The previous chapter explored the variations in the burial customs of fifth- to ninth-century Wessex, which are resonant not merely of contrasting embodiments of cultural or ethnic identity but of different modes of social and political interaction. Distinct funerary idioms are identifiable from pays to pays and from county to county, and are diachronically mutable rather than static. Such trends must surely have been influenced to a significant degree by a dynamic and turbulent climate of emerging territories, shifting boundaries and rising social stratification. Beyond a simple cultural frontier between West Saxons and Britons, changing political configurations are potentially distinguishable at a range of scales, including but not limited to the formation and consolidation of a number of smaller polities and their ultimate assimilation into an expanding Wessex. By the mid-seventh century, the West Saxon kingdom is likely to have incorporated an assortment of sub-kingdoms under the overlordship of the king.

This chapter first asks what form early territorial entities may have taken, from the level of the estate to the more extensive ‘early folk territory’, and introduces some of the proposed models for their development. This leads us on to explore and re-evaluate the relationship between Early to Middle Anglo-Saxon burial sites and the boundaries of ecclesiastical parishes and hundreds. One benefit of a close regional and sub-regional scale of approach is that it can offer us an insight into broader societal and territorial changes. Examining the character and positioning of burial sites in relation to landscape character areas, boundaries and communication routes allows us to contextualise changes in agrarian practices and systems of land holding, especially from around the beginning of the Middle Anglo-Saxon period. The emergence of the phenomenon of isolated high-status burial – of course most notably exemplified by the standout examples of barrow burials accompanied by enigmatic prestige assemblages – is of particular note in this context, and warrants detailed micro-topographical investigation. Such burials are frequently located close to ecclesiastical parish boundaries on the chalk downland, the configuration of which owes much to the natural topography and the ways in which the land has been worked and farmed over several millennia. It is therefore of particular importance to critically reassess how and when these boundaries may have taken shape, and what function and meaning these seemingly marginal zones might have possessed when the burials were made.

When we turn from the pure ‘Celtic’ diplomatic of the ‘Chad’ charters to the Book of Llandaf, we enter a more modern world. Not a page goes by without us being reminded of one or more of Urban's aspirations for his see, as we know them from his papal correspondence and elsewhere. Urban, we learn, stands at the end of an illustrious line of bishops of Llandaf whose rights suffered little infringement until the time of his predecessor, Herewald. Since the time of St Augustine these bishops had been the loyal subjects of Canterbury. – It was probably as evidence of the English connection that a list of Welsh bishops consecrated by English archbishops since Alfredian times was drawn up. – Before Augustine's arrival the bishops of Llandaf had been directly subject to the Pope, ever since their church had been founded in honour of St Peter in the time of St Germanus of Auxerre. The see's other patrons, St Dyfrig (Dubric), St Teilo (Teiliau), and St Euddogwy (Oudoce), had been the first bishops of Llandaf, and hence – naturally – Urban was entitled to all lands granted or confirmed to the saintly triad, all churches founded by them, and even many of the churches merely dedicated to them. Since the twelfth-century cults of Dyfrig and Teilo were centred in south-west Herefordshire and south-west Wales respectively, the area of Llandaf's interest was vast, and some of Urban's territorial claims even lay outside the diocese that he claimed. That diocese stretched from the Wye to the Tywi and extended through Gower into Carmarthenshire to the west and through Breconshire and Herefordshire to the north and east. Urban maintained that its bounds followed the (alleged) extent of a primitive Welsh kingdom of Morgannwg, evidently not sharing the opinion of most modern scholars that Morgannwg takes its name from a tenth-century Morgan, king of Glywysing. LL (pp. 69 and 133) even claims that until the time of St Euddogwy the diocese extended beyond the Tywi through Dyfed to insula Teithi. This justified claims to properties in the west granted to Euddogwy's alleged predecessor, St Teilo.

Urban seems to have convinced the knowledgeable among his contemporaries no more than he convinces us, and his successors inherited a small diocese similar to the diocese of Llandaf as it existed until 1920.

