With Settlements and Strongholds in Early Medieval England, Michael Bintley delivers a stimulating and successful new contribution to the combined study of the literature and archaeology of the Old English and Anglo-Saxon Periods—with an important epilogue in the very late Old English poem Durham, composed around forty years after the Norman Conquest. Compared with other publications within this still relatively small field of cross-disciplinary research, a distinctive aspect of this book is that it is focused on one material topic: settlement archaeology, with a particular emphasis on enclosed or defensible strongholds. The important contrast in this respect with Bintley's previous monograph, Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England (2015), is that this is a cultural and indeed very much a socially vital phenomenon rather than a natural and environmental one.
Bintley presents, analyzes, and interprets the primary material in four central chapters (chapters 2–5), which follow a sequential pattern of development to a degree that runs some risk of over-schematizing the relative chronology, and simplifying the dating problems, of the literary sources. “Ruin mythologies” (the subject of chapter 2) are thus attached primarily to the historical sources written by Gildas (sixth century) and Bede (eighth century), while the literature associated with this topic are the poems Andreas (ninth-century?) and elegies anthologized in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. The following chapter, “Settlements before the ‘Viking Age’” looks at socially prominent sites of power: churches, halls, the wīc, ports, and early burhs. Along with other Exeter Book elegies, Bede's Latin commentary De Templo is examined here. In chapter 4 Bintley then returns to Andreas alongside an especially stimulating discussion of building imagery in the “Alfredian” Early West Saxon prose corpus against the context of the West Saxon revival of Alfred's reign and the Burghal Hidage. Ultimately, though, we may hold it to be properly representative of Old English literature that in the final principal chapter Bintley turns to spiritual, ecclesiastical, rather than political or military, strongholds, using the poems Judith and Durham and a small selection from the Late West Saxon prose authors Ælfric and Wulfstan.
Two exceptional and genuinely impressive qualities of this volume are, on the one hand, the clarity and acuity of Bintley's theoretical and methodological introduction to the whole study in the opening chapter and, complementarily, the manner in which he grows and develops his argument through the four analytical chapters—quite different from the step-like, punctuated manner of even nicely relevant sequential case studies, which is so often the best we can manage. This continues, in fact, into the Afterword (chapter 6), in which Bintley resumes the more theoretical reflections and looks forward to multiple directions for future research.
In approaching the reestablished settlement pattern orbiting urban and ecclesiastical central places of late Anglo-Saxon England, Bintley portrays a conceptual sequence starting with Germanic barbarians being referred to in groups in a manner largely reminiscent of homogeneous mobs—Saxons, nefandum nomen, so-named once by Gildas; Bede's Angles, Saxons and Jutes, populi fortiores—who are the unpolished instruments of God's punishment and could only pull down the decaying edifices of Roman Britain. Their housing was little more than transient sheds within an agricultural landscape that had deteriorated from the Roman world and its villas and was far from the rural utopia of Paradise or any other locus amoenus. As more widely in northern and western Europe, the earliest trading wīcs proved unstable and unenduring, and stimulated little in the way of literary notice or appreciation. Things changed with a new Christian vision, Bintley argues, from the ninth century onward.
In that respect, not only in utilitarian practice but also in ideology, we could argue for greater influence from the Carolingian mainland upon England from this horizon onward than the one indirect comparison with a Herculean Carolingian Emperor in chapter 4 (147) represents. Beyond that, in fact, lay the powerful structure of the economic, political, and ideological consolidation of the Islamic world, at this time unifying a large part of southern Asia with post-Roman North Africa. If anything, though, I would seek rather to move focus and emphasis away from cause-and-effect sequences of historical progression to the complexity of parameters in synchronic (albeit simultaneously inherited and developing) frameworks. The Ruin in the Exeter Book thus has real valency in the context of Eadgar's coronation ceremonies in Bath and Chester in AD 973, not only against a backdrop of postimperial desolation. In a comparable way, one of the directions in which the extensive Late Old English homiletic material could be used further is to address the issue of settlements and buildings as contexts for the performance and reception of literary texts as scripts. Over the last generation, settlement archaeology has moved from a near-exclusive focus on functional studies and interpretations to an appreciation of settlements as the essential setting in which people lived rather than merely that in which they worked to survive (and were removed from when they died). Despite the fact that Old English and Anglo-Latin literature was fundamentally concerned with portraying exceptional characters and experiences in special, not mundane and familiar, circumstances, Bintley's integration of archaeology and literary study in Settlements and Strongholds in Early Medieval England offers a rich and effective insights and a model of procedure that are greatly to be welcomed and commended.
