The medieval period is generally divided into three phases - Early, Central, or High, and Late - but there is little consensus on their date ranges. For the purpose of this review of northern and western Europe, we will simply divide the period into two: an earlier phase to AD 1000 and a later phase to AD 1500.
The Age of Migrations
The archaeology of that earlier period can really only be understood by reference to the Roman period that preceded it. The fifth century was unquestionably a century of rupture, of broken continuity. The archaeological evidence for this is plentiful and diverse: excavations in old Roman towns, for example, often reveal actual gaps in occupation around the fifth century, while gold coinage, previously the staple of the empire, was no longer produced or circulated in the fifth century (and when it was minted again in the sixth century, it owed more stylistically to contemporary Byzantine coinage than to older Roman coinage, thereby underscoring the discontinuity).
But there was also considerable continuity. Continuity is entirely to be expected given that many Germanic people lived with the imperial boundaries prior to AD 400, while Romanized populations continued to live within those former boundaries after the collapse. The archaeological evidence for continuity is, again, very diverse and plentiful. At a local level, for example, Roman-type wheel-turned pottery continued to be made in the Rhine-Meuse valley, even though this was under the control of Germanic people whose pottery vessels were handmade. Continuities are also manifest at a more international level. Although it has often been assumed that one consequence of the collapse of the empire was the loss to northern and western Europeans of the far-flung trade partners they had acquired in Roman times, archaeologists have been able to show how Roman-origin long-distance trade routes remained open and in operation. We know, for example, that raw glass from the former Roman provinces of Egypt and Palestine was still being exported to the western Mediterranean and northwestern Europe during the post-Roman (i. e., early medieval) period, and that it was not until the late eighth century that western Europeans used glass that was manufactured in western Europe.
One hugely important commodity that was moved along these long-distance routes is known historically but is almost invisible in the archaeological: the slave. It is reasonable to imagine that the vessels that carried wine, fur, olives, hides, and other commodities along the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and North Sea shipping lanes were also transporting slaves.
The shift from Roman rule to Germanic rule in the fifth century had social and economic implications everywhere, not least in northern and western Europe. In terms of archaeology, towns and villas had been central to territorial organization and to patterns of production and consumption under the Romans. Under Germanic rulers, by contrast, unenclosed, irregular, agglomerations of houses seem to have been the dominant settlements, and in many areas they were associated with a greater amount of pastoral farming than had been the case under the Romans. These agglomerations, generally comprised of timber-built houses and sunken-floor buildings (grUbenhauser), had neither the spatial regularity nor the permanency of towns or villages. Indeed, most of them were abandoned within a few centuries of their creation, to be replaced toward the end of the millennium by the towns and villages that are still occupied in the landscapes of modern northwestern Europe. These early settlements do testify, however, to societies that were well above subsistence level, if also perhaps below the average comfort levels of their Roman predecessors.
Wics and Christianity
Archaeological evidence of a rebound towards full productive exploitation of economic resources on a par with that of the Romans is available from the later seventh century.
The archaeological evidence from the newly established wics (specialized coastal settlements for trade and even some manufacturing, the largest examples of which were Ipswich, Southampton, London, Quentovic, Dorstad, and Birka) testifies to intense, localized, economic and commercial activity in seventh - and eighth-century northwestern Europe; indeed, when the Vikings took to the region’s seas a little later (in the late 700s and early 800s), they would have been very familiar with the traffic in valuable goods over the previous century and a half, and probably also with its destinations.
The trade activity around the wics was not only local, however: Michael McCormick, in a groundbreaking study that combines history and archaeology, has demonstrated how, contra earlier views, northern and western Europe also continued to be linked to the Mediterranean through the relic-trade, and the movements of both coinage and slaves. To illustrate the importance of the wics in the international network of relations, one need only scrutinize the contents of the grave at Sutton Hoo of the East Anglian king Raedwald (died 624-5): the assorted overseas material testifies to contacts between eastern England and the Celtic West, Francia, Scandinavia, and the east Mediterranean, and the nearby wic of Ipswich was probably the point of entry.
The wics are also important because they were to some degree planned settlements; in other words, they did not evolve but were brand new settlements laid out according to some predetermined spatial plan, complete with boundary markers and designated use-zones. We must imagine that people hitherto living in the countryside relocated by choice, or more likely were relocated with no choice, to these new settlements, under the watchful eyes of local kings. Given that the wics were places of specialized, nonagricultural activity, we must imagine also that the same local kings ensured that contemporary rural farmland kept them supplied with food. It is significant in this context that there is increasing archaeological evidence from different parts of northwestern Europe, particularly England, for nucleated rural settlements of the seventh century being laid out anew with some degree of spatial regularity. The archaeological evidence suggests, then, a controlled reorganization of the landscape with a view to increased productivity.