Around 800, a small booklet containing the Penitential of Egbert was copied out in an Anglo-Saxon hand practicing Insular minuscule either in England or at Lorsch, an Anglo-Saxon monastic foundation in the modern German state of Hesse. Shortly after the date of its copying, this booklet was supplemented with further penitential material, and the original penitential plus these additions constitute what is now Vatican, Pal. lat. 554. At just thirteen folios, including the additions, and measuring 250 × 185 mm, this brief collection would have been portable and inexpensive to produce, taking a scribe only a few days to copy it. Despite their obvious utility, booklets like this one from the Vatican are rare: only a few Anglo-Saxon booklets of any kind survive and this is the only penitential booklet with English connections of which I am aware. Nonetheless, the Vatican booklet is illustrative of the way in which short texts may often have been efficiently and cheaply produced for priestly use.

Unlike missals, lectionaries, or collections of homilies, the types of priestly texts discussed in this chapter do not stand alone in surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Instead, most of the examples that survive are bound with other books and no surviving late Anglo-Saxon manuscript contains penitentials, computistical material, or liturgical texts for occasional offices alone. Thus penitentials, manuals, and computi have been grouped here in one chapter – not due to a similarity of content, but rather to a similarity of context. As these types of texts were often relatively short, they could easily be combined with other volumes, as are our surviving examples, or they could be used in booklet or loose-leaf form, a state in which their chances of survival are slim to none. One can imagine the ease with which a few folios with no protective binding could be lost, and continental sources from the twelfth-century express concerns about the vulnerability of libelli to theft, destruction, or wear. We are also faced with the problem of how representative these rites are, especially when considering regional differences, poor survival rates, and questions concerning their oral performance. As Carol Symes has pointed out, written liturgical texts are essentially prescriptive in nature and it is often difficult to know precisely how these texts were used in worship.

IN HER STUDY of Samuel Richardson's correspondence, published in Transversales 5, Hélène Dachez explains what she defines as the ‘epistolary sociability’ of one of the greatest novelists of the century: a relationship in which, if the letter does not replace the immediacy of conversation in praesentia, it permits the creation of deeper links between correspondents while establishing, beyond the superficiality of some sociable contacts, true friendly connections. The present chapter will investigate the origins of British epistolary sociability in the eighteenth century by examining the eighty-eight epistolary manuals which were published in Britain between 1700 and 1800, several of which went through many editions, the whole making a total of over 250 manuals published in Britain. In order to determine how epistolary sociability evolved in Britain in the eighteenth century, it will generally interrogate the links between epistolary writing and sociability, pointing to elements of epistolary writing which had become commonly accepted both in France and in Britain in the eighteenth century. It will then highlight how the theory was adapted in Britain, where greater attention was granted to lower social categories, to commercial activities and to women than in France. Finally, limits of the theory of British epistolary sociability will be questioned in two short case studies: The Ladies Complete Letter-Writer and William Gilpin's letter-writer.

Epistolary manuals and sociability

Promoting the art of living in society was one of the numerous functions of epistolary manuals in the eighteenth century. Very few of them were made only of models of letters: some contained grammars, dictionaries, tables of abbreviations; many comprised sections focusing on social manners and habits, as suggested by the frontispieces of the manuals entitled Academy of complements. The variety of essays announced from the front pages of the manuals also testifies to the fact that letter-writing manuals were also concerned with the art of socialising. A New Academy of Complements; or, The Lover's Secretary (1715) also contained ‘The Silent Language; or, A Compleat Rule for discoursing by Motion of the Hand, without being understood by the Company’. A New Academy of Complements; or, The Compleat English Secretary (1748) offered ‘Dialogues very witty and pleasant, relating to Love, Familiar Discourse, and other Matters, for the improving the Elegancy of the English Speech, and Accomplishment in Discourse’ and ‘A Treatise on Moles’, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, ‘The Comical Humours of the Jovial London Gossips’.

