Medieval archaeology is a relatively young discipline. It relies heavily on and contributes to the neighbouring disciplines of history and geography as well as certain of the natural sciences. The kinds of sources investigated in the context of medieval archaeology also cast light on many aspects of life in later centuries. The main sources used are: graveyards, churches and churchyards; castles and fortifications; rural and urban settlements; technical production sites and routes of communication. Closely allied to these are the numerous finds of small objects of everyday life, from cutlery and tools to animal remains and grain. This book is a comprehensive discussion of what can be established from the use of such materials about the culture and daily life of medieval Germany. Each subject is augmented with the use of many illustrations. Besides methodological questions, the author considers what can be learnt about the history of settlement and architecture, of technology, of economic and social matters, of churches and missions, and of population, diet and vegetation.

A primer on medieval justice, this book focuses on France, Germany and England and covers the thousand years between the transformation of the Roman world in Western Europe, which took place around the 4th and 5th centuries, and the European Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries. It highlights key elements in the intricate, overlapping legal systems of the Middle Ages and describes a wide range of contemporary laws and cases. A discussion of the modern legacies of medieval law is included, as are a brief overview of the Inquisition, the 27 articles of Joan of Arc and useful commentary on many other topics. Illustrations range from the earliest known depictions of English courts and illuminations of torture to pictures of important sites, events, and instruments of punishment in medieval law.

Innovations, transmissions and transformations had profound spatial, economic and social impacts on the environments, landscapes and habitats evident at micro- and macro-levels. This volume explores how these changes affected how land was worked, how it was organized, and the nature of buildings and rural complexes.

Fiefs and Vassals has changed our view of the medieval world. It offers a fundamental challenge to orthodox conceptions of feudalism. Susan Reynolds argues that the concepts of the fief and of vassalage, as understood by historians of medieval Europe, were constructed by post-medieval scholarsfrom the works of medieval academic lawyers and tha they provide a bad guide to the realities of medieval society.This is a radical new examination of relations between rulers, nobles, and free men, the distillation of wide-ranging research by a leading medieval historian. It has revolutionized the way we think of the Middle Ages.

Feudal military practices, which are as varied as those of modern times, are surveyed here for the first time. The author treats in detail the bases on which feudal service was exacted, the mustering and composition of armies and their subsequent operations in the field, and the qualifications of their commanders. He discusses military feudalism as it originated and developed in the Frankish kingdom of the Carolingians and as it operated during the early Capetian period in the Ile de France and the feudal principalities of northern France. He then follows feudal developments, in roughly chronological order, in those states where feudalism was consciously imported—lower Italy and Sicily, England, and Crusader Syria. He finally treats lands in which the military structure revealed some feudal characteristics but where institutions were never more than superficially feudalized—Southern France, Christian Spain, central and northern Italy, and Germany—describing how such factors as native military institutions, the pattern of landholding, economic structure, and manpower problems worked to modify feudal military institutions and practices. This book will illuminate for specialist and lay reader alike a strangely neglected aspect of feudal life.

This book describes and explains the conditions and changes happening in Germany from 1050-1200.

This book explores how bishops used the medieval tithe as a social and political tool in eleventh-century Germany and Italy.

In this examination of the functions of lordship in a medieval society, Benjamin Arnold seeks answers to some of the most fundamental questions for the period of political and institutional history: How did the lords maintain control over the people, land, and resources? How was their rule sustained and justified? Arnold chooses to analyze the Eichstätt region, an area on the borders of three major German provinces: Bavaria, Franconia, and Swabia. The region was the geographical and political dimension within which succeeding bishops, with great tenacity and inventiveness, survived the threat of dominion by their secular neighbors, the counts. The bishops of Eichstätt were able to emerge with a durable territorial structure of their own, which they succeeded in recasting, between 1280 and 1320, into a credible and long-lasting principality. Modern ideas of political progress, Arnold contends, tend to be unfair to medieval institutions that have not left easily recognizable descendants. He argues that it would be more prudent to observe in the territorial fragmentation of Germany not the triumph of chaos but the outcome of a reasonably orderly social and legal process that provided alternative institutions to those of a centralized or national monarchy.