The seventh century was also a period of sustained conversion (or, more accurately, reconversion) of the northern half of Europe to Christianity. The Germanic migrants of the fifth century had been pagan. Under their polity Christianity disappears from our record across much of northern and western Europe, only to reappear two centuries later as the dominant religion once again. The most famous exception to the fifth-century shift from Christian to pagan is Ireland, where the shift was the other way around.
The hitherto pagan Irish were first subjected to Christian missionary activity in the fifth century; ironically, that activity came mainly from Christian Roman Britain, just as the Romans were ceding control to the new pagan Anglo-Saxon immigrants. An extraordinarily rich insular Christian tradition of art, literature, and learning developed in Ireland thereafter, sustained by the patronage of local kings and by the wealth generated by its proto-urban monasteries. Although their influence has probably been exaggerated, Irish missionaries played an important role in the reintroduction of Christianity to parts of Europe in the late sixth and seventh centuries.
An enduring paradox of early medieval Christianity in Ireland is that its great works of art - free-standing, sculpture-covered, monumental stone crosses (High Crosses), illuminated gospel books (such as the Book of Kells), and rich altar plate (such as the Ardagh Chalice) - were produced to serve a Church which invested very little in built fabric: contemporary Irish churches were small, ill-lit buildings, capable at best of holding no more than several dozen people at a time. Viking raids in the late eighth and early ninth centuries certainly disrupted the pattern of production at church sites in Ireland, but their impact was not fatal. In fact, the Viking contribution to medieval Irish civilization was ultimately very positive: communities of Vikings settled permanently in coastal Ireland in the early tenth century, establishing new towns (such as Dublin), and later converting to Christianity and assimilating thoroughly with the native population.
Carolingian and Later Europe
The first sustained period of economic prosperity in post-Roman northwestern continental Europe came a little later in the 800s, when much of the region was under the rule of Charlemagne and his successor Carolingian emperors. Although he was a Frank, and therefore a descendent of one of the fifth-century Germanic migrant groups, Charlemagne fashioned himself as a Roman emperor and had himself crowned as one on Christmas Day AD 800. Thus, the connection with the Roman world was still alive four centuries after the fall of Rome itself.
Although the Carolingians only held power over part of the larger geographical area of northwestern Europe, in many respects they represent the continent’s principal bridge between antiquity and the peak centuries of the ‘middle ages’. Their landlords, farmers, industrialists, and builders shaped the future. On their great agricultural estates or manors, for example, they used heavy plows, crop rotation, and watermill-aided grain processing, thus setting in train the system of farming that would later feed the continent when population figures soared in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They replaced gold with silver as the material for coinage, and silver remained the currency standard until the twelfth century (when its debasement by copper provoked a return to gold). Carolingian builders also took
The old Roman basilical form of church and remodeled it in a way that formed the basis of later, post-1000 AD Romanesque architecture, as we will see below.
By the close of the first millennium AD, and thanks in no small measure to the innovations of the Caro-lingian era, the form of sociopolitical organization that we describe as feudalism had developed. Feudalism has long been a very contentious concept among historians of medieval Europe, with some arguing that it is a misleading concept and others defending its general value but arguing that its nature differed from one part of Europe to another. In its most basic form a feudal society is hierarchical, obligation-based, and militarized, with different grades of peasants obliged to provide labor services to those above them on the social pyramid, and the lords obliged to provide land and military protection to those below them in status.
Among archaeologists, medieval feudalism is generally regarded as represented by private castles on the one hand and large agricultural estates with communal farming and planned market villages on the other. Castle building by local lords had certainly begun by the tenth century, especially in the former Carolingian territories in France: at Dousi-la-Fontaine in Anjou, for example, a castle-hall dating from the tenth century was discovered in excavation beneath an eleventh-century castle mound. The first fully planned villages are more difficult to date, and it is difficult to generalize from one part of northwestern Europe to another, but there is firm evidence now that the process began in the ninth and tenth centuries, if not as far back as the seventh (as we noted above). The role of the Church in village formation from the tenth century is certainly critical, since churchyard burial became the norm for local communities in the north and west in that very century.
World History
