Introduction

Europe is generally regarded as having five well-defined major historic regions: the north, the west, the east, the south (the Mediterranean), and the center or middle. Northern Europe is comprised of the Low Countries, Germany, Poland, Finland, the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), and Scandinavia. It is, in a sense, the northern equivalent of the Mediterranean, in that these lands encircle the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Even though the region was never a single political entity, the histories of these lands, individually and collectively, revolve around that very large and continuous body of water. Western Europe is comprised mainly of Iberia, France, and the major off-shore islands of Britain and Ireland. Here too a sea - in this case the Atlantic Ocean - provided a natural geographic unity. Like northern Europe, this region was never politically unified either; on the contrary, its medieval and early modern history is marked by regional conflicts in which England usually stood alone. Where Europe’s northern seas imparted some degree of cultural unity to their adjoining landmasses, there has been much less cultural unity along the Atlantic seaboard.

In this overview we will look at two general issues - chronology and historiography/methodology - before recounting the development of medieval northern and western Europe as revealed by archaeological evidence.

Chronology

The phrases ‘medieval’ and ‘middle ages’ are relatively modern inventions. A ‘middle age’ was first identified by the Italian scholar Flavio Biondo in the early fifteenth century, and was used with reference to the period of European history that had ended just before the Italian Renaissance. The associated adjective ‘medieval’ is of more recent vintage, having been coined in the eighteenth century.

When did the medieval period begin and end? More precisely, given that the terminology is a post facto invention, what are the dates that historians and archaeologists regard as marking the start and end of the period? The answer varies from one part of Europe to another, as each European country has its own historical trajectory, but there is general consensus that the period lasted for about 1000 years across most of the continent and was framed by the early fifth century AD at one end and by the early sixteenth century AD at the other.

The Birth of the Middle Ages

Most scholars maintain that the collapse of the western Roman empire at the start of the fifth century was the event that began the period; a cross-disciplinary European Science Foundation project in the 1990s entitled The Transformation of the Roman World and the Emergence of Early Medieval Europe reflected this view. That collapse was a complex process that began in the third century, but its most dramatic moments came in the early 400s as Germanic peoples - ‘barbarians’, as the Romans described them unflatteringly - spilled over the empire’s boundaries, sometimes taking land by force. As recently as 30 years ago it was fashionable in academic circles to describe that immediate post-Roman period in the western half of Europe as ‘the Dark Age(s)’. This terminology reflected the view that the Germanic peoples, who were non-Christian and illiterate, extinguished the bright light of the empire, casting Europe into darkness. Today, of course, the cultural sophistication of the Germanic populations is universally appreciated on its own terms, and they are celebrated as medieval Europe's founding population. The abandonment of the term Dark Age reflects our understanding of their critical role in the shaping of Europe over the following millennium (see Europe, Northern and Western: Iron Age; Europe, South: Rome).

It should be noted that the fifth century is less appropriate as the starting date for the medieval period in those areas around the edges of northwestern Europe that had not been under Roman control. Scandinavia, for example, was prehistoric in the fifth century. Indeed, judging by an authoritative encyclopedia of Scandinavia's medieval history and archaeology, scholars in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden regard the medieval period as beginning in, respectively, the late 800s, the late 900s, and the mid-1000s. Judging by this authority, Scandinavian scholars do not describe the period in which the region’s Viking inhabitants expanded overseas - the late eighth and ninth centuries - as part of the ‘middle ages', even though the Viking raids and settlements overseas are described as part of medieval history elsewhere.

The End of the Middle Ages

Turning to the other end of the chronological scale, the period between 1500 and 1550 is favored by historians as the end phase of the ‘middle ages' in both the northern and western regions of Europe. This chronology is also generally accepted by archaeologists, even though many medieval cultural practices are known to have continued on. There are, briefly, four reasons why the early sixteenth century has such significance: Italian Renaissance thinking spread northwards and westwards (a phenomenon of particular interest in France), Protestantism gripped Northern Europe, the New World was discovered, and finally, feudalism, which was the dominant mode of social organization in the ‘middle ages’, gave way to capitalism. Although each of these is, strictly speaking, an historical phenomenon, each impacted on the material conditions of life and so each is manifest in the archaeological record.