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This chapter considers the idea of history, in its broadest sense, as it applied during the early Middle Ages. How were people and events of the past pictured, structured and recreated? When and why were they written about? Since we as modern historians depend so heavily on the historical writings of previous generations, from the period we are looking at to our own, ideas of what history is and how it works are topics of central importance. The case studies pursued in this chapter exemplify different ways in which the past was treated. Genre, audience and context were crucial: individual writers each had their own concerns to pursue. At the heart of the issue are of course texts that called themselves histories, which were written as coordinated, authoritative accounts of the past. But even these were composed according to the expectations of the day, with different valances assigned to truth, embellishment and objectivity. Æthelweard’s Chronicle, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain represent three distinct deployments of this tradition. But ‘history’ was far from the only way of handling the past. Other genres deployed accounts of historical figures and events, including heroic verse (Beowulf) and pithy genealogical inscriptions (the Pillar of Eliseg).
This final chapter has two aims. One is to give an outline of the shape of Britain, and of its subsequent developments, in the eleventh century. These included the establishment of a new dynasty in Alba, and the Norman Conquest of England, the latter leading to realignment of the relations between all the major powers of Britain, as well as between the British kingdoms and mainland Europe. The second main aim is to isolate some of the overarching changes in the period covered by this volume.
Language is a fundamental element of life and identity, and can serve to divide or unite, to clarify or obfuscate, and to empower or diminish. This chapter examines aspects of language in early medieval Britain, a place that saw important changes in what tongues people used and the connotations they carried. Four themes will guide us as we go along. The first two are the roles of Latin and the various vernacular languages. Third is the interaction of those languages when they came in contact with each other. Finally, we will look at the functions of writing.
This chapter explores further the implications for extending Deeper Learning Episodes and provides some initial guiding questions which position educators as designers of learnscapes.
The design, guidance and supervision of learnscapes requires alternative approaches to teaching and learning which call on a wide range of competences. Learnscaping requires reconceptualising how we grow shared, safe, plurilingual learning spaces. These spaces normalise digital learning. They seek to provide engaging opportunities for promoting learning based on increasingly challenging subject understanding, enabled by individual language progression – that is, all the components brought together into a learning ecology.
This chapter looks at how the idea of Britain evolved during the early Middle Ages. As there was mostly no single authority that could exercise hegemony over the whole island, it represented a fragmented political space, and generally featured in the minds of contemporaries more as a physical reality, or as an idea, a claim to power that could be projected on to neighbours through thinking of the past. Here, three specific eras of thinking about Britain will be assessed: that of Gildas in the immediately post-Roman centuries; that of Bede and the Historia Brittonum in the eighth and ninth centuries; and finally the tenth century, when claims to rule over all Britain were made and pursued by kings of the English, provoking responses from observers in western and northern parts of the island.
Britain between 650 and 850 still consisted of numerous competing kingdoms, which in this period can be thought of as moving in three broadly distinct orbits: North Britain beyond the Firth of Forth, which was the domain of the Pictish and Dál Riatan kingdoms; middle Britain, between the Forth and the Humber, which was dominated by the powerful kingdom of Northumbria; and south Britain below the Humber, within which the Mercians were pre-eminent among the English and Brittonic kingdoms for most of the period described here, with Wessex emerging as a stronger player along and south of the Thames, especially in the ninth century. This chapter examines these three segments in turn, with final consideration of economic developments, and the initial encroachment of the vikings, that cut across wider geographical divisions.
Chapter 5 outlined the need to bring student affect and growth required for deeper learning into the frame. At the same time, the role of the teacher – in terms of facilitating growth by creating the most conducive conditions for learning and progression – is embedded in ecological processes which stimulate and refine effective meaning making and knowledge construction. Supporting learners to ‘own’ learning goals and engage in subject development through a commitment to the successful achievement of those goals, however, is dependent on complementary actions and ways of being by the teacher.
