The narrator of Mother Night, the conflicted World War II double agent Howard W. Campbell, Jr, constructed many false lives for himself together with all their trappings, and was so deeply entrenched in these lives that it is difficult to discern who the true Campbell is – even for Campbell himself. Our Anglo-Saxon and Anglo- Norman elites were probably less likely to face ramifications on the level that the fictional Campbell did. But the idea is apt: it is within the trappings of display, the creation and representation of particular identities, that one creates the persona appropriate to the places and the persons viewing them. In the central middle ages, the use of space and objects within them combined to create the display of – and the embodiment of – an elite authority.

This, at some places and times, starts with a building and the movement through these buildings in order to act the role, adding in the objects and the people who created the spaces from the places. A building, as we have seen, is more than material culture. Like any other piece of material culture we have from the central middle ages, it is a means to see people, sometimes even individuals. Buildings, and the spaces within them, provide us with a very interesting opportunity to marry history and archaeology, in the best of possible circumstances, as some of these buildings have associated records. We know who was here, sometimes. And this is not just the lord and lady of the manor; sometimes we are lucky enough to know names of slaves, servants, household members, though this is rather the exception to the rule. But it is these exceptions that allow us a chance to get closer to a wider swathe of society. It allows us to try to know not just the people in the place, but the experience, if viewed carefully, thoroughly and, dare I say, maybe a little creatively.

Within the places of our buildings are not just lives, but also things, the everyday objects that we have with us to make our lives easier, the small (or big) luxuries that give us pleasure in their look or feel, and the many useless things that bring us unidentified joy to see. Trinkets tell us more about the person who has them in their possession than we might care to admit: the Star Wars duvet cover, your grandmother’s quilt or the sparkly unicorn statuette are a part of how we display who we are as a person. These things do not exist alone in a place or a space, but they are a start of how to view the presentation of the people within the places and spaces. Objects pining in the dark are often what is left for us to deal with when thinking about people in particular places in the past, though they are certainly not alone as clues to how we can view how people presented themselves in the past.

One way to view things in the past in addition to the materiality of artefacts is to view them through written sources as well as the physical. Many times these sources give us an opportunity to ‘view’ the things that, archaeologically speaking, generally do not survive due to their own particularities of materiality. Textiles and wood, for example, are vulnerable objects that only survive in the best of very particular archaeological conditions. But their lack of material remains does not mean that they didn't exist. Certainly, they did, and all scholars are happy to say this. The lack of material survival is no reason not to consider their use, impact, and role in the creation of personae or identities in the past. The trick, as always, is knowing how to ‘see’ these lost objects.

The corpus of Anglo-Saxon wills is one way not only to view these objects pining in the dark, but to relate them to specific people at specific points in their life, particularly when they are considering their own place in the mortal coil and what would remain of them when they have shuffled it off.

The wealth of surviving texts from the late Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman period was briefly mentioned in the Chapter One, dealing primarily with the Anglo-Saxon wills, and a few documentary sources were also touched upon in the previous chapters. But these are not the only texts from our period: Anglo-Saxon poetry and legal writing, Norman and Anglo-Norman history, for example, have left us a rich textual tradition. Although moving from the realm of the physical to the representational, these texts have much to say about space, gender and authority, though we should not always expect a direct correlation between the ideas and social concepts displayed in the material record and those in the textual sources. Indeed the representation of places in these texts displays a mentalitéappropriate to the experience of place and authority, not simply in as structural a sense as Boudieu's habitus but with the actors written in these texts demonstrating both an awareness of the societal norms at a conscious and subconscious level, as in habitus, but also the abilities and willingness to subvert or counter those norms, both working within and without the social framework of those spaces.

The texts here, however, move to a level of society somewhat different from that examined in the previous chapters. Although the previous chapters attempted to focus on aristocracy and below rather than royalty, as a result of the nature of the remains available to study in the wills and the sites, here the texts under study focus on aristocracy and above. The reasons for this are as before: to some degree, extant pieces from the period focus in that level of society, and doubly so when particularly taking advantage of history writing and hagiography. In fact, two of the three tales studied in this chapter focus on kings and their houses: Beowulf, and the stories of King Eadwig leaving his coronation feast to dally with two women, told in five different texts, one by the anonymous Auctor B, two by Eadmer, and two by William of Malmesbury.

