Abstract
Medieval archaeologists, possessing elements of the landscape and the buildings of the past, together with a good knowledge of the historical context, can recover many aspects of the way that space was perceived in the past. A phenomenological approach has been applied not only to castles, but also to the mundane world of peasants. Phenomenology emphasizes the experience of the world whereas archaeologists have been no less interested in the way in which that experience was manipulated and also in the competing ideas of space. Examples of encultured landscapes examined include natural places, gentry houses, village tofts, liminal places, and sites of pilgrimage. Drawing upon the evidence of place-names and documents, as well as the archaeological remains, it has been possible to reconstruct how people conceived of and experienced the world around them.
Highlights
Cooling Castle in the north of Kent has recently been discussed by an historian and English scholar, Cristina Maria Cervone (2008), and an archaeologist, Matthew Johnson (2002, xiii–xix) – the former taking a literary, if wide-ranging approach to one aspect of the site, the unusual plaque attached to the outside of the gatehouse, and the latter adopting a rhetorical view of their appreciation of the building
The historian Wace was surely right when he wrote that the mysteries of the wood of Barenton in Brittany had disappeared with the spread of settlement, in many places, field-names recorded in the late medieval period suggest the continued memory of both sacred and demonic sites for a time (Burgess and van Houts 2004, 162)
The study of the perception of the spiritual has been almost entirely limited to established religious sites, which fails to reflect the thorough penetration of the sacred into the mundane world. If these aspects of late medieval archaeology have remained underdeveloped, it is because approaching the way the world was experienced by people in the past is bound to prove challenging
Summary
The approach to the perception of landscape and settlement adopted by medieval archaeologists has been rather different to those of their colleagues working on the prehistoric period. The medieval archaeologist can further enrich their understanding of the meaning of the landscape and the experience which may have been evoked if there is some knowledge of the stories associated with places - the lieux de mémoire – locations which evoke social memory Such a rich reading of the landscape has been given, for example, for Peak Castle in Derbyshire. Both Cooling Castle and Pipewell Gate were given voices which make explicit that these were not to be seen as merely inanimate objects, but were intended to serve as personifications of their builders, in first case of John de Cobham and in the second of the town of Winchelsea Their inscriptions speak of an increasingly literate population which might be addressed with texts intended to intrigue through their ambiguities. These buildings provide evidence for the argument that late medieval settlements and their settings were intended to convey complex messages, rarely ‘vocalized’ as in these examples, but always present
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