Polity and Neighbourhood in Early Medieval Europe ed. by Julio Escalona Monge et al. (review)

Between 400 and 1100 ce the nature of a state or polity in medieval Europe was unlike that of the classical ancient states that had gone before and those that were to emerge afterwards in the Renaissance. How states were formed in this period, what their nature was, what forms of property were imagined, and how memory was maintained within them have been questions researchers from the Enlightenment onwards have variously answered in accounts that included collapse and rupture, invasion and continuity. In the last twenty years archaeologists, literary scholars, and historians have sought to re-examine the cultural heritage of this period using innovative combinations of new and old technologies as applied to old and new material. These revisions have produced substantially new if also conflicting accounts. This book is the work of one school of thought that has examined the available material for many parts of Europe again. It presents some of their results. The contributors, reconsidering some critical communities on the periphery of the continent, bring together very different sources to answer questions such as: What makes a neighbourhood? Was the structure established top down or bottom up; what was the balance? How similar were areas that were far apart?

The authors have been working and publishing together for several decades as part of a major Spanish-funded research unit whose role is to compare how communities in very different parts of Europe varied from one another in the ways in which they handled and developed their customs. The approach is comprehensive. Not only do the authors identify the dissimilarities, but they show how the localities all had their own distinctive social characteristics and all had a different relationship to the dominant state that exercised a level of control and power over a wider area. They show how the nature of the neighbourhood modified the authority the dominant government could exercise; local societies retained different degrees of self-rule. The places examined vary from the sophisticated to the elementary in their social ideas. What all the chapters make clear is that there is constant change in the nature of the local culture.

The authors of the individual chapters analyse the topography of their given area and how it often led to unique social and economic structures. Frode Iversen, for example, illuminates the way in which the unstable groups in Norway despite many civil wars eventually developed a unified kingdom in which originally contradictory laws were melded into a more common understanding. Orri Vésteinsson in contrast investigates the world view that underlay the state formation in Iceland, where political power was 'fluid and personal' and constantly shifted from one family to another. Letty Ten Harkel, who is concerned with a very different place, Walcheren—described as 'marginal yet strategic'—a liminal trading area in which there were competing factions, analyses their differing relationships to the Frankish court. Through a reassessment of the ringforts linked to the few literary mentions of the islands, she draws out a possible identity of the local supra-polities—the monasteries and the secular rulers—that confronted one another.

The concluding chapter draws out the common features of the different studies as they examine the relationship between the local and what one might term the central, although the authors prefer the term supralocal. It emphasizes the ways in which the detailed studies show how the local situation could either limit central agency or legitimate the wider rulership. The most significant outcome of the work is the light it sheds on the changing groupings and hierarchy of particular areas. Shifting boundaries and settlements that grow or disappear are shown to be part of the history in which neighbourhoods grow and amalgamate with others to form major polities.