The Medieval Household: Daily Life in Castles and Farmsteads: Scandinavian Examples in their European Context (review)

The title of this interesting book is misleading. Rather than covering Scandinavia, the focus is on Sweden, and not all of Sweden but excavations of four medieval settlements, one farmstead, one hamlet, and two castles, in the western region of Värmland. Nevertheless, Eva Svensson admirably succeeds in placing her Scandinavian examples in their European context and in the process produces some intriguing comparisons and conclusions. As a result, medieval scholars, even those with little interest in Scandinavia/Sweden/ Värmland, will find much in this book to ponder. Svensson is no armchair historian; her book is a result, in her words (p. 30), 'of my own exposure to [archaeological] material at various excavations performed in all types of weather including extreme Swedish winter conditions'.

The chapters in Part I provide a comparative introduction to Swedish society in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Svensson explains, for example, that serfdom never occurred in Sweden, peasants owned property, and they in consequence held a strong social position when compared to peasants elsewhere in Europe.

Parts II and III form the core of the book and analyse the results of the excavations at the farmstead of Skinnerud, the hamlet of Skramle, and the castles of Saxholmen and Edsholm. To provide some order to the abundant artefact material, Svensson divides it into thirteen groups: handicraft, trade, home furnishing, housekeeping including table manners and cooking, clothing and personal adornment, building activity, animal rearing, hunting and fishing, agriculture, popular belief, military objects, administration, and leisure. For the farmstead and the hamlet, agricultural infield land was limited, so both made extensive use of the outland, which provided not only resources for survival but also opportunities for commerce through activities such as iron and tar production, hunting, and the provision of raw materials. Both castles had relatively short existences: Saxholmen was built in the middle of the thirteenth century and abandoned around 1300, while Edsholm was probably built in the 1360s or 1370s and destroyed by fire during a revolt in 1434. In contrast to the peasant interaction with the surrounding landscape, the inhabitants of the castles were segregated from it. Their fortifications were in a certain sense their own prisons.

In Part IV, Svensson notes that these four settlements were located on the geographic periphery or margins of Europe. For the purposes of comparison she selected fifteen similar archaeological sites in northern Europe - three each from Britain, the Netherlands and Germany, two from Switzerland, and four from the Czech Republic - totalling seven castles and eight rural settlements. Spatially, the European castles were separate but not remote: they were built on higher ground but were near a town or a trade route. Swedish castles were much more remote as well as much less comfortable. Nonetheless, the castles in both areas shared many similarities, giving the impression that 'the builders were reading the same manual' (p. 340). Rural settlements also had similar features, the foremost being the long building or hall that dominated villages and functioned as a meeting place. In both areas, animals and humans had separate buildings.

More surprising was the discovery that the inhabitants of the Swedish periphery owned items of clothing and personal adornment that were equal, if not superior, to anything owned by the Europeans. On the other hand, the Swedes had a simpler diet. Barley, oats, wheat, and rye were the dominant cereal crops in both areas, but the Europeans ate fruit, peas, nuts, and other vegetables, all of which did not appear at the Swedish sites. The most common meat in Europe was cattle, followed by sheep/goats and pigs, while in Sweden it was sheep/goats followed by cattle.

Svensson's acknowledgements do not mention any help putting the book into English, so I surmise that the prose belongs to the author. The book reads very...