The medieval St Michael's church at Netherton was deconstructed in 1864–6 with the chancel remaining as a mortuary chapel until about 1890. The font is said to have been taken to St Barnabas, Faccombe, and this piece of stonework noted as twelfth-century in the 1911 VCH Hants and echoed almost verbatim in the Pevsner 1967 and 2010 and elsewhere. There are no records of movement of the Netheron church's physical material in the Hants RO's documentation regarding the dismantling of St Michael’s Netherton, though this would have been at the edge of living memory at the time of the creation of the VCH Hants. Residents of the modern village of Netherton note that there are houses and walls in the area which have stonework embedded in them presumably from the deconstruction of the church in the mid-1800s but those pieces are, as of the time of this book going to press, not yet identified. A visual examination of the font in St Barnabas, Faccombe, does indicate a medieval piece, possibly but not necessarily specifically twelfth century.

Geophysical survey undertaken at the site of St Michael's Netherton churchyard in June 2018 and July 2019 with David Ashby and Thomas Hayes of the Archaeology Department, University of Winchester, identified the probable cemetery and churchyard area to the west of the churchyard, as well as the two-cell stone foundation of a likely nave and chancel, of which the chancel is evidenced in an undated photograph taken between 1864 and 1890 (Ashby forthcoming 2020, which will be archived with Archaeology Data Service, https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/; see Plate 3). Undated sketches of the church, published by Fairbrother, indicate a typically long, built-upon structure with a probable earlier chancel having added to it a nave, porch and tower. However, according to the staff at Netherton Rectory, these sketches were made in the twentieth century by the son of the then-Netherton Estate owner J. A. P. Charrington, long after the church had already been wholly deconstructed – perhaps based on the recollections of elderly villagers?

Having discussed many of the ins and outs of privacy, class and status, and spatial elements of buildings, this chapter will now consider the spatial implications of these manorial sites. Starting in the earlier period, the space demonstrates that the impetus of the display of an elite authority moved from the person in the spaces themselves, to the seclusion and the importance of the materiality of the place to demonstrate status and the power afforded to them by being members of the sociallyrecognized elite class. Within this, we can recognize how aspects of accessibility and seclusion, the changeable natures of rooms, and the importance or invisibility of the slaves or servants compared to the materiality of the place, manifest elite status. Several sites from England and Normandy are examined here, such as at Faccombe Netherton, Hampshire, which provides an impressively excavated and documented site; Goltho, Lincolnshire, which provides spatial modelling despite it being virtually ‘prehistoric’ in its lack of records; Chateau de Creully, Normandy, giving an impressive Norman parallel; and Bishopstone, East Sussex, with its interestingly compact building sequence. Gender will be considered in light of all of these aspects of space and authority, with the patterns seen across the sites held up against Faccombe Netherton as the site most fully documented: through much of the central middle ages, we know who might have been resident at this manor and this, crucially, provides a model and a microcosm of gender and authority in the household environment in the central middle ages. Overall, the spatial construction of an elite authority at the estate level altered in this three-hundred-year period from the physical visibility of the elite persons, with the trappings of their material wealth and familial objects of memory, to the physical seclusion of the elite persons, letting instead their manor do the talking. But the evidence suggests no differing spatial roles for a man or a woman in charge. Instead, one position of authority was maintained, and that was to be held by the elite person in charge.

Happy Moscow isn't entirely accurate when it states that only objects are left, surviving in the dark. As poetic as it sounds, there are not simply things that allow us to see the past, but rather a combination of objects, buildings and people that can tell us their histories and biographies. This chapter adds the next element of our analysis: that of the spatial properties of buildings, and how they can be ‘read’ in combination with other factors to view not only the places but the people within them.

The main method employed here is based principally on access analysis as proposed by Bill Hillier and Julianne Hanson. Hillier and Hanson argue that a building, in and of itself, serves the purpose of organizing the space it encloses, and organizing that space is tantamount to organizing the people within those spaces. The methodology is outlined extensively in their monograph, and it is proposed as a universal method to approach buildings that has been utilized by disciplines including anthropology, archaeology and architectural history to understand the subtleties of space in a variety of contexts. As outlined in the introductory chapter, it is not a methodology without its critics, especially in stripping the spaces from other factors including the materiality of the buildings themselves, but certain layers such as reading gender or materiality in the analysis can be added to a ‘pure’ spatial analysis to read the spaces with their manifestations of their physical realities. Since the publication of Hillier and Hanson's theory and method in the mid-1980s, there have also been increasingly nuanced and theorized approaches seen in areas such as phenomenology, landscape studies, materiality, thinginess and agency theories. For example, ideas of sensory experiences in places augment a view of the past in decentring visuality as the primary or sole experience of a place. Works such as those by Ben Jervis enliven the social expressions of medieval pottery through marrying Actor-Network Theory à la Bruno Latour and the engagement of people with materials, furthering the ties we can make between people, objects and places.