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Wessex

Author: HADRIAN. COOK

Publisher:

Published: 2024-04-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781803275352

Wessex is famous for its coasts, heaths, woodlands, chalk downland, limestone hills and gorges, settlements and farmed vales. This book provides an account of the physical form, development and operation of its landscape as it was shaped by our ancestors. Constituting no modern political entity, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom and archaeological province of 'Wessex' may be defined by its natural resources and connectivity by both land and sea, for its borders include the English Channel and Severn Estuary. Following the tundra environments that dominated south of the ice sheets during the past two million years, the Wessex area experienced dramatic changes in climate, something reflected in its soils and vegetation cover. Humans hunted in the 'wildwood' established after the Ice Age, then cleared the land for agriculture and settlement in a 6,000 year old process. In more recent times, areas of cultural importance and nature conservation have been established as well as a thriving economy based largely on natural resources, trade and manufactures. The region comprises the counties of Hampshire (including the Isle of Wight), Dorset, Wiltshire, historic Somerset, and Berkshire. Whether through Thomas Hardy, a water company service area, or a royal title, Wessex has lingered in the imagination and secured its place in the construction of English history. The reader is taken through not only the physical landscape, but also the human institutions that have affected its evolution, including manors, great estates, monasteries and hunting forests; major themes include the development of agriculture, settlements, industry and transport.

The Landscape of Wessex

Author: J. H. Bettey

Publisher:

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9780239002426

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The Medieval Landscape of Wessex

Author: Michael Aston

Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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Wessex formed the heartland of Alfred the Great's kingdom, and continued to wield immense economic power long into the Middle Ages with many extensive and wealthy royal and ecclelesiastical estates. Contributors to this collection of 13 papers on the medieval landscape of Wessex include: B Eagles (The Archaeological evidence for settlement in the 5th to 7th centuries); D Hinton (The archaeology of 8th- to 11th-century Wessex); P Hase (The Church in the Wessex heartlands); D Hooke (The administrative and settlement framework of early medieval Wessex); M Costen (Settlement in Wessex in the 10th century); J Bond (Forests, chases, warrens and parks); J Hare (Agriculture and settlement in Wiltshire and Hampshire); C Lewis (The medieval settlment of Wiltshire); M Hughes (Towns and villages in medieval Hampshire); C Taylor (The regular village plan); M Aston (Medieval settlement in Somerset); S Rippon (Medieval wetland reclamation); R Croft (Protecting medieval settlement sites).

Danes in Wessex

Author: Ryan Lavelle

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2015-11-30

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1782979344

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There have been many studies of the Scandinavians in Britain, but this is the first collection of essays to be devoted solely to their engagement with Wessex. New work on the early Middle Ages, not least the excavations of mass graves associated with the Viking Age in Dorset and Oxford, drew attention to the gaps in our understanding of the wider impact of Scandinavians in areas of Britain not traditionally associated with them. Here, a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to the problems of their study is presented. While there may not have been the same degree of impact, discernible particularly in place-names and archaeology, as in those areas of Britain which had substantial influxes of Scandinavian settlers, Wessex was a major theater of the Viking wars in the reigns of Alfred and Æthelred Unræd. Two major topics, the Viking wars and the Danish landowning elite, figure strongly in this collection but are shown not to be the sole reasons for the presence of Danes, or items associated with them, in Wessex. Multidisciplinary approaches evoke Vikings and Danes not just through the written record, but through their impact on real and imaginary landscapes and via the objects they owned or produced. The papers raise wider questions too, such as when did aggressive Vikings morph into more acceptable Danes, and what issues of identity were there for natives and incomers in a province whose founders were believed to have also come from North Sea areas, if not from parts of Denmark itself? Readers can continue for themselves aspects of these broader debates that will be stimulated by this fascinating and significant series of studies by both established scholars and new researchers.

The Land of the English Kin

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 717

ISBN-13: 9004421890

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This volume draws together a series of papers that present some of the most up-to-date thinking on the history, archaeology and toponymy of Wessex and Anglo-Saxon England more broadly. In honour of one of early medieval European scholarship’s most illustrious doyennes, no less than twenty-nine contributions demonstrate the indelible impression Barbara Yorke’s work has made on her peers and a generation of new scholars, some of whom have benefitted directly from her tutorage. From the identities that emerged in the immediate post-Roman period, through to the development of kingdoms, the role of the church, and impacts felt beyond the eleventh century, the rich and diverse character of the studies presented here are testimony to the versatility and extensive range of the honorand’s contribution to the academic field.

Burial, Landscape and Identity in Early Medieval Wessex

Author: Kate Mees

Publisher: Anglo-Saxon Studies

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781783274178

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Multi-disciplinary investigation of Anglo-Saxon funerary traditions. Burial evidence provides the richest record we possess for the centuries following the retreat of Roman authority. The locations and manner in which communities chose to bury their dead, within the constraints of the environmentaland social milieu, reveal much about this transformational era. This book offers a pioneering exploration of the ways in which the cultural and physical environment influenced funerary traditions during the period c. AD 450-850, in the region which came to form the leading Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. This was a diverse landscape rich in ancient remains, in the form of imposing earthworks, enigmatic megaliths and vestiges of Roman occupation. Employing archaeological evidence, complemented by toponymic and documentary sources and elucidated through landscape analysis, the author argues that particular man-made and natural features were consciously selected as foci for funerary events and ritual practice, becoming integral to manifestations of identity and power in early medieval society. Kate Mees is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University.

Clothing and Landscape in Victorian England

Author: Rachel Worth

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-01-30

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 178672345X

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In the context of this rapidly changing world, Rachel Worth explores the ways in which the clothing of the rural working classes was represented visually in paintings and photographs and by the literary sources of documentary, autobiography and fiction, as well as by the particular pattern of survival and collection by museums of garments of rural provenance. Rachel Worth explores ways in which clothing and how it is represented throws light on wider social and cultural aspects of society, as well as how 'traditional' styles of dress, like men's smock-frocks or women's sun-bonnets, came to be replaced by 'fashion'. Her compelling study, with black & white and colour illustrations, both adds a broader dimension to the history of dress by considering it within the social and cultural context of its time and discusses how clothing enriches our understanding of the social history of the Victorian period.