This volume is a very ambitious one. What does "People and Space in the Middle Ages" mean? Is there any reason to speak about "The Middle Ages" in the case of "People and Space," and then, is there any possibility of comparison between the 4th and the 13th century?
The editors had something in mind Chris Wickham in his similarly ambitious book "Framing the Middle Ages" [1], who undertook to write the history of Europe in a time when there was no Europe in our sense, but Roman and non-Roman influenced societies in the space of present-day Europe. The editors are aware of the problem that lies in that conception but also they are aware of the opportunities in such an approach to historical societies. Like "Framing the Middle Ages," this book shows two things: first the lack of comparability between very different societies in different phases of development, and second the possibility of finding questions and criteria for a general understanding of spatial and social organization in the history of Europe. Even to a middle- central-European reviewer this book opens new approaches to European history because of the relative dominance of studies belonging to structures that developed without much Roman continuity or even reception of Roman political thinking. Thus the articles showing Icelandic social and political organization are very interesting because of their lack of earlier history. Iceland was not cultivated before the 10th century. English organization of space also can be seen as rather original, not basing upon Roman organization. But that in Francia and Spain is. Most traced societies can be called early ones. But there are differences in the time when they emerged.
There are three main approaches: Population, Space and Community. Now it is one legitimate task to connect space and population, thus proceeding to social organization of space, another task to analyze the role of communities understood as politically acting corporations. In this book, most articles deal with organization of space, e.g. in England, Iceland, Spain or France, and some of them give insight into the quality of communities. That, I think, is a very important question with reference to social and political organization. It is not sufficient to use geo- or demographic approaches regarding bordered space, knowledge of certain central places or density of population if we truly want to understand society.
In the introduction ("Introduction: Community Definition and Community Formation in the Early Middle Ages--Some Questions") Wendy Davies establishes the importance of a book like this. She states that "early medieval western Europe characteristically had small-scale polities and small-scale political systems" (4). She is right and one might add that small-scale polities are the basis of post-Roman European political organization, insofar as comparing European societies in post-Roman times is necessary, maybe as a more small-scaled undertaking.
Another aspect is the relationship between local and "governmental" organization: she states: "Determining the relationship between the local and the governmental is crucial to understanding the process of politicization. Did the larger polity depend on building blocks off pre-existing communities? Or did the needs of government in effect call local communities into being?" (4-5). This is the point to ask for the quality of local communities. Are they able to become an active part of the political organization? Can we find juridical personification of groups, even out of ecclesiastical systems?
Three articles are devoted to Anglo-Saxon societies. The first describes Wansdyke (Andrew Reynolds and Alex Langlands, "Social Identities on the Macro Scale: A Maximum View of Wansdyke"), a kind of Dyke that was able to mark an Anglo-Saxon border. It must have been built after Roman times and it seems that such dykes required a huge number of workers. The second (Grenville Astill, "Community, Identity and the Later Anglo-Saxon Town: The Case of Southern England") focuses on towns in southern England that developed before the 12th century. Most of these were so called "Burhs," constructed as fortifications against Norman invasions. Some of them became early towns, even if they did not become towns in a full sense up to the 11th century, exercising dominion over the "hinterlands." The question of early parochial organization is investigated by Steven Basset ("Boundaries of Knowledge: Mapping the Land Units of Late Anglo-Saxon and Norman England"), who proposes that ecclesiastical order reflects social organization. Therefore the study of the system of church organization tells much about social space. He undertakes this investigation in the case of the so-called minister churches at the example of Wottan Waven. Bassett states that almost none of the eleven minor churches in the parish could have been established earlier than the 11th century except the main church of Wottan Waven. It seems that the early English history of social space is a very difficult subject because of so many uncertain propositions.
