Chapter 3 - Minding the Gaps: Early Medieval Elite Sites in England and the Perimeters of Current Knowledge

Summary

ATTEMPTS TO take a global perspective on early medieval England rapidly reveal that current knowledge of daily life in that era is an archipelago of isolated islets of information. Like traditional Pacific Island mariners navigating what Epeli Hau‘ofa has evocatively called a ‘sea of islands’, scholars of early medieval England sail skilfully and purposefully across the often vast distances between fragments of information that arise into contemporary view above the surface of time. However, unlike such mariners, who acknowledged the sea itself as having its own deeply perceived and respected identity, we imagine perhaps overconfidently that our ability to connect scattered bits of information by simultaneously deploying both logic and imagination will allow us to make connections across the depths of the metaphoric oceans of the world we study, without truly acknowledging the existence of those oceans themselves.

Those of us who work in the material culture of early medieval England are particularly interested in connection via comparison, between different sites and objects, and between such physical evidence and the broad array of primary-source texts that survive from the context we study. However, these threads of connectivity are built on discrete fragments of information, some closer to one or more of the lived realities of the past, others more obviously projections of cultural ideals, and all interpreted through eyes and minds of our own time, with our own agendas and at a millennium's historical distance from the time period we study. However carefully we proceed, it may be wise to model our perception of our degree of understanding of the deep past more consciously on modern oceanographers’ frank admission of the fragmentary and incomplete state of their knowledge of the world's seas; in effect, we should mind the gaps.

A case in point is the state of knowledge concerning elite residential sites in early medieval England. The knowns are well known: the older excavations at Yeavering, Cowdery's Down, and Cheddar, the new sites at Lyminge, Rendlesham, and Frogmore, and the inevitable literary parallels: Heorot and other hall-life references in the Old English poetic record, and Bede's parable of the sparrow.