Howard Williams. Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain.

Webster, Leslie

HOWARD WILLIAMS. Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain. xiv+260 pages, 73 illustrations. 2006. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 0521-84019-8 hardback 55 [pounds sterling] & $100.

Back in the early 1990s, I gave a talk on the Anglo-Saxon 'princely' barrow burial at Taplow to the London University Medieval History Seminar, attended by, amongst others, Patrick Wormald. After my detailed account of this powerful construct--the significant location of the barrow, with its wide viewshed over the Thames valley, set within an earlier Iron Age hill-fort and adjacent to a medieval church; the quantity, range, and unusually exotic nature of the grave contents in the timber chamber below the mound; the major resources involved in bringing this all about; and the unknowable events that must have delivered and framed the burial installation--Patrick brought the ensuing discussion to a standstill with one devastatingly simple question. 'How' he asked, 'would this message, with all its tangible and intangible investment, be made known to subsequent generations?' How, in essence, might such a carefully constructed mortuary text have both present and enduring meaning for the community, its neighbours and their descendants?

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Typical of Patrick's brilliant ability to cut to the central issue, it was a crucial question, hardly addressed by archaeologists--or historians--in those days. Howard Williams's excellent book is thus greatly to be welcomed as the first extended survey of how the dead were remembered in early medieval Britain. Memory and forgetting (though the latter gets much less of a look-in here) are proposed as guiding principles in early medieval mortuary behaviour, and the various 'technologies of remembrance', whereby social memories linking past, present and future were constructed, are examined in detail. This forms the core of the book, framed by introductory and concluding chapters, and consists of five sections: on portable artefacts, on the management of the body, on the structure and composition of the burial itself, on the association of burials with monuments, and on their relationship to the whole landscape setting.

The evidence drawn upon is wide-ranging, covering the period c. AD 400-1100, and spanning traditional cultural boundaries to include examples from Wales, Scotland and the South-West, as well as from the areas of Anglo-Saxon settlement; two Viking burials are also included, both from the Isle of Man. Twenty-two case studies are presented, providing a representative sample of the main issues involved, though, as the author readily allows, an overview study of this length and nature is inevitably highly selective. Most significantly, churches, domestic architecture and sculpted stone monuments are omitted from this volume, so that those wishing for an extended consideration of this topic must wait for Williams's forthcoming book on the subject. Nevertheless, there is enough here to show that the author has a firm command of his theme; the evidence is well presented and the illustrations are particularly elegant. There are valuable insights, for example on the differing management of the body and its presentation in cremations and in inhumations, both male and female--themes regularly noted by archaeologists, but seen here from a refreshingly different perspective; and the chapter on the variety of relationships that burials may have with the landscape is particularly stimulating. As one would expect, the literature is well-covered and up-to-date, with a very useful bibliography.

One notable absentee, however, is the 'princely' grave recently found at Prittlewell, Essex, which evidently came too late to contribute to the discussion (I could not, incidentally, find the reference to it which the index lists as being on p. 217). As a particularly complex and well-excavated statement of seventh-century high-end mortuary practice, it would have had much to contribute to Williams's thesis, particularly in relation to issues concerning proximity and separation in burial practice. A wider use of contemporary literary and other sources might also have benefited his approach; the Franks Casket, for example, certainly has something to contribute to discussions of Anglo-Saxon death and memory, itself an object which interrogates different histories, different ideologies. Discussion here is restricted to three accounts of mound burial--Beowulf's own burial, Guthlac's re-use of an earlier burial mound, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 1006 which mentions Cwichelm's barrow.

The book evidently targets students and other readers with a general interest, as much as professional archaeologists and historians; the latter will nevertheless find much to stimulate them here. The textbook style, however, makes for rather laboured reading at times; with its prolegomenon and closing summary chapter, bolstered by regular repetitions and recapitulations throughout, plus a text heavily freighted with bibliographical references (13 in one otherwise short sentence on p.181!), the book could have benefited from a firmer editorial hand. A few typos have also slipped through the net, including a surreal 'shirt-court' for 'shire-court' (p. 207). But such minor quibbles should not detract from what is an important and innovative contribution to the study of early medieval mortuary behaviour and its inherent strategies of memory.

LESLIE WEBSTER

Department of Prehistory and Europe, British Museum, London, UK

(Email: arachne55@tiscali.co.uk)