Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 240

In 1855 John Mitchell Kemble saw the similarity of some excavated pottery from Stade on the Elbe and pottery from East Anglia. Since then archaeology has played a major role in the study of the historical relations in the early medieval period between Britain and the countries on the other side of the North Sea. Not only the pottery but also the weaponry, the ornaments, the dress and the history review burial rituals of both regions showed a high degree of correspondence in style, technique and origin.

In the field of housing the sunken hut was the common element. But with the expansion of settlement archaeology on the continent since the 1950s and somewhat later in Britain a marked difference appeared. The sunken huts, long seen in England as human dwellings, appeared on the continent to be secondary buildings in farmyards dominated by aisled bipartite longhouses that housed both people and cattle. In due course ground-level buildings were also discovered in England but they averaged only 10 to 12 metres and lacked cattle byres. The roof weight was not supported by double rows of inner posts as in the longhouse, but by wall posts. At the large fourth to sixth century site of Mucking on the Thames, some 200 sunken huts were accompanied by over 50 small wooden buildings, none of them exceeding 15 metres in length and all of them lacking the aisled structure prevailing on the continent in the same period. Why didn’t the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in England in the fourth century build the houses they were used to in their homelands, and why didn’t their descendants in the eighth century follow the general continental fashion of building houses with roof supports set in the wall, with external raking posts and bowed long walls?

Working on the Mucking material and confronted with the apparent anomaly, Helena Hamerow felt the necessity to study in detail the archaeology of the early medieval settlements on the continent. The book under review is the result of her efforts which brought her in personal contact with archaeologists in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and northern France and for which she often had to consult papers in the languages of these countries.

In her analysis of the excavated settlements the author has looked at a number of aspects, devoting separate chapters to the different archaeological approaches, the archaeology of the buildings, the settlement structures, the territorial context, the agrarian production, and the evidence for trade and non-agrarian production. At the end of each chapter she discusses the British evidence. In addition she had all the major settlement plans schematically redrawn. In this way she has made a large body of archaeological information from the continent accessible to British students.

I personally have been closely involved with some of the Dutch excavated settlements dealt with – Wijster, Odoorn, Gasselte – and can assure British readers that Hamerow provides an up-to-date picture of these sites and their interpretation. I am convinced that the same holds good for other informative sites, such as Vorbasse and Nørre Snede in Denmark, Flögeln, Dalem and Feddersen Wierde in Germany, Kootwijk and Gennep in the Netherlands, and Mondeville in France. Few continental archaeologists will have the same overview as the author, and so her book, with its rich list of references to primary sources, will certainly be of great use to them as well. On the other hand, the continental reader interested in British settlement sites must make do with very few illustrations. Mucking and Cowdery’s Down each receive one picture, but where are the plans of, for example, Catholm, Chalton, Linford, West Heslerton, West Stow, Yarnton and Yeavering, sites that are amply discussed in the text? We on the continent would have benefited had some of these sites been illustrated in the same way as their continental counterparts.

The author has no clear-cut answers to the central questions. But she is struck by the great diversity shown by the continental settlement data and she finds much that would weaken the contrast, especially when considering long-term social and economic developments as revealed by the archaeological data. Discussing the origin of the Anglo-Saxon timber building, she refers to a number of short houses without internal roof supports in some Dutch sites, suggesting that they might be comparable. Here, however, I would disagree. In these houses the roofs are supported by opposing sets of double posts in and close to the wall, a system quite unlike that of the British houses. Furthermore, these houses only occur in combination with ordinary longhouses in the same farmyard. In my view, the absence of the longhouse in Britain and the origin of the Anglo-Saxon house are two sides of the same problem, the solution of which can only be found in Britain itself.

Hamerow’s book is well produced. It should be read and consulted by all students of early medieval archaeology, both on the British and on the continental side of the North Sea.