near Priory Park in Prittlewell. A find of international significance, this is the richest and most important Anglo-Saxon burial found since the 1939 discovery of the great ship burial at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. The lavishly furnished wooden chamber beneath a mound contained the coffin of a high-status man, evidently a Christian, who died at the end of the 6th century AD. The results of years of study of the excavated evidence are described and illustrated here to provide an account of the burial and the grave goods, and the information they give us about the East Saxon kingdom, where the man lived, and its contacts with Kent, Francia and the Christian Mediterranean.

Magic, sorcery and witchcraft are among the most common themes of the great medieval Icelandic sagas and poems, the problematic yet vital sources that provide our primary textual evidence for the Viking Age that they claim to describe. Yet despite the consistency of this picture, surprisingly little archaeological or historical research has been done to explore what this may really have meant to the men and women of the time. This book examines the evidence for Old Norse sorcery, looking at its meaning and function, practice and practitioners, and the complicated constructions of gender and sexual identity with which these were underpinned. Combining strong elements of eroticism and aggression, sorcery appears as a fundamental domain of women's power, linking them with the gods, the dead and the future. Their battle spells and combat rituals complement the men's physical acts of fighting, in a supernatural empowerment of the Viking way of life. What emerges is a fundamentally new image of the world in which the Vikings understood themselves to move, in which magic and its implications permeated every aspect of a society permanently geared for war. In this fully-revised and expanded second edition, Neil Price takes us with him on a tour through the sights and sounds of this undiscovered country, meeting its human and otherworldly inhabitants, including the Sámi with whom the Norse partly shared this mental landscape. On the way we explore Viking notions of the mind and soul, the fluidity of the boundaries that they drew between humans and animals, and the immense variety of their spiritual beliefs. We find magic in the Vikings' bedrooms and on their battlefields, and we meet the sorcerers themselves through their remarkable burials and the tools of their trade. Combining archaeology, history and literary scholarship with extensive studies of Germanic and circumpolar religion, this multi-award-winning book shows us the Vikings as we have never seen them before.

Torre Abbey is one of the more impressive monastic sites in Devon, both as a ruin and as a conversion to a comfortable post-medieval mansion. Founded in 1196 as a house of the Premonstratensian ‘White Canons’, the church and the monastic buildings round the cloister were built soon after and not greatly modified in later medieval changes. Converted to domestic use after the Dissolution, the Abbot’s house and part of the cloister was for 300 years the home of the Cary family, and it continued as the home of their successors until 1930 when it was acquired by Torquay Borough Council. A major programme of excavation was undertaken on the church by the Exeter Museums Archaeological Field Unit in the 1980s, followed by a series of above-ground investigations of the historic building fabric. A later phase of museum reordering and redisplay led to further exploratory work by Museum of London Archaeology, and then by Oxford Archaeology. This report publishes the results of the excavations and building surveys, including the architectural development of the abbey church and claustral buildings, discoveries made in removing render from the walls of the monastic refectory, and changes made for the post-medieval mansion. Geophysical surveys suggest that much more remains to be discovered on the site. The finds include an impressive collection of worked stone from medieval monuments and architectural features, an important group of ceramic paving tiles, and tantalising remains of stained glass windows. This fully illustrated publication brings to a close a major enterprise in the 30-year investigation of the site and buildings under the auspices of the Torbay Council.

The Bay of Skaill, Marwick Bay, and Birsay Bay form openings in the high sandstone cliffs of Orkney’s Atlantic coast. These west-facing bays have long been favoured locations for settlement, with access to the ocean, to fresh water, to land and to resources for cultivation. The coastline of Orkney’s North-West Mainland is recognised worldwide as a location of exceptional archaeological importance, dominated by the Neolithic world heritage site of Skara Brae, and the Viking-Norse remains on the tidal Brough of Birsay. Many of its archaeological sites have been exposed by coastal erosion, a serious problem which continues its destructive progress with every oceanic storm. Rescue excavation has contributed essential data, but its resources have concentrated on the zone of immediate threat, and until recently less has been understood about the archaeology of the landscape that lies behind the eroding shore. From 2003, a new archaeological research project began to investigate the hinterlands of the three bays. Using the rapidly-developing applications of archaeological geophysics, coupled with topographical survey, it has sought to create a broader and better-informed landscape context. Much of the land is dominated by windblown sand, at the Bay of Skaill and Birsay Bay in particular, reflecting centuries of environmental change, and requiring adaptive methodologies and approaches. Several new areas of archaeological interest have been identified, and many previously-known sites are now better-understood. Excavation was used selectively to test the survey results. In one area in particular, a cluster of large settlement mounds on the northern side of the Bay of Skaill, two major Viking-Norse settlement clusters were identified and investigated. These held exceptionally well-preserved deposits, which have required detailed dating and analysis. The artefact assemblages include evidence for ferrous metalworking along with iron and copper alloy objects, combs, glass and amber beads, worked stone, ceramics and a range of archaeobotanical and archaeozoological remains. A Viking silver hoard discovered in 1858 and a Viking grave uncovered in 1888 are revisited. This monograph brings together the survey and excavation results, and tells a new story of an ancient landscape.

