Medieval England: A Social History and Archaeology from the Conquest to 1600 AD

"In the early 1990s, I was beginning to research social life in late medieval England. There were two historians who changed my entire perspective on what was possible. Both Colin Platt, the author of Medieval England , and Christopher Dyer—whose book we’ll come to in a minute—had one thing in common: they paid as much attention to archeological sources as they did historical ones. Chris Dyer is a historian who looks at archeology; Colin Platt is an archeologist who looks at historical sources. Historians and archeologists don’t always see eye to eye. You’d have thought they’d be trying to attain the same ends, but, frequently, archeologists proceed in complete oblivion to what the historical record says. Likewise, historians sit in their libraries and pontificate about what happened in the past without going and looking at the ground, the remains, the places, the artefacts. These two historians reversed that. In fact, they put an end to that way of proceeding. Chris Dyer was so successful within academic circles that he revolutionized the study of social history of medieval England, and probably further afield. Colin Platt is deceased now, but he was very thorough. He worked from the material culture outwards. His book showed me there is a way of integrating what I can go and look at for myself and the narrative about how medieval England changed—because medieval England changed so much between the 11th and the 16th centuries. You go from a world which is riven by violence, famine, hostility, hardship, slavery, fighting the Vikings, through to the age of Shakespeare . That’s an enormous transition. We talk about Shakespeare ‘speaking for us’, and yet Shakespeare would never have spoken for people in the early 11th century. Those transitional 500 years really made the modern world. So to have that explained through the things you see around you, and the objects and the buildings of southern England….it’s one of those books where the scales fall from your eyes. You feel you can see in greater detail than ever before. Medieval England made a huge impression on me about how much is possible when you tie the material culture with the written record."