Richard the Lionheart's captivity

On his way home from the Third Crusade in December 1192 Richard was captured and imprisoned by Duke Leopold of Austria. This was despite the fact that Richard was a crusader-pilgrim, and such an action was strictly forbidden by the Church and punishable by excommunication. In February 1193 Leopold handed him on to his brother-in-law, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, and the king spent nearly a year and a half being moved from one prison to another. William of Newburgh reported that Richard himself later said that he had at first been treated well, but that after the French king's cousin Philip of Beauvais came to the imperial court he was loaded down with chains so heavy that a horse or a donkey would have struggled to move, and Peter of Blois wrote in a letter to Archbishop Conrad of Mainz that ‘Richard was held in chains and made to go hungry, his face pale and his body weak.’ Gillingham suggests that ‘if anything like this did happen it is likely to have been in the weeks immediately after Easter 1193 when he was imprisoned in the castle of Trifels’. From here he was rescued by the diplomacy of William of Longchamp, who persuaded Henry to allow him to return to the imperial court and negotiated a date for his release. Gillingham relates that ‘Longchamp was then sent back to England with letters from both Richard and Henry VI exhorting the prisoner's subjects to find the money as quickly as possible, with similar letters being sent to other parts of Richard's dominions.’ This is likely to have been when he composed his famous song in Old French (RS 1891) to help raise his ransom.

In many parts of the developing world, the easiest entry point into market-based activity is for people to make and sell goods they use themselves and know their neighbours need. In South Africa a highly centralised corporate sector was already mass producing almost every manufactured or agro-processed product that poor people consume, with distribution systems reaching the most remote corners of the country. This limited the opportunities for small-scale producers targeting local markets in poor communities, where they struggled to compete in relation to either price or brand recognition.

South Africa’s high levels of inequality mean that not everyone is poor, however. Different market segments have different levels of disposable income. At the time, the emergence of a black middle class was starting to change the traditional segmentation of local markets and South Africa’s re-entry into global markets also held the promise of new opportunities. So how could entrepreneurs access these wider markets – on terms that would yield better returns?

The Mineworkers Development Agency (MDA)’s strategy shifted from a focus on local markets to explore how best to meet this different challenge. Until this point, support strategies at MDA’s centres had been framed spatially, aiming to support diversification in local markets and tackling common obstacles facing local enterprises in a multi-sectoral way. Accessing higher-value, external markets required greater sectoral specificity, however, and put participation in value chains on our radar.

Market development and value chains

In the wider enterprise development discourse, there was a shift from the narrow focus on business service markets described in the previous chapters to an approach called ‘making markets work for the poor’, (commonly abbreviated as M4P) and focused on market systems, defined widely to include not only buyers, sellers and others directly involved in exchange, but also the institutions, rules of the game, organisations and enabling-environment factors shaping the terms on which exchange takes place.

There was certainly plenty of contestation over what this new M4P approach might mean, with early formulations fitting rather squarely into the hegemonic neo-liberal consensus of the day.

The Inheritance

It is now generally agreed by historians that there was much continuity between the western Roman empire and its successors following the disintegration of the centralised state during the fifth century. In the east, the continuity was unbroken as the Byzantine empire survived for another thousand years. The Germanic tribal confederations, many of whom had been living in or alongside Roman society for decades, set up kingdoms of whom the Franks in northern Gaul and beyond, the Visigoths in southern Gaul then (after expelling the Vandals, who took over Roman Africa) Iberia, and the Ostrogoths who established a kingdom in Italy were the most significant. The new rulers (numerically a small minority of the population) wanted and needed to use what they found, not destroy it. Only in a few places had specific circumstances led to a collapse of the Roman infrastructure. The political and military history of the age can be traced easily through written evidence – key features were the reconquest of Africa and destruction of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy by east Roman (Byzantine) emperor Justinian (r. 527–65), and the expansion of the Frankish kingdom under the Merovingian dynasty following Clovis (r. 482–511) – but evidence for society and the economy is harder to find, and here archaeology makes a big contribution. Warfare and archaeology can be combined to permit a study of levels of engineering and to propose what happened to its military version. It will be proposed that although there are few references to named engineers across these centuries, they continued to operate; and that the changes to society and the economy that took place as late antiquity gave way to a recognisably different early medieval world in the seventh century appear to have had limited consequences in this field.

