People and Space in the Middle Ages, 300-1300 (review)

People and Space in the Middle Ages, 300-1300 is another excellent volume in Brepols' 'Studies in the Early Middle Ages' series, combining leading scholarship with handsome production values. The work is user-friendly, including a number of maps, tables and photos, as well as a useful list of abbreviations. Of particular note is the eleven page glossary at the back of the volume containing key terms. When these terms appear in an article they do so in bold followed by an asterisk, alerting the reader that the term is in the glossary.

The volume opens with an introduction by Wendy Davies during which she draws on her own work on plebs in ninth-century Brittany. Andrew Reynolds and Alex Langlands begin proceedings with their thought-provoking article, 'Social Identities on the Macro Scale: A Maximum View of Wansdyke'. The authors argue that Wansdyke was a middle Anglo-Saxon construction that was built amidst border disputes between Wessex and Mercia during an early period of state formation. Birna Lárusdóttir's 'Settlement Organization and Farm Abandonment: The Curious Landscape of Reykjahverfi, North-East Iceland' is a micro-scale study which traces settlement using saga material, chapel sites, pagan graves, cottage ruins, place-names, and an examination of land fertility. Remaining in northern Iceland, Chris Callow employs Guðmundar saga dýra to investigate social connections in twelfth-century Iceland in 'Geography, Communities and Socio-Political Organization in Medieval Northern Ireland'. In 'Communities of Dispersed Settlement: Social Organization at the Ground Level in Tenth-to-Thirteenth-Century Iceland', Orri Vésteinsson disputes the commonly held belief that farmsteads in Iceland were isolated and largely independent, and convincingly argues that a sense of community existed despite the distances involved. The volume returns to England with Steven Bassett's detailed 'Boundaries of Knowledge: Mapping the Land Units of Late Anglo-Saxon and Norman England', revisiting the debate on the commencement of pastoral duties by old minsters. Bassett argues strongly that St Peter's Wootton Wawen (Warwickshire) had a parish before the tenth-century, but as his thesis rests largely on a single charter many are likely to remain unconvinced.

Julio Escalona contends that territorial structure in tenth and eleventh-century Castile was more complex than is often thought in 'Mapping Scale Change: Hierarchization and Fission in Castilian Rural Communities During the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries'. 'Central Places and the Territorial Organization of Communities: The Occupation of Hilltop Sites in Early Medieval Northern Castile' by Iñaki Martin Viso presents a more convincing article on Castile with an examination of the continued use of hilltop sites. The relationship between notions of community during the Roman period and its early medieval successor is tackled by Adela Cepas in 'The Ending of the Roman City: The Case of Clunia in the Northern Plateau of Spain'. The post-Roman evolution of Roman institutions is also the focus of Guy Halsall's tentative work, 'Villas, Territories and Communities in Merovingian Northern Gaul', which employs burial evidence amongst other things to argue that a relationship existed between villa communities and the wider Merovingian world, helping to preserve the villa unit, partly due to its involvement in the taxation system. In 'Community, Identity and the Late Anglo-Saxon Town: The Case of Southern England', Grenville Astill examines the burhs of Wessex for signs of urban identity between the ninth and eleventh centuries, finding that the pattern is inconsistent, and that the pre-burh pattern based on royal centres and minsters may have had more influence than is often thought. A late eleventh-century cartulary provides a rare and detailed glimpse of the dealings of a monastery with local serfs in 'Marmoutier: Familia versus Family: The Relations between Monastery and Serfs in Eleventh-Century North-West France', by Paul Fouracre. The relationship between space, memory, text, and...