The case of Icelandic social space is different. Social organization is much smaller-scaled than in England. On the other hand it is easier to describe social structures. There were neighborhoods, not even villages, and there was an aristocracy on a low economic scale that was organized all over the island, but without a political system in a specific sense (Chris Callow, "Geography, Communities and Socio-Political Organization in Medieval Northern Iceland"). Birna Lárusdóttir ("Settlement Organization and Farm Abandonment: The Curious Landscape of Reykjahverfi, North-East Iceland") examines the relationship between archeological knowledge and written sources. Callow investigates the relationship between the Gudmundar saga d?ra (1186-1200) and the social space where the named person lived. It seems that even the saga reports a small-scaled space. Orri Vesteinsson ("Communities of Dispersed Settlements: Social Organization at the Ground Level in Tenth- to Thirteenth-Century Iceland") analyses forms of settlement and tries to build categories of places. He shows that while main locations got their names from natural places, some minor places got their names from persons.
Spanish spatial organization shows some different patterns. One can see that Roman past gave some disposition for even post Visigothic Spain. Adela Cepas ("The Ending of the Roman City. The Case of Clunia in the Northern Plateau of Spain") traces Roman civitas-organization in the case of the Civitas Clunia that lost its function as a capital in the 3rd century. Here we learn that in 2nd century Spain a community can be found not only as (self-)conscious social unity but even as a juridical unit. There were cities as legal entities. The question is if they lived on throughout the next centuries and how long they did so. In early medieval Castile in Visigothic times there were lots of "castellae" on hilltop sites, often dating from Roman times, that were used as local aristocratic or communal places of power. These were left in the 11th century, when central power was able to allow more diverted settlements under the watch of more central places of power than the hilltop-sites were. Some hilltop sites survived as villages (Inaki Martín Viso, "Central places and the Territorial organization of Communities: The Occupation of Hilltop Sites in Early Medieval Northern Castile"). It seems that in northern Spain during the 10th and 11th centuries social space changed its appearance. So settlement became more small-scaled. There was a turning away from Roman organization of space to a new political organization of a more local and fragmented society on a smaller scale. Julio Escalona ("Mapping Scale Change: Hierarchisation and Fission in Castilian Rural Communities during the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries") states that some smaller communities that emerged in the 10th and 11th centuries, especially small "alfoz"- centres, used abandoned Roman central places.
Guy Halsall ("Villas, Territories and Communities in Merovingian Northern Gaul") investigates the transformation of social space in the Frankish realm after Roman times. He shows that Roman villae as small central places often were given up in the 5th century. Later they were used as cemeteries, but due to the increasing number of cemeteries in the beginning of the 7th century they became smaller in time. Halsall makes plausible that larger communal organization was displaced by small family units. He (226) argues that this was because of an increase in social stability, and therefore the display of social status in collective necropolic funerary sites was not necessary in the 7th century anymore. In the case on Marmoutier, Paul Fouracre (Marmoutier, Familia versus Familiy. The Relations between Monastery and Serfs in Eleventh-Century North- West France) describes the role of priories in controlling serfs and land in a larger space. Priories like Marmoutier controlled serfs over long distances. The serfs belonged to the familia of Marmoutiers as well as to a social community at their living- place. The wealth of the "Grundherrschaft," the power over serfs, stood against the community the serfs lived in. Antonio Sennis ("Narrating Places: Memory and Space in Medieval Monasteries") shows that social space needs holiness and gets it regularly with saints venerated at local places in social space. He argues for the medieval idea of space as a cultural concept, that there is no "Euclidian space."
This book has an Index, a bibliography and a glossary compiled by Guy Halsall. There are a lot of words used in this book with which most readers will not be familiar. Because of that the glossary defining, for example, Icelandic words like "ping," meaning an "area served by a priest" is very useful. The marking of words declared in the glossary with an asterisk is slightly irritating. In the whole this book--although it is very disparate--gives more than a first survey over patterns of organization of social space. It would be useful for a future undertaking to concentrate on comparable political spaces or, as another possibility, to focus on special forms of organization or even possibly political space with the same political history, either Roman or non-Roman. This book, as the editor Wendy Davies states "answered some questions but posed more." One might add: and gives some help in conceptualizing special patterns of organizing social space. [1] Chris Wickham, Framing the Middle Ages. Europe and the Mediterranean 400-800, Oxford, University Press, 2005.