The seventh century also saw the sudden creation of an Islamic state as Muhammad’s followers achieved extraordinary victories pushing back the frontiers of eastern Rome and destroying totally the Persian empire (by 651) before extending their power across Egypt and North Africa (whence from 711 they quickly took over Visigothic Iberia) and eastwards across central Asia to the borders of China and India.

An Unbroken Tradition Of Military Engineering?

The monuments of the ancient world that have survived are eloquent testimony to the levels of engineering skills available in these societies. Each successive civilisation left evidence of its ability to build on a vast scale, to overcome geological and geographical obstacles through the application of human ingenuity and (often) the force of immense human labour, to make arid land fertile through great hydraulic projects, to cross rivers and seas. We know that these engineering skills were also harnessed for the conduct of warfare. Literate societies such as China, India and successive empires in the Middle East, and Greece then Rome around the Mediterranean, additionally left writings that confirm what they were capable of in both civilian and military contexts. Each empire influenced its neighbours and its successors. In Europe, the Middle East, central Asia and North Africa, the roots of the developments of the most recent millennia must be sought in the legacies of Rome and Persia, and their interactions with China and the kingdoms of the Indian subcontinent.

The imperial armies of Rome and its ever-present Persian rival for domination in the east were professional organisations and military engineering was integrated within them. The operation and maintenance of artillery, the erection of fortifications, the bridging of rivers and laying out of camps, the undermining of enemy fortresses were all tasks for which members of the armed forces were recruited and trained. Roman weaponry was manufactured under the supervision of salaried, skilled workers employed in arms factories (fabricae). The contribution of engineering to the military success of Rome was sufficiently valued for its impact to be described in classical histories, or at least clearly implied.

Not until modern times (in Europe) would a professional corps of engineers integrated into the army of the state again become common. It would be the seventeenth century before a formal body of engineers existed in the British armed forces, for instance. The earliest examples would be the experts charged by a few rulers with organising a paid body of people to maintain the royal artillery in the gunpowder age from the mid fifteenth century onwards.

The majority of papers in this book emerged from a conference “Encountering the ‘Other’ – Understanding Oneself: Colonialism, Ethnic Diversity and Everyday Life in Early Modern Sweden and New Sweden” organized at Lund University in 2013 within the “GlobArch” network and with the support of the Crafoord Foundation, the Swedish Research Council and Elisabeth Rausing Memorial Foundation. The conference created an interdisciplinary and international forum to discuss social and cultural developments in early modern Sweden, especially its multifaceted involvement in colonial expansion – as a country having colonies of its own, procuring, exchanging and consuming colonial goods and sharing ideologies of European supremacy. The main theme of the conference was the reaction to the broadly understood newness brought about by the expansion and rise of intercontinental connections as well as the construction (ideological and material) of otherness and sameness in early modern Sweden, New Sweden and other colonies.

The conference and this collection appear at an exciting time, when the traditional national framework of research and focus on political and economic history of the Swedish “Era of Greatness” shifts towards transnational history writing, scrutinizing Sweden's entanglement with the European and global world. This shift is coupled with a greater interest in materiality within the field of history. It is also accompanied by a rapid development of post-medieval archaeology in Sweden and Finland, which offers new perspectives on a range of interesting questions, such as the characteristics of early modern culture, multiculturalism, self-fashioning through material objects, the selective nature of consumption, the rise of modernity and material engagements with novelties and imports. The collection reflects the wide-ranging research directions taken in the fields of history and historical archaeology, and their potential to rewrite the history of early modern Sweden. Our goal is to present, with an international audience in mind, a picture of early modern Sweden that is rarely considered in the available general English-language works on the kingdom: an image of an early modern Swedish society and culture deeply affected by cultural transformations, mobility and connections with the increasingly global world of the 17th and 18th centuries; a country, society and culture not left on the margins of Europe, disengaged from contemporary currents, but rather drawn into and developing dialogical relationships with the rest of Europe and the known world.