London’s Spitalfields Market was the location of one of the city’s largest archaeological excavations, carried out by MOLA between 1991 and 2007. This book presents the archaeological and documentary evidence for medieval activity here, on the north-eastern fringe of the historic city, and the site of the Augustinian priory and hospital of St Mary without Bishopsgate, later known as St Mary Spital. Large areas of the medieval precinct have been explored, making this by far the most intensively investigated medieval hospital, and one of the most extensively investigated monastic establishments, in Britain. Founded in 1197, rebuilt on a larger scale and refounded in 1235, the hospital catered primarily for London’s sick poor. A pre-existing extramural and extraparochial cemetery became the priory’s principal cemetery. As the priory continued to attract patrons and wealth, it expanded its precinct and carried out major building programmes. By the 15th century the small hospital had become one of the largest Augustinian priories in southern England. Medical treatment in the 14th century is illustrated by remarkable evidence from the canons’ infirmary with its attached pharmacy; a trend towards secularisation in the 14th and 15th centuries is shown by the hamlet of timber houses and workshops that grew around the cemetery. An exceptional survival was the charnel crypt of the 14th-century cemetery chapel, which is preserved today under Bishops Square.

"For the will desires not to be dark, and this very desire causes the darkness” (Jacob Boehme). Moving through the fundamental question of this paradox, this book offers a constellation of theoretical and critical essays that shed light on the darkness of the will: its obscurity to itself. Through in-depth analysis of medieval and modern sources - Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Dante, Meister Eckhart, Chaucer, Nietzsche, Cioran, Meher Baba - this volume interrogates the nature and meaning of the will, along seven modes: spontaneity, potentiality, sorrow, matter, vision, eros, and sacrifice. These multiple lines of inquiry are finally presented to coalesce around one fundamental point of agreement: the will says yes, yet only a will that knows how to say no to itself, entering the silence of its own darkness, will ever be free.

A selection of papers on the Anglo-Saxon period, including papers on non-ferrous dress-accessories from early medieval Lincoln; The Anglo-Saxon settlement at Catholme, Staffordshire; transformation and use of insular mounts from Viking-Age burials in TrØndelag central Norway, and evidence from two rural Anglo-Saxon sites in Suffolk.

In this volume of papers, deriving from two conferences held in Rome and Leicester in 2016, nineteen leading European archaeologists discuss and interpret the complex evolution of landscapes – both urban and rural – across Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (c. AD 300–700). The geographical coverage extends from Italy to the Mediterranean West through to the Rhine frontier and onto Hadrian’s Wall. Core are questions of impacts due to the socio-political, religious, military and economic transformations affecting provinces, territories and kingdoms across these often turbulent centuries: how did townscapes change and at what rate? What were the fates of villas? When do post-classical landscapes emerge and in what form? To what degree did Europe become an insecure, defended landscape? In what ways did people – cityfolk, farmers, nobility, churchmen, merchants – adapt? Do the elite remain visible and how prominent is the Church? Where and how do we see culture change through the arrival of new groups or new ideas? Do burials form a clear guide to the changing world? And how did the environment change in this period of stress – was the classical period landscape much altered through the attested depopulation and economic deterioration? And underlying much of the discussion is a consideration of the nature and quality of our source material: how good is the archaeology of these periods and how good is our current reading of the materials available? Combined, these expert studies offer valuable new analyses of people and places in a complex, challenging and crucial period in European history.