Dede echoes these thoughts when he states that the focus of educational technology has turned from ‘artificial intelligence to amplifying the intelligence of teachers and students’ (2014, p. 7). He calls for teaching strategies and principles which are geared towards deeper learning and which integrate the use of information and communications technology (ICT) because ‘technology as a catalyst is effective only when used to enable learning with richer content, more powerful pedagogy, more valid assessments, and links between in- and out-of-classroom learning’ (Dede, 2014, p. 6).
Our personal journey, which would eventually lead to this book, started with our desire to address shortcomings in CLIL theory and practice as identified by state-of-the-art research since around 2010 outlined in Chapter One. Primarily, we wanted to understand why so many learners seemed to have difficulties expressing their understanding of subject content in adequate ways, especially in writing. The only conclusion we could reach back then was that those research findings indicated gaps in student learning or, as we would learn in the process, that learning did not go deep enough. If learners can’t explain their understanding properly, the chances are they haven’t fully understood. Somehow, many learners seemed to be stuck at a superficial level of learning and unable to ‘connect the dots’ in order to develop conceptual knowledge, which in turn is a prerequisite for transfer of learning.
In this chapter we will examine the Church as a structured, organised set of institutions, and the people who ran them. We will consider forms of monasticism – churches notionally dedicated to spiritual withdrawal from the world – as well as the provision of pastoral care for the bulk of society. We will also look at saints: the men and women believed to have lived a holy life on earth, and who still exercised influence from heaven. What emerges is an influential and culturally rich set of organisations, which were highly varied and deeply embedded in their own particular societies. While the Church taken as a collective whole was very important in early medieval Britain, there was no single church organisation for the whole island, or even for many political units.
Chapter 1 considered some of the milestones in the development of CLIL over several decades. It acknowledged the CLIL phenomenon as diverse and dynamic in developing theoretical principles and constructs that guide and situate classroom teaching and learning across different contexts. However, we suggest that the nature of ‘intercurricular disconnect’ (Lin, 2016) and the independent universes of language and curricular content as ‘reified entities’ (Dalton-Puffer, 2011, p. 196) should neither be underestimated nor seen as impermeable barriers with regard to changing classroom practices.
The title of this chapter is not meant to give the impression that the study of peoples and their origins is synonymous with migrations. If anything, it is meant to highlight, and contest, the long-established perception that the two are closely intertwined, and that they are one of the prime attractions of the period. The idea of the early Middle Ages being marked by the movement of peoples into Britain is the product of a long, complex intellectual pedigree that does indeed have roots in the period itself, but that also gathered new steam in modern times, as scholars in the eighteenth century and after used increasingly sophisticated techniques to further nationalist agendas. On that basis, it is easy to understand why ethnicity and migration often came as a pair and overlapped closely. Ideas of collective ‘national’ identity were – and are – social constructs, sometimes very transparently so, and the idea of migration was a cornerstone in the mythology built around them. Crucially, perceiving that the concept of, say, Englishness or Welshness is a historical artifice does not make it any less real: issues of identity have always had the power to stir and provoke. Migration, too, was a real phenomenon. People in the early Middle Ages moved, at times over long distances and in significant numbers, or on a less articulated basis. The challenge is to disentangle the two and get a sense of how and why they came to be treated together.
This is the first of two chapters that examine the impact and role of the Christian Church in early medieval Britain. Conversion to the new religion is the principal focus here, the central question being how the new faith implanted itself. The subject is one of the best evidenced and most intensively studied themes of this volume, for Christian writers of the period attached great significance to the establishment of their faith, and so took pride in recording its early days. One of the challenges is to evaluate these sources, which often tell us as much about the writers and their own times as the period they represent. Another challenge is to consider what the spread of Christianity meant for the people of early medieval Britain. It signified different things in different places, and for people of higher or lower social standing. Material evidence is one important source for how the religion implanted itself in aspects of day-to-day life, such as burial. Finally, this chapter considers the beliefs that Christianity displaced, how they varied from the new religion and what weight should be assigned to later accounts and accusations of ‘paganism’.