Böcker av Martin Biddle

Winchester Studies 10: This wide-ranging study uses historical and archaeological evidence to consider humanity's interactions with the environment, fashioning agricultural, gardening and horticultural regimes over a millennium and a half. The discussions of archaeological finds of seeds from discarded rubbish including animal fodder and bedding show the wide range of wild species present, as well as cultivated and gathered plants in the diet of inhabitants and livestock. Pollen analyses, and studies of wood, mosses, and beetles, alongside a look at the local natural environment, and comparison with medieval written records give us a tantalizing picture of early Winchester. The earliest record is by Aelfric of Eynsham in his 11th-century Nomina Herbarum. From medieval records come hints of gardens within the city walls, and considerable detail about agriculture and horticulture, and produce brought into the city. Wild fruit and nuts were also being gathered from the countryside for the town's markets and mills. At St Giles' Fair exotic imported spices and fruits were also sold. All these sources of evidence are brought together to reveal more fully the roles of agriculture and the environment in the development Winchester.

London and Winchester were not described in the Domesday Book, but the royal properties in Winchester were surveyed for Henry I about 1110 and the whole city was surveyed for Bishop Henry of Blois in 1148. These two surveys survive in a single manuscript, known as the Winton Domesday, and constitute the earliest and by far the most detailed description of an English or European town of the early Middle Ages. In the period covered Winchester probably achieved the peak of its medieval prosperity. From the reign of Alfred to that of Henry II it was a town of the first rank, initially centre of Wessex, then the principal royal city of the Old English state, and finally `capital' in some sense, but not the largest city, of the Norman Kingdom. This volume provides a full edition, translation, and analyses of the surveys and of the city they depict, drawing on the evidence derived from archaeological excavation and historical research in the city since 1961, on personal- and place-name evidence, and on the recent advances in Anglo-Saxon numismatics.

Edited by Martin Biddle with a catalogue of the known coins of the mint by Yvonne Harvey, this volume records and illustrates the minting of silver pennies in Winchester between the reigns of Alfred the Great and Henry III, a period of three and a half centuries. At the Mint, which was situated in the area of the High Street to the east of where the city's cross now stands, at least 24 million silver pennies (possibly as many as 50 million) were struck. Five and a half thousand survive in museums and collections all over the world. These have been sought out and photographed (some 3200 coins in 6400 images detailing both sides), and minutely catalogued by Yvonne Harvey for this volume. During the period from late in the reign of Alfred to the time of Henry III, dies for striking the coins were produced centrally under royal authority in the most sophisticated system of monetary control at the time in the western world. In this first account of a major English mint to have been made in forty years, a team of leading authorities have studied and analysed the use the Winchester moneyers made of the dies, and together with the size, weight, and the surviving number of coins from each pair of dies, have produced a detailed account of the varying fortunes of the mint over this period. Their results are critical for the economic history of England and the changing status of Winchester over this long period, and provide the richest available source for the history of the name of the city and the personal names of its citizens in the later Anglo-Saxon period.

Over six thousand objects were recovered during the Winchester excavations of 1961 to 1971 - by far the most extensive corpus of stratified and datable medieval objects yet presented from a single city. Martin Biddle and the team of eighty-three contributors assembled by the Winchester Research Unit have used this material to investigate not only the industries and arts, but the economic, cultural, and social life of medieval Winchester. Their findings are being published in two parts: the first part, by Katherine Barclay, will deal with the pottery remains; and this second part in two volumes by Martin Biddle covers all the objects from the finest products of the Anglo-Saxon goldsmith's skill to the iron tenter-hooks of the cloth industry. Martin Biddle's study of the objects identifies change through time, and traces variation across the broad social scale - from cottage to palace - represented in the excavated sites. Using the objects as evidence for the economy of the medieval city, it also throws new light on some of the great questions of medieval industry and artistic production: amongst them the development of the textile industry, the origins of wire-drawing and the manufacture of pins, the beginnings of window-glass production, and the earliest glass painting. These objects are an essential part of the evidence for the development and changing character of the excavated sites to be published in forthcoming volumes of Winchester Studies on the Minsters. To ensure complete integration between the objects and the sites, every object in this volume is related to the context in which it was found and a concordance provides a detailed conspectus phase by phase of each of the twenty sites excavated between 1961-71, and of the objects found in each phase.

Among topics covered in this volume, two important authorship questions are settled; the discovery of a major Northumbrian settlement is reported; and the conceptions of Old English literature which have prevailed during the last three hundred years are paraded for critical inspection. The usual comprehensive bibliography rounds off the book.