Cille Pheadair is one of more than 20 Viking Age and Late Norse settlements discovered on the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides (Western Isles), off the west coast of Scotland. Its unusually well-preserved stratigraphic sequence of nine phases of occupation, including five longhouses and many smaller buildings, provides a remarkable insight into daily life on a Norse farmstead during two centuries of near-continuous occupation c. AD 1000 –1200. Although the excavation at Cille Pheadair was a rescue project undertaken before the site was destroyed by coastal erosion, it provided an opportunity to address important research questions about the domestic use of space, agricultural economy, and relationships with the wider world beyond the Outer Hebrides. Careful and ground-breaking analysis of preserved house floors provided profound insights into the changing use of space within a Norse longhouse and its surrounding outbuildings. The rich assemblage of pottery, ironwork, gold and silver reveals that the inhabitants of Cille Pheadair had long-distance connections across the Viking world. A battery of scientific studies, including faunal and floral analyses, isotopic and lipid residue analyses, and soil chemistry, have revealed much about the social and economic dimensions of life on a Norse farm. Detailed survey and excavation in South Uist, reveals a remarkable picture of Norse-period settlement across this island which was part of the insular Viking world between Ireland and Norway, becoming part of the Kingdom of Man and later the Kingdom of the Isles. Cille Pheadair’s status as an ordinary, if wealthy, farmstead can be contrasted with the much larger and longer-lived high-status settlement at Bornais to the north. The two sites together provide a fascinating insight into similarities and differences within the settlement hierarchy of the time that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Viking world.

This book is the culmination of the author’s lifelong interest in the Roman to medieval transition in England and in the analysis of the historic landscape of Wessex. It begins with a focused, referenced, and critical exploration of the thorny, but crucial, issues of post-Roman personal and group identity, employing linguistic, historical, archaeological and toponymical evidence. A series of integrated studies seek to elucidate changes in the territorial organisation of the Wessex landscape, from Somerset to Hampshire, from the Roman period to the emergence of the historic counties. It is shown that the defined limits of the self-governed Roman civitates had a significant impact upon subsequent historical developments, not least on the early English settlements. In eastern Wessex - Berkshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire – the Roman boundaries broke down piecemeal, but continued to influence political developments and patterns of settlement into the seventh century. It is argued that those three counties acquired their medieval and later form only at the time of the Viking wars. In western Wessex, Dorset and Somerset, by contrast, the core of the territories of both the southern and northern Durotriges in the Roman period has persisted until the present day. The book also includes a re-examination of the formation and extent of the kingdom of the Jutes in southern Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight. The chronology, history and archaeology of the fifth century, set alongside the many changes of the later fourth century, and vital to our understanding of the momentous events of that time as Saxon control took hold in the east , are here the subject of a separate, detailed study. Place-names across Wessex with a bearing on the presence of the Britons, and the changing nature and distribution of archaeological sites in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, are discussed in their historical context.

This volume brings together an interesting range of papers discussing medieval buildings across Europe. They provide interesting insights to life in the medieval world in several understudied areas of Europe. The papers range from Croatia and Transylvania in the east, Scandinavia in the north and Britain in the west, providing insights into areas that are rarely discussed by books published in western Europe. There is comprehensive range in size and status of buildings, from the smallest, single-roomed house in Byzantine Serbia and rural homes in central Europe to churches in Sweden and monastic hospitals in England. Buildings of high status and low status are discussed, as well as those of a secular and ecclesiastic nature. Materials and craftspeople are considered through a study of brick makers and their identifying marks. This volume aims to open discussions about medieval buildings beyond simply architectural features and typologies, and furthers the discipline through this process. Buildings can reveal details of the lives of their occupants and therefore enrich our knowledge of life in medieval Europe.

Well known for its later gunpowder industry and the famous Shepherd Neame brewery, Faversham’s earlier medieval history also reveals it to have been an important religious and administrative centre. The town archives possess an unusually complete set of medieval-onwards town charters and other documents including a Magna Carta. Using archaeological and historical evidence set in an ever-changing physical and social context, the authors argue that there is a great deal more to this small town on the north Kent coast than is obvious at first glance. There is a wealth of evidence for prehistoric settlement with the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age being particularly well represented archaeologically and Roman remains indicate a very prosperous phase up to around the AD 270s, followed by drastic changes. Abundant evidence for ironworking is described. The book charts the rise of the town from Pagan Jutish origins through the medieval period, centred originally around the establishment of an Abbey and other religious houses but developing as a trading port and wealthy market town. Supporting evidence is drawn from a variety of archaeological sources (Victorian antiquarians, modern excavations, various voluntary and community archaeology groups) and historical documents. The authors present the story of Faversham in a vivid and accessible narrative that reveals a new history of this ancient Kentish market town.

