This book provides a comprehensive survey of the archaeology of the regions bordering the North Sea and the Baltic between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries AD. While leaving the writing of broad political narratives to others, the author skilfully uses documentary evidence to help with the interpretation of sites and finds, and to identify problems with our current understanding of the archaeological record. Ayers draws on a myriad of published and grey-literature sources, supplemented with a wealth of information gained from the author's site visits, attendance at colloquia and trips to collections. It is clearly the product of several decades of active engagement with the material, with its emphasis on East Anglian archaeology reflecting the locus of the author's professional experience.
The structure of the volume follows a chronological narrative, but within each chapter there are sections dealing with the most relevant themes: geo-environment, climate, social organisation, the relationship between towns and their hinterlands, developments in material culture and technology and so on, as appropriate. As a means of organising a huge body of densely interconnected material, this provides both a coherent framework for the story and the flexibility to concentrate on the most significant issues, leaving the reader feeling secure in their grasp of the issues being discussed. Merchant-driven trade, the underlying leitmotif of the book, gets its own chapter, as though it were too important to be constrained by the century chapter headings of the rest of the volume. The narrative is told in a way that illuminates and explains the broader development of society and culture in the later Middle Ages, as ideas about how to live, work and, increasingly, accumulate and consume spark backwards and forwards across the many coastlines that constitute the North Sea province.
The early period, starting around AD 1100, sets the scene by describing the major drivers of change in the coming centuries. These include the growth in population, particularly in urban centres, the various pressures of climate change, technological innovation and the agencies of institutional power. The results of all of the major research projects in the study area are deployed, as are the discoveries from the multitude of archaeological excavations and building surveys undertaken over the last 50 years in advance of the regeneration of the historic trading centres that form the main foci of interest. A number of the most important centres—Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bergen, Bruges, Great Yarmouth, Hull, London, Lübeck, Norwich, Ribe and Trondheim—are re-visited throughout the chapters, as different excavations illustrate different themes over the centuries. The encyclopaedic coverage is astonishing.
Two aspects deserve honourable mentions in despatches: the attention given to developments in archaeological science and the recognition of the importance of the underlying conceptual frameworks that archaeologists work within but rarely explicitly discuss. An examination of fish-bone assemblages opens the book, and then the story takes in climate change (effects on fishing and the Little Ice Age); vulcanology (the eruption of Mount Rinjani in Indonesia); gas chromatography-mass spectrography (for identifying wine residues on barrels and vessels); stable isotopes (population movement and, innovatively, to track the mobility of disease); DNA studies from teeth of the Charterhouse cemetery burials to isolate the Yersinia pestis bacteria (a plague vector) and at St Catherine's cemetery, Eindhoven, harvesting ancient genetic sources to develop gene therapies in the creation of new drugs to combat HIV; geo-technical analysis to provenance ballast from King's Lynn and Wismar, and the stone used in Flemish churches, limestone ledger stones and Tournai ‘marble’ grave markers; the list goes on.
In the theoretical sphere, following a nod to Henri Pirenne, we get Robert Liddiard on elite landscapes, David Barraclough on cognitive mapping, John Steane on the heavenly town, Christopher Dyer and John Schofield on urban space and mentality, Peter Spufford and Jennifer Kermode on the uptake of coinage, Frans Verhaeghe's critique of ceramics as indicators of trade, David Gaimster and Natasha Mehler on Hanseatic cultural signatures, depositional theory by Thomas Spitzers, Kelly Green on the symbolism of gloves, John Cherry on seals, Roberta Gilchrist and Stephania Perring on sacred space, imagery and the Reformation and, bringing us back to Pirenne, Joakim Thomasson on capital and society. Again, the range and depth of scholarship is deeply impressive.
Elsewhere in this smorgasbord the reader learns of the brick latrine used by Chaucer, red squirrel pelts at York, where also is found the first depiction of spectacles (c. AD 1410, on a figure in a stained glass window), ferreting for rabbits, the Ruisdael painting of an Amsterdam manor-house with subsidence problems caused by land-reclamation, known as the Dutch vernacular equivalent of ‘The Money Pit’, and, to whet the whistle, a detailed archaeology of beer and brewing.
With such a wide-ranging volume, there will be occasional errors. A couple of very minor points are offered here as corrections for the inevitable second edition: the residents of Hartlepool will not like their relocation to Yorkshire, and the author is misled by his secondary source in describing the timber-framed buildings on the Close, Newcastle, as having undercrofts and being dated to AD 1400, statements flatly contradicted in the published building recording. A final note of constructive criticism to the publisher of the otherwise excellent ‘Studies in the Archaeology of Medieval Europe’ series: there is no point in having end-notes if the note itself is just a bibliographic reference, causing the reader to have to turn immediately to the bibliography to find out what the reference relates to. The end-notes take up 22 pages, space that could have been used to make the dense blocks of text easier to read by employing a larger font.
In summary, this marvellous book is a definitive text that is all the more significant because the subject, the interconnectedness of the nations around the German Ocean, although of the greatest importance, has not previously been covered in any depth. Packed with archaeological evidence, very fully referenced and clearly illustrated, the book is an essential source for any researcher, field archaeologist or historian working on the medieval period from the western coast of Russia to the English Channel. Particularly at the present political juncture, I can only echo the author's concluding sentiments: “the sea binds communities together rather than dividing them” (p. 198).
