One of the most commonly acknowledged forms of historical nicknames are those applied to monarchs – Charles the Bald, Bloody Mary, Robert the Bruce etc. The Anglo-Saxons are no exception, and we find some impressive examples in the written sources. A question of terminology: Royal ‘Nicknames’ are traditionally referred to as ‘Epithets’ – descriptive or […]
A brief look into learning, understanding and translating four major early medieval languages – Latin, Old English, Old Norse, and Old French. Here you’ll find a list of beginners books and free online resources, including dictionaries. #ComissionsEarned (This post includes Amazon Affiliate links) – As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. A historian […]
Occasionally, you come across a resource that is so incredibly good, it amazes you that it’s free. The Yale Early Medieval Lecture Series (available free on Youtube) is one of these cases, and is an amazing contribution by the Yale outreach programme to leveling the playing-field and getting everyone access to the humanities. You can […]
Bored in lockdown or at work? Try designing your own Bayeux Tapestry! https://htck.github.io/bayeux/#!/ A new app doing the rounds on Twitter lets you drag and drop individuals, animals, buildings and more from the original tapestry into new scenarios and scenes. I can’t find anything more about the creators than that they’re called Leonard, Mathieu and […]
Continuing the search for free online resources for those interested in history, this week we take a look at the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds, a database of some of the archaeological coin evidence from England. Numismatics, the study of coins and currency, is a crucial part of archaeology, but one that I am […]
The British Museum has a wonderful collection of online resources on the Sutton Hoo finds that can be explored from your computer. One of the things I’ve missed most in lockdown has been going to museums. However, it’s important to remember that museums have been putting in a great effort to digitise and engage with […]
Food is a universal, but frequently invisible to the historian. What and how did people of the past eat? Do these questions vary by ‘class’, gender, age etc. In the first of these Deep-Dives into smaller topics of early medieval history, we’ve going to approach this broadly by looking at the food consumption of the […]
How did the elite in Anglo-Saxon England use textiles and clothes to express their status and power? As an archaeologist, can we ever find evidence of this material culture, or is it all hypothetical? We looked briefly before at how the thegnly class in Anglo-Saxon England sought to distinguish themselves from the masses through a […]
How did rich late ‘Anglo-Saxons’ live? Can their use of buildings and shape tell us about how they viewed themselves, and how they maintained their power? In the final part of the series discussing how Anglo-Saxon thegns expressed their power and status, after examining diet and textile use, we move onto the biggest archaeological category […]
The poetry of ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ holds an interesting middle-ground in public perception. On the one-hand Beowulf is perhaps the single most famous piece of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural output, of any form. Tolkien famously translated it, as did Heaney, and there was that terrible movie in the 2000s that we try and forget… However, the sheer quantity […]
Conspiracy Theorists are the bane of the academic. After years of research, experimentation and peer-review, some random person on the internet appears and instantly disregards your work, choosing to accept a sinister cover-up instead. I’ve written before about how these conspiracy theories can often be actively damaging and dangerous, rather than simply laughable. But today, […]
Archaeology is a fascinating subject, but is often quite difficult to get into. There’s an awful lot of complex jargon associated with it, scientific wizardry, and illegible publications. However, with a little bit of background reading, it’s absolutely possible for even the most casual enthusiast to develop a deep and complex understanding of the fundamental […]
This week, I thought I’d run through the beginnings of a broader introduction to archaeological theory I have planned. The focus here is on the so-called ‘New’ or Processual Archaeology – one of several competing ways to ‘do’ archaeology. What was it, how was it different, and was it in fact ‘New’? The text here […]
Food is a universal, but frequently invisible to the historian. What and how did people of the past eat? Do these questions vary by ‘class’, gender, age etc. In the first of these Deep-Dives into smaller topics of early medieval history, we’ve going to approach this broadly by looking at the food consumption of the […]