The Later Medieval Period: AD 1000-1500

The millennium year - AD 1000 - was a significant one in European cultural history. There was a real fear in many circles that the anniversary of Christ’s death would be marked by the fulfillment of the prophecies in the Book of Revelations. The year passed without incident, and medieval churchmen across Europe marked the deliverance of the world from apocalyptic destruction by building churches at an astonishing rate. The great church building, Romanesque and Gothic, represents only one high-profile element in the archaeological canvas of later medieval Europe, as we will see, but its prominence in our thinking about the period - a period for which George Duby coined the phrase ‘The Age of the

Cathedrals’ (1981) - reflects the penetration by Christianity of all aspects of later medieval life in northern and western Europe. Having said that, there is a need, as yet generally unfulfilled at the level of synthesis, to factor into the medieval archaeology of Europe the impact of Islam: a kiln of Islamic tradition among the thirteenth-century workshops of Sainte-Barbe in Marseille, for example, is but one indicator among many of the movements of craftsmen and craft-knowledge from the Arab world to the Christian, while Kufic inscriptions on the walls of twelfth-century southern French churches, such as the cathedral in Le Puy, suggest more subtle interactions.

Farm, Industry, Market

In many cultural pursuits the patterns established before AD 1000 simply continued thereafter. But steady population increase prior to the fourteenth century had a growing impact on all of them. That impact is perhaps most evident archaeologically in the landscapes of rural farming communities on the one hand, and of urban mercantile communities on the other.

The output requirements of rural communal agriculture in this period of enlarging population led to a massive intensification of arable farming in environments suited to cereal growing. Technology made that intensification possible within the manorial economy. The heavy plow, mounted on wheels and pulled by a team of (usually eight) draft animals, either horses or oxen, had been known in Roman and earlier medieval times, and was universal by the thirteenth century. The large rural workforce had a sufficient supply of iron-made tools (plows, harrows, and so on) to open up to cultivation land that had hitherto been under forest. The taking in of new land -‘assarting’ in English - is most dramatically represented by the forest villages of Germany with their long, sinuous, fields snaking across land that had been newly cleared.

Turning to urbanism, the later medieval physical expansion of old towns of Roman origin was exceeded by the foundation of brand new towns, complete with planned marketplaces, regularly arranged streets with properties of equal width along them, and town walls. New town foundation was an economic necessity everywhere in Europe, and was made possible by the agricultural endeavors in the countryside. As defensible places, new towns had roles in regional defense, as, for example, the bastides established by the English in southwestern France in the thirteenth century. Finally, new town foundation was also an agent of colonization in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries: because town occupancy was attractive to medieval rural dwellers, the English founded new towns in Ireland in order to entice settlers to their new colony there, and the Germans did exactly the same in the Slavic lands on the other side of Europe.

One definition of ‘town’ is that it is a place where the majority of inhabitants are not engaged primarily in agricultural production but are involved in the so-called ‘secondary’ and ‘tertiary’ industries of manufacturing, commerce, and so on. Many medieval industries, both before and after AD 1000, were rural rather than urban, however. Availability of raw material was one factor in their location. Extractive industries were rural by their nature. Unless raw material, once obtained, could be easily transported to urban places, manufacturing industries tended to stay in the countryside, often with settlements of specialized workers developing around them, as in the pottery-producing Saintonge area of western France, for example. In any case, most industries required copious amounts of firewood, and industrial operations intended to serve regional markets required it in vast amounts. Not only was the wood scarce in already built-up areas, but kilns and furnaces were fire hazards.

The availability of water for power and transport was also influential in determining industry location. Urban places generally had water, but industry often polluted it, so it is no coincidence that we find certain urban (or, more correctly sub-urban) industries like tanning at places where water flows away from settlements.

Pottery Of all the medieval industries, the ceramic industry is probably the best known. It is certainly the industry that leaves the strongest imprint in the archaeological record. Northern and western Europe were pottery-making and pottery-using right through the ‘middle ages’ (although there were aceramic pockets, such as early medieval Ireland), and each region had its own pottery-making traditions that evolved through time. Some sites or places of production had histories of activity over a millennium: Mayen in the German Eifel, for example, was one of many places where there was continuous pottery production from Roman to later medieval times. Because pottery has almost no recycling value, broken sherds enter the archaeological record as unmodified cultural indicators. By-sight analysis often allows identifications of places of origin: for example, thirteenth-century pots from Saintonge, mentioned above, can be easily identified in archaeological levels in Britain and Ireland by their distinctive shapes and by their white or buff color (the result of being made with the local, low-iron, fine clay). Scientific analysis of ceramic material - particularly Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis, or INAA - allows actual production places to be identified.

