Warriors, heroes and companions: negotiating masculinity in Viking-Age England

Detailed analysis of the construction of gender identities has transformed our understanding of many aspects of early medieval society, yet the study of the Vikings in Britain has largely remained immune to this branch of scholarship. In responding to this lacuna, this paper examines the gendered dimension of the funerary record of the Scandinavians in England in the ninth and tenth centuries, and suggests that the emphasis on masculine display, in both the burial and the sculptural record, is not merely a quirk of survival, but rather it has much to reveal about the negotiation of lordship in the context of conquest and settlement

‘Uncle Tom was there, in crockery’: Material Culture and a Victorian Working-class Childhood

British archaeologists have long recognised the potential for the archaeology of working-class neighbourhoods to illuminate communities that typically left few direct traces of their own in the written record. They have also emphasised that the diversity of material culture from such sites provides alternative perspectives to the textual evidence, which is often moralising and condemnatory. Drawing on a case-study from Sheffield in Yorkshire, England, this paper explores what material culture can reveal about working-class childhoods. It argues that childhood was depicted and experienced at the intersections of the chapel, mine and pub, and that competing conceptions of childhood and family were pivotal to the struggle for working-class identity

‘Uncle Tom was there, in crockery’: Material Culture and a Victorian Working-class Childhood

British archaeologists have long recognised the potential for the archaeology of working-class neighbourhoods to illuminate communities that typically left few direct traces of their own in the written record. They have also emphasised that the diversity of material culture from such sites provides alternative perspectives to the textual evidence, which is often moralising and condemnatory. Drawing on a case-study from Sheffield in Yorkshire, England, this paper explores what material culture can reveal about working-class childhoods. It argues that childhood was depicted and experienced at the intersections of the chapel, mine and pub, and that competing conceptions of childhood and family were pivotal to the struggle for working-class identity

Charnel practices in medieval England: new perspectives

Studies of English medieval funerary practice have paid limited attention to the curation of human remains in charnel houses. Yet analysis of architectural, archaeological and documentary evidence, including antiquarian accounts, suggests that charnelling was more widespread in medieval England than has hitherto been appreciated, with many charnel houses dismantled at the sixteenth-century Reformation. The survival of a charnel house and its human remains at Rothwell, Northamptonshire permits a unique opportunity to analyse charnel practice at a medieval parish church. Employing architectural, geophysical and osteological analysis, we present a new contextualisation of medieval charnelling. We argue that the charnel house at Rothwell, a subterranean room constructed during the thirteenth century, may have been a particularly sophisticated example of an experiment born out of beliefs surrounding Purgatory. Our approach enables re-evaluation of the surviving evidence for charnel practice in England and enhances wider narratives of medieval charnelling across Europe

The osteological evidence for execution in Anglo-Saxon England

YesThis paper reviews the osteological evidence for execution in Anglo-Saxon England, which, in the cases of modern analysis, can reveal considerable detail about the methods of decapitation, in particular, and it also provides a critical appraisal of the considerably less reliable antiquarian reports. We suggest that secure evidence for execution, principally decapitation, can be identified through modern osteological analysis but it is limited, and we also argue that assertions made in antiquarian excavation reports about apparent examples of execution need to be treated with caution

An Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery at Walkington Wold, Yorkshire

This paper presents a re-evaluation of a cemetery excavated over 30 years ago at Walkington Wold in east Yorkshire. The cemetery is characterized by careless burial on diverse alignments, and by the fact that most of the skeletons did not have associated crania. The cemetery has been variously described as being the result of an early post-Roman massacre, as providing evidence for a ‘Celtic’ head cult or as an Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery. In order to resolve the matter, radiocarbon dates were acquired and a re-examination of the skeletal remains was undertaken. It was confirmed that the cemetery was an Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery, the only known example from northern England, and the site is set into its wider context in the paper