AT first sight, All Saints’ may seem an odd choice for in-depth study. Even in Bristol other parishes appear more promising: why All Saints’ when, for instance, its neighbour, St Nicholas, was both larger and richer, or St Mary Redcliffe, in the southern suburb of the town, clearly ran a far more ambitious regime? The answer lies, simply, in the survival of evidence. Most English parishes can muster little, if anything, by way of archival evidence to shed light on their history before the Reformation. And while parishes in Bristol emerge as reasonably well-off for late medieval materials as compared with those, say, in late medieval York or Norwich – neither of which, wills apart, has any substantial holding of material reflective of parish life – All Saints’ preserves more than any other. Although we may be hard pressed to explain quite why, this particular parish possesses a remarkably rich pre-Reformation archive. It repays close study for the straightforward reason that, unusually, it can furnish sufficient data for an in-depth enquiry.

Parishes have never functioned in a vacuum: in the period in question, they occupied an increasingly prominent position among the array of institutions ministering to the political, as well as to the spiritual, interests of the realm, its rulers and their subjects. Local conditions naturally determined the manner in which parishioners might respond to incentives, not least insofar as economic trends governed the simple availability of means which, as a result, affected citizens’ ability to invest in their parishes. So the following provides, first, a brief outline of Bristol's fortunes, after which the focus turns to the parish of All Saints’ and to an examination of its archive which, as suggested, provides the rationale for this study. To set the scene more fully, some of the parish's more distinctive characteristics deserve attention; these raise questions concerning both its capabilities and its typicality – or not. Subsequent chapters in this section are concerned more with parishioners and, in the main, those active when the archive is at its most detailed towards the end of the fifteenth and in the early sixteenth centuries. They consider how belief found expression often in very generous behaviour.

This book started out as a conversation on a train journey from Cambridge (where we both then lived) to The National Archives at Kew. The conversations that have continued ever since – usually over copious amounts of tea, beer, wine, and Plymouth gin – have been the most enjoyable aspect of working on the book.

From the beginning we both agreed that there is a need for a maritime history of the civil wars of the 1640s, to provide students and scholars with an overview of this topic and to introduce it to a wider audience. We also agreed that any such history must take into account both the significance of the conflict at sea to the outcome of the wars and its place in long-term naval and maritime developments in Britain and Ireland. These have been the guiding principles we have followed in writing this book. Readers will decide for themselves whether we have succeeded.

Many other people have joined us in the conversations behind the book, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge them here. Our first and most important debt is to Dr David Smith, to whom this book is dedicated. David has mentored both of us, as Ph.D. supervisor to Richard and as a colleague of Elaine's on the New Edition of the Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell project, and he has given endless and unstinting advice and encouragement. He commented on our first proposal for the book and read the full draft once it was complete. Our second major debt is to Peter Sowden, our editor at Boydell and Brewer, who responded enthusiastically to our initial idea and has continued to support us with the same enthusiasm and with no less patience. Without him this book would not have happened. We are also grateful to Dr J. D. Davies, Professor John Morrill, Professor Steve Murdoch, Dr Annaleigh Margey, and Dr Ismini Pells, who also read drafts and offered valuable comments; to Rachael Blakemore, whose copy-editing greatly improved the text, especially in harmonising two authorial styles; and to Cath D'Alton for preparing the maps.

Both of us have benefited greatly from our many colleagues and friends at the universities of Cambridge, Exeter, Oxford, Plymouth, and Reading.

