Environmental information from place-names has largely been overlooked by geoarchaeologists and fluvial geomorphologists in analyses of the depositional histories of rivers and floodplains. Here, new flood chronologies for the rivers Teme, Severn, and Wye are presented, modelled from stable river sections excavated at Broadwas, Buildwas, and Rotherwas. These are connected by the Old English term *wæsse, interpreted as ‘land by a meandering river which floods and drains quickly’. The results reveal that, in all three places, flooding during the early medieval period occurred more frequently between AD 350–700 than between AD 700–1100, but that over time each river's flooding regime became more complex including high magnitude single events. In the sampled locations, the fluvial dynamics of localized flood events had much in common, and almost certainly differed in nature from other sections of their rivers, refining our understanding of the precise nature of flooding which their names sought to communicate. This study shows how the toponymic record can be helpful in the long-term reconstruction of historic river activity and for our understanding of past human perceptions of riverine environments.
This chapter provides an interdisciplinary, scene-setting review of the current state of knowledge in the field of early medieval social complexity and sets out an agenda for future work in this topical area. While much previous work in this field tends to focus on comparisons with the classical world, this contribution emphasises the uniqueness of early medieval modes of social organisation. Introductions are provided to the study of geographies of power through archaeological analyses, vocabularies of power drawing on place-name evidence and notions of law and its enactment at assembly sites from written sources. It is argued that places where power was enacted in a period of non-urban social and administrative complexity must be understood on their own terms. The robusticity and flexibility of early medieval networks of power is also emphasised in the context of a comparative discussion ranging across the European area.
This chapter asks what enquiries might reasonably be made of the place-name record in order to further our understanding (1) of movements to England in the medieval millennium, and (2) of the process by which incoming communities negotiated the process of acculturation, retaining or giving up identity traits—including language—which marked these groups as distinctive or coherent. A response to these broad questions is attempted through detailed methodological discussion and a focus on the place-names of Old Norse origin which arose as a result of Scandinavian activities in England, from the late ninth to eleventh centuries.
This article examines heroic poetry in medieval England, focusing on Widsith, Deor, Waldere, The Finnsburh Fragment, and Beowulf. It explains that these poems take as their subject figures, historical or imagined, from the time of the Germanic migrations or heroic age: that period from the fourth to sixth centuries characterized by the movement of various peoples into areas which were previously under Roman control. It describes how these poems depicted heroic-age figures and events and shows how poets from different times and places, working within different literary traditions, make significantly different choices in presenting the same basic material.
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