Concordance and Chart Showing the Paginal and Chronological Order of the Charters

Christianity has long been recognized as a religion of the book. Within two or three decades of the death and resurrection of Jesus, accounts of his life were written and circulated, as were pastoral letters to newly founded churches in Europe and Asia Minor. Sources such as the pre-Pauline creed in 1 Corinthians 15 and the description of early Christian worship found in Justin Martyr's First Apology attest to frequent use of written liturgy and the texts that eventually formed the biblical canon, both of which are indicative of a strong literate element in these formative centuries. This element was passed on to the medieval church and has persisted to the present day. The dependence of Christianity on written texts necessitates literacy and the availability of books to those who lead its adherents – a need witnessed in the present day by the years of training that ministers undergo prior to ordination and the significant number of publishers whose business depends on the sale of bibles, commentaries, devotional volumes, and books for the liturgy.

Though the advent of printing and the rise of Protestantism stand between us and the books used by the medieval priest in England, the clergy's reliance on books has remained constant. Throughout the Middle Ages, the provision of the rites and services of the church by priests was largely reliant on access to certain texts, such as penitentials, books for the celebration of the mass and Divine Office, books of sermons or homilies, and others. These are frequently one of the very few routes we have into understanding the ministry of the secular clergy to medieval Christians outside of prescriptive sources and thus the study of priests’ books is an essential component in understanding the contexts for and practice of pastoral care. Scholarly interest in the study of pastoral care on its own merit has grown in recent decades, but has largely been limited to studies of individual aspects of pastoral care, a specific text, or a single priestly book, and it is my hope that this work will be a constructive addition to an important stage of development in this burgeoning field.

Wiltshire

Abbeymeads, Blunsdon St Andrew, SU142899

Pays: Corallian–Gault–Greensand Belt

Indirectly associated: enclosure/prehistoric settlement

Two inhumation burials of probable C7th date were revealed during an excavation undertaken by Cotswold Archaeology in 2007, the grave cuts of which had previously been identified as part of an evaluation in 2000. Grave 1 was orientated NW–SE, with head to the NW, and consisted of a crouched burial of a mature adult of probable male sex, with an iron knife and copper-alloy buckle with plate. Two metres to the NE, Grave 2 contained the SW–NE-orientated (head to SW) extended inhumation burial of a mature adult of probable female sex, accompanied by a pin with garnet mount, a glass bead and, at the foot of the grave, an iron-bound bucket. A single hobnail, thought to be residual, was also found in the area of the torso. Three Iron Age pits were found just over 100m to the W. The site lies c. 500m W of Ermin Street Roman road.

References: McSloy et al. 2009; Brett and McSloy 2011

Aldbourne, SU262753

Pays: Marlborough Downs

A group of c. six skeletons, in an approximate line of shallow graves ‘with a few wedge-shaped nails’, was uncovered in 1960 during the construction of an extension to a poultry farm. The skeletons were poorly excavated and were left ‘scattered’ and ‘lying in the sides of the trenches’ (Meyrick 1961). They were initially interpreted as victims of a Civil War skirmish. In 2007–8, a watching brief by Wessex Archaeology led to the discovery of a Middle Anglo-Saxon cemetery. Twenty-six inhumations were within graves and at least one disarticulated individual was without an apparent grave. Sixteen were extended supine; there was one double burial, four flexed, two crouched and one prone; three were uncertain owing to truncation. Seventeen graves were orientated SW–NE (head to SW); nine W–E (head to W). Eight had grave-goods (extended supine/one flexed): iron knives, a seax, a bone comb and unidentified artefacts, suggesting a C7th date. There was at least one case of leprosy (the first recorded case in Wiltshire).