BEER AND IDENTITY

In medieval and early modern northern Europe the tradition of brewing and drinking beer was deeply rooted in all levels of society; it worked then (and indeed perhaps works nowadays) as a social glue. However, brewing traditions and culinary preferences varied between geographical regions and social groups, making it plausible to link beer types to the question of the identity and perhaps the ethnicity of its producers and consumers. When referring to identity and ethnicity, the basic model used here is that described by Richard Jenkins (2004) as a process of “being” or “becoming”. Thus “identity” is used as a broad term referring to any social identity – such as ethnicity, age, class, gender, profession etc. However, the term “ethnicity” is here used in a much more limited and simplified way, referring to a self-identification by specific ethnic groups. This chapter discusses the possibility of linking certain regional variations in beer culture to ethnicity and regional identity in northern Europe during the 15th to 17th centuries. The main aim is to expose the complexity of the question at hand, and to try to identify possibilities and limitations of the task. It is also to provide an overview of regional variations in beer culture from 1450 to 1800, and to give some background as to how and why these variations may be linked to the identity and ethnicity of the consumers. Central to the discussion is a case study from a town plot in Nya Lödöse in western Sweden, where the archaeobotanical record provides evidence for a brewery on the plot in the period c. 1480–1612.

Ruin Feeling

IN A 1940 article in the magazine Time and Tide, the novelist and scholar Rose Macaulay sought to account for wartime Londoners’ morbid fascination with ruins: “‘There's a good one in my street,’ we say, proud of our own monuments. ‘Makes you think, doesn't it,’ we say. But just what it makes us think, I am not sure.” Macaulay spent the rest of her life pursuing answers to this very question. In May 1941, after leaving home in London to oversee family affairs following the death of her sister, Macaulay returned to find her West End flat completely destroyed, a result of what turned out to be the last and worst major air raid of the Blitz. She lamented, in a letter to a friend, that “I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with … It would have been less trouble to have been bombed myself.” In 1950 Macaulay published The World My Wilderness, her first novel in almost a decade. Set amid the ruins of post-war London, the book's title is taken from a haunting poem attributed to “Anon” but written by the author:

A couple of years later, 1953 saw the publication of a further, extended meditation by Macaulay on the cultural meanings ascribed to architectural decay in any period: her extraordinary Pleasure of Ruins. This defiantly rambling book, a work of non-fiction that sets out to explore the ruin-mindedness of humans across many centuries, continents and cultures, discovers in stony rubbish something meaning- laden, redemptive, even artful. Eighteenth-century Germans had invented the compound Ruinenlust to describe this obsession; resurrecting the term, Macaulay writes of ruin pleasure.

Almost two decades after the publication of Macaulay's Pleasure of Ruins, Derek Jarman produced a small-scale watercolour that alludes directly to her theme. Entitled The Pleasure of Ruins and dated 1972 (Plate VI), Jarman's painting features a tiny humanoid figure sitting contemplatively atop a pile of architectural and sculptural fragments.

Ethnicity and administration in Sudan are complex and interwoven issues and they form the foundations of its socio-economic and political power relationships. The ethnic composition in Sudan is mixed and diverse and its administration has been influenced by the historical approaches of various ruling systems of the kingdoms that formed Sudan and the colonial and national regimes that have ruled the country. Darfur society is representative of the wider society in Sudan, but it has unique characteristics in its ethnic composition and administrative system. The latter is an extension of the Fur sultanate's administration, in which tribes and tribal territories were significant pillars. This chapter outlines the historical complexity around identity in the country, the political approaches based on ethnic and racial discrimination that were embraced by the rulers who have governed Sudan, and how these have been manifested in the administration and ethnic relationships in Darfur since it was annexed to Sudan in 1917.

GEOGRAPHY AND POPULATION

Darfur (DarFur – the homeland of the Fur tribe) was founded as an independent Fur sultanate (1445–1916). It was annexed to Sudan in 1917 when the last sultan, Ali Dinar (1889–1916), was defeated by the Anglo-Egyptian condominium administration. The sultanate was the heir of the prior kingdoms of the Daju and Tunjur African tribes, which today represent minor ethnic groups in terms of both population and political weight. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Keira Fur sultanate was established by sultan Suleiman Solung (1445–76), purportedly born to a Fur mother and an Arab father, who came down from Jebel Marrah to extend the sultanate to the plains east of the Jebel (Shuqayr, 1981, p. 150). Darfur was also governed respectively by the Turco-Egyptian invaders (1874–81) and the Mahdiyya (1881–98), led by the Sudanese cleric, Mohamed Ahmad al-Mahdi.

