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This thesis presents an investigation into children in medieval England through burial, the most archaeologically-visible evidence for the treatment and conceptualisation of children in life. It examines whether children were distinguished in burial from adults in parish cemeteries of the 10th-16th centuries. Selected cemeteries are analysed in detail to establish whether or not children received different burial treatment to adults. The burials of biologically-immature individuals are compared with the remainder of the burial population, totalling c.4,700 individuals, assessing whether the provision of burial furniture, burial in a shared grave and location of graves varied by age at death. The dissertation includes a discussion of archaeological and historical approaches to children and child burial, both general and medieval, medieval attitudes to children, death and burial, before discussing the case study sites in depth. From this, the methodological issues of undertaking such a study are considered and a sympathetic methodology developed, before the presentation of analysis, discussions and conclusions. I demonstrate that a variety of burial practices were used during the medieval period and that differentiation by age at death occurred. The results show that burials of juveniles are commonly differentiated, particularly infants aged 0-1 year or children aged 12 years or younger, by furniture, inclusion in a multiple burial and location. The thesis concludes that a variety of factors affected how an individual was buried, with age a strong determining factor for those dying at a young age. The influence of age is interpreted as resulting from medieval attitudes to infants, children and adolescents based on active, socially-identified characteristics, indicative of age-based appropriate burial treatment on both familial and community levels due to emotional, social, religious and economic concerns.

Yes / THIS PAPER INVESTIGATES physical impairment and disability in the c 5th to 6th centuries ad in England through a combination of osteological and funerary analyses. A total of 1,261 individuals, 33 of whom had osteologically identifiable physical impairment, from nine early medieval cemeteries were included. The funerary data for all individuals in each cemetery was collected, and the individuals with physical impairment were analysed palaeopathologically. The burial treatment of individuals with and without physical impairment was compared both quantitatively and qualitatively, and patterns within and between cemeteries were explored to investigate contemporary perceptions and understandings of impairment and disability. The results suggest that some people with physical impairment and potential disability were buried with treatment that was arguably positive, while others were buried with treatment that was either normative or potentially negative. This suggests that, in the same way as the rest of the community, individuals with physical impairment and potential disability had a variety of identities (that may or may not have been influenced by their impairment or disability) and could occupy different social spaces/statuses.

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My dissertation examines the presence of the “North of England” in medieval texts, a presence that complicates the recent work of critics who focus upon an emergent nationalism in the Middle Ages. Far removed from the ideological center of the realm in London and derided as a backwards frontier, the North nevertheless maintains a distinctly generative intimacy within the larger realm as the seat of English history—the home of the monk Bede, the “Father of English History”—and as a frontline of defense against Scottish invasion. This often convoluted dynamic of intimacy, I assert, is played out in those literary conversations in which the South derides the North and vice versa—in, for example, the curt admonition of one shepherd that the sheep-stealer Mak in the Wakefield Master’s Second Shepherd’s Play stop speaking in a southern tongue: that he “take out his southern tooth and insert a turd.” The North functioned as a contested geography, a literary character, and a spectral presence in the negotiation of a national identity in both canonical and non-canonical texts including Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, William of Malmesbury’s Latin histories, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Robin Hood ballads of the late Middle Ages. We see this contest, further, in the medieval universities wherein students segregated by their “nacion,” northern or southern, engaged in bloody clashes that, while local, nevertheless resonated at the national level. I argue that the outlying North actually operates as a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the processes of imagining nation; that regionalism is both contained within and constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism. My longue durée historicist approach to texts concerned with the North—either through narrative setting, character, author or textual provenance—ultimately uncovers the emerging dialectic of region and nation within the medieval North-South divide and reveals how England’s nationalist impulse found its greatest expression when it was threatened from within by the uncanny figure of the North. / text

Bibliography: leaves 422-466

Marriage is a subject of great interest to the social historian. However, the marriage of the average medieval English villager is very poorly documented, as it bears little obvious relationship to the great affairs of state. Searching for information on such difficult subjects, many social historians have recently turned to legal records, learning to sift them for the intimate details of daily life. The Register of John Chandler, Dean of Salisbury 1404-17 preserves a rich variety of cases presented to the church courts of early fifteenth-century Salisbury. The questmen, selected from the most respectable men of each village, presented to the court stubborn sinners who had proved incorrigible by the methods of discipline available at lower levels. Most of these cases involved sexual irregularity of some sort, and most of these concerned marriage. This essay is divided into three parts. The historiography examines the work of ecclesiastical, legal and social historians over the last century, especially where the three merge, as when scholars use the records of church courts to write social history. The next two chapters discuss adultery and fornication in Chandler's register. Because of the large number of these cases, it was impractical to address each of them in detail. Thus these chapters rely on statistical analysis and use specific cases as illustrations. The following three chapters address disputed marriages, abandonment and "self-divorce", and marital abuse. Each of these subjects requires a discussion of background and definition of terms, therefore these chapters have longer introductory sections. However, there are few enough examples of these in the register that each can be discussed individually. The Register of John Chandler shows the Church struggling to control the institution of marriage as well as the spiritual lives of the villagers of Salisbury. To the extent that it succeed, it did so because it provided necessary order to the people of Salisbury and because they received it willingly. The average person obeyed the Church and its laws, more or less, but the Church was often unable to enforce its will on the powerful or the stubborn.

Bibliography: leaves 422-466 / x, 466 leaves : ill., maps ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of History, 1986

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Yes / This paper explores experiences and perceptions of physical impairment and disability in early medieval England, contrasting pre-Christian (AD 5th–early 7th centuries) and Christian (AD late 8th–11th centuries) communities through a combination of bioarchaeological, clinical, funerary, historical, and theoretical analyses. By comparing understandings of physical impairment and disability in the pre-Christian and Christian periods, this paper investigates how political rearrangements and the growing power of the Church might have influenced changing contemporary perceptions of physical impairment and disability. This research has found that the funerary treatment of individuals with physical impairment in the pre-Christian period was extremely variable within and between cemeteries, and there is evidence for arguably positive, normative, and potentially negative burial treatment. Although mortuary treatment of Christian-era individuals with physical impairment was somewhat variable, this variation was much more subtle. This reflects the overall Christian-era pattern in burial form, and strongly negative or positive mortuary treatment was not identified among the individuals with physical impairment. Based on this evidence, it is proposed that administrative and judicial standardisation, conversion to Christianity, and the spread of Christian morals and doctrine influenced the reduction in mortuary variability observed in individuals with physical impairment and/or disability in the 8th–11th centuries in England.