The charters in LL that were not forged from scratch at the time of compilation must have been based on earlier charters, of varying authenticity, gathered together in the twelfth century or before from Gospel Books, single sheets, cartularies, and so on. Although it is inherently unlikely that none of the charters used were copies of copies, I have not been able to find any evidence for a ‘long history of interference’ with the material before Urban chose to make it the basis of his claims. The indications of more than one stage of editing, such as the ‘circular’ features discussed above, need indicate no more than that LL went through several drafts in the Llandaf scriptorium, as one would expect with so large a project. As we have seen, no diplomatic features have been detected that prove or even indicate the existence of pre-Llandaf, intermediate collections of charters, and the present arrangement of LL can be explained solely in terms of the Llandaf compilers’ inconsistent attempt at arranging all the bishops in a single chronological sequence, with the aid of their notions about the three patron saints, the internal evidence of the charters themselves, and the incomplete list of ninth- to eleventh-century consecrations. It is difficult to imagine any circumstance before the advent of the Normans and the new ideas about ‘proper’ diplomatic form that Urban or his collaborators may have acquired at Worcester or elsewhere that would have led early Welsh clerics to attempt any purely diplomatic revision of their ancient charters. Given their evident reverence for ancient books, it would be strange for them to have attempted to rewrite their ancient documents merely in order to have crisp new copies. One of the proofs of ownership in the early Irish Laws was a senscríbend deodae, ‘an ancient ecclesiastical writing’, and it is reasonable to suppose that a similar attitude would have prevailed in Wales. Manipulation in favour of a different recipient was another matter, of course; but there is little evidence that the LL charters had suffered any such alteration before Urban associated all their bishops with Llandaf in support of his great cause, a cause which had its roots not much further back, so far as we know, than the episcopate of his predecessor Bishop Herewald.

This book is primarily concerned with the documentary evidence for the history of Willington from 1382, the year after the Peasants’ Revolt, to 1522, which was the date of the last surviving manor court roll before the manor was bought by John and Joan Gostwyk in 1529. Numerous documents relating to Willington manor are extant for the period.

The central theme of the volume is the story of the co-operation of the bailiff, manor elite and the other tenants to regulate and control their own affairs within the context of the management of the Mowbray lords’ and ladies’ councils and their officials. The prestigious and powerful Mowbray family was at its most influential at the end of the fourteenth century and in the early fifteenth century when they became Dukes of Norfolk and Earls Marshall of England, but they had financial problems before the male line died out in 1476. Willington was part of the dower of Katherine Neville, widow of the second Duke of Norfolk, from 1432, and the extant records document consistent management by her, her third and fourth husbands, their stewards and their councils October 1448-May 1482. The Mowbrays enjoyed close, but often dangerous, relationships with the English kings and their courts. Their properties and lands included Willington, Bedford Castle, Bromham, Cardington, Cople, Haynes and Stotfold in Bedfordshire and part of Wing in Buckinghamshire.

The text draws on the information contained in primary sources from several collections. Because the sources are incomplete, analysis of the information is problematic, but it is clear that serfdom lingered on throughout the 140 years covered by this volume, that tenants worked together under the leadership of local bailiffs, and that by the end of the fifteenth century villein tenure was almost as secure as free tenure.

Then, as now, the inhabitants were dependent on the landscape in which they lived. The geology, topography and archaeology of the landscape help to put information from the early documents and other records into context.

In his introduction to The Making of the English Landscape, W. G. Hoskins says that, ‘everything is older than we think’, and this is very true of Willington. The landscape of Willington manor and parish can be described as a palimpsest: something which has been rewritten or redrawn at least once.

Abbot Warin. The twentieth.

He was succeeded by Abbot Warin who came from Cambridge, from middling stock. When in the world, before he took the habit, this abbot had won a great reputation and widespread fame because of his reverence for the righteous life, his outstanding knowledge of vliterature and the elegant beauty of his form. Together with his brother, Master Matthew, who was distinguished by the same gifts though not to the same degree, he had been educated in natural sciences at Salerno by efficient teachers with a sense of style, and then he took up the habit of a religious in the cloister of St Alban. Within a short time, because of his outstandingly virtuous life, his deep knowledge of books and his personal elegance he was chosen and made prior.

So when, as I have described, Abbot Simon of pious memory had been taken up from our midst and the abbacy was vacant, the matter of a replacement was discussed. Thus Dom Warin, the prior, was chosen as abbot. The whole community unanimously assented apart from Dom William Martel, the sacristan, who himself had ambitions for the same position more than was fitting. For he claimed that Warin was just about cross-eyed and could barely see in front of him, and that he came from a family of common burgesses who were thirsty for nothing apart from amassing their pennies by all possible means. He even openly referred to the family by the scandalous name of ‘salt dealers’. He also declared that, if Warin was elected abbot, together with his brother Matthew, he would cause misery by riding roughshod over all the brothers and scattering them abroad, for no one would dare even to mutter against them. Nor was his view altogether disproved by events, as the following pages will show.