Modern Sudan is thus an amalgamation of several adjacent, often warring kingdoms that existed in Sudan in the precolonial period, e.g. the Fung in the centre, Darfur in the west and other numerous kingdoms and sultanates in the east and the south. For a century, until 2011, Sudan remained the largest country in Africa and the Middle East, with a total area estimated at 2,505,813 square kilometres.

Although the notion has been discredited that clergy and laity must inevitably have been at loggerheads before the Reformation, we nevertheless still have a tendency to treat priests as axiomatically set apart. In some obvious respects this was true; but, if anything, the evidence surviving for All Saints’ tends to accentuate how constructively the clergy worked with parishioners to secure the shared benefit of the community. We have already explored the collaboration between Richard Haddon and John Gyllard, prior of the Kalendars, and also considered how Maurice Hardwick first lobbied for and then defended Agnes Fyler's endowment. It has emerged, moreover, that parishioners in All Saints’ possessed a degree of spiritual understanding that speaks well of the instruction received from their clergy, either formally from the pulpit and at confession, or informally by example in and around the parish. While synodal legislation determined certain responses – for instance, by defining the laity's responsibilities as churchwardens – the role that parish priests played and the instruction they no doubt offered influenced both individual and communal conduct. The clergy not only exercised leadership by example but also carefully assimilated their efforts with those they exhorted from their parishioners. Although their words may now be lost, the All Saints’ archive permits us to retrieve aspects of their behaviour, revealing how they dovetailed their efforts with those elicited from their flock. Parishioners, as we will see, clearly respected their clergy, and specifically sought their personal assistance. If their estate set clergy apart, this by no means led to disengagement; the following elaborates on the nature of their involvement.

The vicars and priests that have been good doers: Clergy as role models

Appraising the part played by the clergy in parish affairs is normally difficult because much of the evidence on which we rely was produced by and for the laity; it treats the clergy, at best, in a glancing manner. For all their detail, churchwardens’ accounts, for instance, served specific purposes: to enable parishioners to keep close track of the ‘parish stock’ – be it money or equipment – entrusted to the wardens, and to prove the discharge of duties incumbent on the laity. The clergy's activity lay mainly beyond their remit. But, once again, the All Saints’ archive furnishes materials offsetting this shortcoming.

Violent conflict in Darfur is not a new or a sudden phenomenon; tribes of the same or different ethnic groups have engaged in sporadic disputes and deadly clashes in the past. Since the 1970s, however, these clashes have become more recurrent and have often involved groups of pastoralists of the Baggara and Abbala Arab tribes. The situation has further been compounded by the emergence of politically motivated Darfuri-armed movements and insurgencies since 1991/2. Many causes could be cited for the eruption of these conflicts and their escalation into fatal violence beyond the local capacity to resolve them, as discussed below.

A HISTORY OF CONFLICT IN DARFUR

During the Fur sultanate (1445–1916), most of the conflicts between Darfuri tribes were disputes either over the use of common resources or over authority and administration. The former often ensued from pastoralists breaching local conventions on common resource management and causing damage to farmers’ crops by allowing their herds to encroach into the farms of sedentary communities, whereas the second usually erupted when the authority of tribes over their Dars was challenged or threatened.

Tribal authorities were often able to resolve the disputes over resources through their own local resolution mechanisms, which people usually respected and abided by. But sometimes a group would attempt to grab the lands of other tribespeople by force and use it for their own settlement. Since the reign of Sultan Tayrab (1768–87), the Fur sultans intervened to force the invaders off the lands they had seized and to maintain law and order. For instance, Sultan Abd al-Rahman (1787–1801) intervened, with a force of sixty horsemen, to terminate the conflict between the Mahriyah and the Mahamid Abbala Arabs, confiscating half of their camels in retribution. The pattern of conflicts caused by the encroachment of pastoralists’ herds on the farms, and the subsequent interventions of the sultans to restore law and order, continued up until the era of Ali Dinar (1898– 1916), who forced large groups of pastoral communities to leave the lands they seized from sedentary communities during the Turco-Egyptian rule (1874–81) (O'fahey and Spaulding, 1974).