Wharram Percy: deserted medieval village (review)

REVIEWS Beresford, Maurice and John Hurst, Wharram Percy: deserted medieval village, N e w Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1990; cloth; pp. 144; 100tilustrations,13 colour plates; R.R.P. AUS$25.00. Archaeology traditionally has been presented in terms of classic excavated sites. Although not a household name even among medievalists (who may ask 'who' rather than 'what' it is), Wharram Percy over its forty years of excavation has become the type-site of an English deserted medieval viUage. Theresultsof field survey on the ground and from the air, as well as of excavation and of documentary and environmental study of W h a n a m Percy, are ably summarised and weU illustrated in this book. It is particularly strong on explanation of how and why the various stages of research came about. When in 1948 academic interest was first taken 'almost by accident' in W h a n a m Percy, the category of deserted medieval village and the discipline of medieval archaeology were just being recognised. The results of archaeological investigation are critically dependent on the questions asked of a site, and Beresford and Hurst are candid about the shortcomings of their excavation programme in this regard, showing how interpretation or reinterpretation of the evidence often posed new questions and demanded new strategies to answer them. The book is thus also informative about the way archaeologists work. Typically, the excavators got much more than they had bargained for at Wharram Percy: not just the plans of medieval village houses as first sought but evidence for 2000 years of settlement on the site. Fifth-century continuity is not proven but one gathers that the evidence is more likely to be unrecognised than absent. While the main interest of the book remains centred on the village in the twelfthtofifteenthcenturies, great care is taken to put this phase into the complete picture of activity from Neolithic ranching (no settlement identified) to the archaeological excavation itself. There is indeed a whole chapter about the post-medieval farms and parsonages after the village had ceased to exist. The Saxon period comes through as the most enigmatic. The reader will be rather startled to read of the discovery, in middle-Saxon levels at the W h a n a m Percy north manor site, of Tating ware, which according to the Glossary (p. 138) is 'found in England only at the main trading centres and important royal or religious centres'. The Anglian stone cross fragment lacks a context, and why 'there is a distinct possibility that W h a n a m Percy may form one of the small family monastic sites that are known to have existed in the middle Saxon period' (p. 84) is not at all clear. I have two, related, minor criticisms of the book. Its specifically British usage of 'early medieval' for 'Norman' rather than 'Saxon' may be confusing to international readers. Also a section on W h a n a m Percy in the context of 116 Reviews European medieval archaeology is desirable, especially as the Danish village excavations of Axel Steensberg seem to have been initially inspirational to the Wharram Percy excavators. Wharram Percy deserted medieval village has been developed as an English Heritage site for visitors, as is explained in the book. Located within thirty kilometres of York, it thus provides a rural medieval counterpart to the Jorvik Viking Centre which is the enduring outcome of another outstanding English medieval archaeological excavation. Lynette Olson Department of History University of Sydney Berger, Harry, jr., Revisionary play: studies in the Spenserian dynamics, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1988; paper; pp. 494; R.R.P. US$14.95. In 1957 Harry Berger, Jr. published The allegorical temper, a full-length study of Book II of The Faerie Queene based upon his doctoral dissertation, and in 1968 he edited Spenser: a collection ofcritical essays. Both works have been accorded canonical status within the outstanding corpus of Spenser scholarship which emerged in the 1960s and '70s. Revisionary play is divided into two sections. Thefirstbringstogethereleven critical articles on The Faerie Queene which were originally published between 1961 and 1971 in such prestigious journals as Studies in...