But since a single objection could not impede the fixed purpose of those who had turned to this one man, Warin was chosen and made abbot, and on the day of the nativity of the Blessed Virgin received the gift of the benediction. Not long after, confirmed in his full power, his aforenamed brother, Matthew, was elevated to the priorate. These two, namely the abbot and prior, also had a nephew, Master Warin, renowned in the study of the decretals.

Perceptions of a Chinese character, one that was suited to provide a colonial labour force under British governance, had been developed in Singapore and disseminated by propaganda from Western merchants on the China coast. But what were the applications of the Chinese migrant labour beyond the limits of contact zones on the China coast or in Southeast Asia? Examining new experiments with Chinese labour migration in the 1830s and 1840s reveals the continuing construction of the Chinese character as a useful tool for colonial production. Chinese migrants were particularly desirable in different colonies that required skilled and unskilled, cheap and free labour. The timing of this phenomenon was crucial, with two connected changes re-shaping the British Empire's economic development from the 1830s. Parallel to the abolition of slavery in 1833, unremunerative British colonies underwent a rapid transformation into plantation-based ‘resource pools’. This process is neatly summarised by Alessandro Stanziani:

Without access to African slave labour or voluntary European colonists, such as those who populated Britain's settler colonies, the colonial administrators who tried to boost plantation agriculture and develop export economies looked to Chinese migration to Singapore as a model. Crucially, the desire for Chinese labour was not purely economic but part of a broader ideology of colonial improvement. As in Singapore, economic necessity and ideas about race were intertwined.

This chapter brings together three case studies, which demonstrate the different ways in which colonial authorities sourced Chinese labour for new colonial settings. The first case study is the development of tea planting experiments in Assam in the 1830s. In order to develop tea plantations for the production of tea for export to Britain, colonial projects in Assam recruited Chinese tea cultivators from both China and Singapore. The second case this chapter examines is the repeated attempts to introduce Chinese colonists to Ceylon in a period notable for increased metropolitan and economic pressure on Indian Ocean plantation colonies. The governorship of James Alexander Stewart-Mackenzie is a central concern.

‘What time I had for myself I gave to the study of Bach.’ A bold statement, and one which perhaps does not chime with the usual image of Sir Henry J. Wood – lengthy baton outstretched in front of a large symphony orchestra at the Promenade Concerts. Wood's ultimate legacy was ‘The Proms’, a summer festival that not only created a ‘new epoch in English musical life’ at the turn of the twentieth century, but changed the social and cultural parameters of concert-going in Britain. A remarkable musician by any standard, he worked at the highest level with the greatest artists of his day and established concert programmes of the works of living composers alongside classical repertoire. He was a conductor with a voracious appetite for ‘new’ repertoire to fill nightly concerts and attract new audiences, whether from the neglected ‘ancients’, the French Impressionists, the Second Viennese School, or contemporary British composers. Over 700 works by more than 350 composers given Proms premieres under his baton attest to his ambition and success as an orchestral experimenter and tireless promoter of new music.

But what of a campaign on behalf of Johann Sebastian Bach? Was this part of his constant yearning for new repertoire or something more personal? Should Bach be regarded on a pedestal above his other passions: the promotion of Russian or British music or the popularisation of Wagner or Sibelius? While Lady Jessie Wood claimed: ‘Henry did not restrict his horizon by concentrating on a favourite composer’, she conceded that there were favourite works: ‘I can definitely say that Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, especially the slow movement, was singled out as such.’ This admission is the key to unlocking a particular preference and resulted in his championing Bach's orchestral repertoire.

That Wood does not feature in recent scholarship regarding the English Bach revival is perhaps not surprising: his archive of scores has, until recently, been largely undisturbed. No estimation could fully be made of Wood's commitment to Bach without the study of his vast collection of scores and orchestral parts. Marked-up published scores and unpublished manuscripts in his hand, or that of an assistant, reveal the extent of his assiduous, obsessive approach, and through them he emerges as an innovator, educator, disciplinarian, and administrative workaholic for the sake of his art.