The cathedral city of Hereford is one of the best-kept historical secrets of the Welsh Marches. Although its Anglo-Saxon development is well known from a series of classic excavations in the 1960s and ’70s, what is less widely known is that the city boasts an astonishingly well-preserved medieval plan and contains some of the earliest houses still in everyday use anywhere in England. Three leading authorities on the buildings of the English Midlands have joined forces, combining detailed archaeological surveys, primary historical research and topographical analysis, to examine 24 of the most important buildings, from the great hall of the Bishop’s Palace of c. 1190, to the first surviving brick town-house of c.1690. Fully illustrated with photographs, historic maps and explanatory diagrams, the case-studies include canonical and mercantile hall-houses of the Middle Ages, and mansions, commercial premises and simple suburban dwellings of the early modern period. Owners and builders are identified from documentary sources wherever possible, from the Bishop of Hereford and the medieval cathedral canons, through civic office-holding merchant dynasties to minor tradesmen otherwise known only for their brushes with the law.

Modern Liverpool Street was once on the margins of London: the story of its development – from the medieval marsh of Moorfields to municipal, non-parochial, burial ground and later suburb – is illustrated by archaeological investigations undertaken as part of the Crossrail Central development. Excavation also recovered a wealth of well-preserved artefactual evidence for the local inhabitants, from the 16th century to the 19th-century households of Brokers Row. The New Churchyard, or 'Bethlem' as it was later known, was established after the severe plague of 1563 and was in use from 1569 to 1739; archaeological evidence suggests c 25,000 people in total were buried here. Contemporary accounts and parish registers, combined with tombstones and detailed osteological analysis of one quarter of the 3354 burials excavated, enable the reconstruction of some of their lives, and their deaths. They included migrants, many of the city's poor and those on the fringes ofsociety. Some were the victims of recurrent epidemics and outbreaks of plague – confirmed by the identification of the plague pathogen in five skeletons – when mass, but orderly, graves were dug

For 7,000 years seals have functioned as signs of authority. This publication deals specifically with aspects of status in the history of seals, exploring this theme across a diverse range of cultural contexts—from the 9th century up to the Early Modern period, and, across the world, looking at Byzantine, European, Islamic and Chinese examples. These objects are united by the significant role they play in social status hierarchies, in the status of institutions, indications of power and finally in notions of relative status among objects themselves. In addition to their chronological and geographical diversity, these studies concentrate on many different phases of seal use. Therefore, together they highlight the importance of studying the full life cycle of seals, from the way in which they were made and used through to their cancellation, loss and sometimes destruction. The volume will look at seals used by all members of society, from kings to fishmongers, and will examine the history of objects, with examples ranging from the medieval matrix with a classical gem showing the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius to the 17th-century Providence Island matrix from America. This publication complements the British Museum’s ongoing programme of the digitisation of the Museum’s collection of medieval seal matrices which will widen access to this fascinating body of material.

The aim of this book is to promote the thesis that myth may illuminate archaeology and that on occasion archaeology may shed light on myth. Medieval Irish literature is rich in mythic themes and some of these are used as a starting point. Some myths are of great antiquity and some were invented by contemporary authors. It is a challenging source, first explored in the author's earlier work Archaeology and Celtic Myth and this work will elaborate on some of the themes pursued there and introduce some new ones. Combining literary and archaeological evidence chapters deal with the construction of the past, illustrating how the Irish medieval world invented aspects of the past; the abuses of myth presented in later literature; the evidence for the survival of pagan beliefs and practices well into medieval times in Ireland; evidence to illustrate the key elements of the institution of sacral kingship, a consideration of sacred trees; mythology of the underworld and its archaeological expressions and the equine aspects of the myths attached to the Irish goddess Macha (linked to Navan Fort) and her Welsh counterpart Rhiannon. John Waddell brings a lifetimes experience of studying Irish history, Bronze Age archaeology and Celtic mythology in this personal and lively exploration of mythology and its archaeological expression.