Most medieval pottery is simple earthenware: it is clay pottery, made by hand or wheel. Wheel-turned earthenware was present in the Roman world but its manufacture and use was discontinuous in large parts of Europe. By the start of the later medieval period (as defined here) it was common again, and from the twelfth century it was everywhere. The clay for earthenware was literally dug out of the ground, made pliable, had materials (temper) added to it for stabilization in the kiln, and was then fired slowly. The heat of the firing determined hardness and imperviousness. Although generalization is dangerous given the sheer quantity and diversity of ceramic material found in northwestern Europe, later medieval ceramics were invariably glazed. Glaze is a lead-based transparent vitreous film on the surface of pottery, and its purpose is both decorative and functional: the colors are attractive and it largely prevents porosity. Glaze was applied in different ways before firing: sometimes vessels were completely immersed in it, and at other times it was applied by brush or was dripped over the inverted vessels as they were stacked in readiness for firing. Just as the color of the ceramic was determined by the type of clay used, the color of the glaze was determined by added oxides: iron oxides made them yellow or red, copper made them green, cobalt blue, and antimony yellow.

Prestige vessels - tableware - were glazed externally, but cooking wares were sometimes only glazed on the inside to increase their imperviousness. On the whole, the use of ceramic cooking vessels actually declined around the fourteenth century as more efficient and larger capacity metal vessels (such as cauldrons) came into use. By contrast, the range of serving/ consuming vessels increased, so that by the end of the ‘middle ages’, there were many ceramic ‘factories’ producing high-quality plates and dishes. It was only after the end of the ‘middle ages’ - the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - that ‘slipware’ and porcelain (or ‘china’) was made in northwestern Europe.

The Hanseatic League The archaeology and socioeconomic history of late medieval northern Europe is dominated by the Hanseatic League, a group of towns around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea which formed a regional commercial and manufacturing cooperative from the middle of the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth. Hanse means fellowship, and it was applied in this context to allude to mercantile guilds. The League towns were distributed between the

Netherlands in the west and Estonia in the northeast, and were mainly port towns, even if their access to the sea was by navigable river. There were also communities of Hansa merchants in port cities outside this area (such as London). The development of the League and its control over regional commerce was greatly aided by the development of a new type of large capacity seafaring vessel, the cog.

Lubeck was the main Hansa town. A new town founded in 1158, it achieved regional prominence in the 1220s and 1230s when its laws - its town constitution, in other words - were adopted by other towns within the region, notably Hamburg. The center of Lubeck quickly became a mercantile enclave, with a market area, specialized shops and craft areas, a town hall, merchant houses, warehouses, and a Kaufmannskirche or merchants’ church, designed as much for mercantile business as for worship. In its layout and architecture, Liibeck can be regarded as a typical Hansa town.

No artifact is more associated with the Hansa confederation than the stoneware vessel. Stoneware is earthenware that is fired at such great heat (1200 °C and upward) that it is impervious to water. Not all clays lend themselves to this: the most suitable clays were in Saxony and the Rhineland, which is where the type originated. Stoneware was distributed widely across Europe, even to the Mediterranean, thanks to the influence of the Hanseatic League. Glaze, usually made of salt, was applied towards the end of the firing process so that the ceramic body and the glaze fused as one. Stoneware is the Hansa ceramic par excellence.

Castles

Castle-building began before AD 1000, as we have noted, but survivals of that period are quite rare. The great phase of castle-construction begins in the second half of the eleventh century and it continues uninterrupted to at least the end of the ‘middle ages’. Indeed, newly built high-status private buildings were still being described as castles in the 1700s across much of northern Europe.

The history of the castle as a monument-type has long been discussed in terms of a tension between defensibility and domesticity. Castles are traditionally understood by scholars to have been primarily military structures, but they are also understood to have been residences, equipped for comfortable living by lords and their inner households. Castle-scholars - castellologists - across both northern and western Europe have generally argued that prior to the fourteenth century or thereabouts, castles were more military than domestic, reflecting the fact that power was maintained within feudal society by military force or persuasion. They have also argued that, notwithstanding the widespread use of gunpowder, changes in the social and political environments in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shifted the emphasis in castle design toward greater domestic comfort and a higher level of status display. In this way of thinking, the late thirteenth century is identified as the period when castle building was at its peak. Thus, the castles of Edward I in north Wales - Caernarvon, Harlech, Conway, and the unfinished Beaumaris - are regarded in many circles as the greatest of all European medieval castles because they offered high levels of comfort (for their royal patron and his court) within near-impregnable architectural designs.

Recent years have seen shifts in this thinking among some archaeologists. The overtly military interpretation of pre-1300 and later castles has been questioned, and other aspects - their symbolism, the rituals of domestic life within them - have come into focus instead. Much of the groundbreaking work in this regard has come from Britain, where, for example, archaeologists now regard the watery landscapes that surround castles not as defensive barriers but as early attempts at aesthetic landscape planning of a type that is more frequently associated with the Renaissance.

Archaeological studies of stone castles have concentrated on fabric; excavation can yield lost walls but the upstanding walls tell us the most. The one type of medieval castle for which excavation is singularly well suited is the timber-and-earth castle, a type that is pan-European in distribution and usually dates from the eleventh or twelfth century.

There are different types of timber-and-earth castles, or ‘timber castle’ as some describe it. The best-known type is the motte or motte-castle; the motte-and-bailey castle is a subcategory of this. The motte-castle’s main feature is a tall earthen mound, steep-sided and flat-topped in profile. The timber building or buildings stood on this mound, but needless to say these do not survive and their plans are retrievable only by excavation. The word motte itself, sometimes rendered as mota or motta, originally signified a small block of land, as in the ninth century in north Italy, but by the middle of the twelfth century it was mainly being used to describe the mounded component of a castle, whether that mound was a natural feature or was manmade. The term bailey, which refers to the courtyard area beside a motte or outside a central citadel within a castle complex, is regarded as the modern recension of ballium in Latin, and baile in the English language of the Norman period.

The consistency with which mottes were built by medieval societies of the eleventh and twelfth centuries - from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, and from west of the Shannon in Ireland to east of the Elbe in central Europe - is quite extraordinary. The motte is almost as ubiquitous as Romanesque architecture in the Europe of the later 1000s and 1100s. The tried-and-trusted practical value of the castle mound as a high and well-drained vantage point may have been behind its great popularity, and it might also have acquired some sort of iconic status as part of the visual apparatus of feudal lordship. Moreover, the act of building a motte - of stripping land, moving soil, imitating a natural hill - may have been imbued with as much symbolic significance as the finished product, since it was the actual practical demonstration of a lord’s control over natural and human resources.

Motte origins across this great geographic sweep are frustratingly fugitive. The documentary record is not explicit enough to help us discover when, where, or why the motte first appeared, and too few sites have been excavated. It has been argued that mottes first appeared in the tenth century but we only really know them from the eleventh. It is possible that the motte was the end result of a process of morphological development from a simpler form of timber-and-earth monument, driven perhaps by a need for greater defense in increasingly restless times. To support this we could cite the evidence from the German site known as Der Husterknupp where there was a gradual heightening of an earthwork between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries until it eventually looked like a motte. On the other hand, it could be equally argued that the motte had actually been ‘invented’ as a fully-fledged type by at least the start of the eleventh century.

Monasteries and Cathedrals

Among the many achievements of the late eighth - and ninth-century Carolingians, the one which stands out most boldly in the archaeological record may be the architectural. The first great architectural style of the later medieval period, the Romanesque (c.1050-1150), developed in part out of Carolingian architecture; at very least, the Carolingians showed how ancient Roman architectural forms could be reshaped, and in doing so they provided a blueprint for post-AD 1000 builders.

The place of origin of the round-arched style that we know as Romanesque is disputed, as indeed is the very idea that Romanesque is a single style to begin with. What is clear, though, is that by AD 1100 hundreds of new ecclesiastical buildings had been erected in Spain, northern Italy, France, Germany, and England, all of them revealing an obvious ancestral debt to Roman buildings of eight centuries earlier.

Included in these were cathedrals, parish churches and, especially, monasteries.

The greatest of all monasteries of the period was Cluny in Burgundy. This was founded in 910 as a Benedictine monastery. During the tenth century its brethren adapted their Benedictine regulations to their own needs and the monastery suddenly became the center of a new monastic movement: the Cluniac. Their monastery was simply vast. Twice they had to replace their church with a bigger structure, and eventually (in 1130) they ended up with the largest church ever built in northwestern Europe. French revolutionaries demolished almost all of the church and monastery between 1800 and 1810, but the American scholar Kenneth Conant excavated large parts of the site in the mid-twentieth century and revealed its history. Conant’s work at Romanesque Cluny is among the most famous excavations of a medieval European site.

Each of the countries of medieval northern and western Europe had its own particular national tradition of Romanesque architecture, and there were also regional traditions within those countries. The funding for this explosion of new architecture came from different sources. Local royal patronage and international pilgrim traffic account for some of it. These building projects would not have been possible if contemporary economies had not also been operating so successfully.

In the second quarter of the twelfth century, church builders in the region around Paris developed a new architecture: the pointed-arch style known as Gothic. St Denis, the royal abbey church of France, was the first building in which it was used. Over the course of the following century the Paris Basin, with Chartres, Notre-Dame-de-Paris, Bourges, Beauvais, and others, became a great canvas for the display of Gothic architecture. That this same region was exceptionally rich agriculturally is no coincidence.

Gothic spread outwards from northeastern France and by the mid-thirteenth century it was the established style almost everywhere for new ecclesiastical buildings. As with Romanesque before it, there were national regional traditions of Gothic. In fact, ethnic and political identities - English, French, German - were articulated more clearly through Gothic architecture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than had been the case with Romanesque.

Gothic’s debt to the Roman past was much less obvious than Romanesque’s. It was a new creation of the ‘middle ages’. Were one looking for a symbol of the end of the ‘middle ages’ around the start of the sixteenth century, one could choose the replacement of Gothic, the quintessential medieval style, with the neo-Classical style of the Renaissance.

See also: Europe, Northern and Western: Iron Age; Europe, South: Medieval and Post-Medieval; Europe, South: Rome; Europe, West: Historical Archaeology in Britain; Historical Archaeology in Ireland; Exchange Systems.