So, what exactly does a fanfiction writing magpie do when she's not online?

Books on the Subject       Baby Ghosts

I'm a graduate student working on a joint PhD Medieval Mortuary Archaeology.   My research topic?   Medieval Death.   Or more specifically, the rituals of burial in late Roman Britain into the early medieval period.

Bored yet?  *g*

The fact is I adore this subject and will from time to time put up interesting bits of information from my ongoing research into this subject.   If you want to know more about the subject or just want to talk Middle Ages feel free to get in touch!

A Brief Bibliography

Are you at all interested in the Middle Ages or Medieval Archaeology?  If so, here are a
few books on the subject that I'd recommend.  I'll add to this list from time to time.

Bahn, Paul (ed)  2003:  Written in the Bones:  How Human Remains Unlock the Secrets of the Dead.  Buffalo, New York.

Barlow, Frank  1979:  The English Church 1000 - 1066:  A History of the Later Anglo-Saxon Church, Second Edition.  London.

Bartlett, Robert  2000:  England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075 - 1225.  Oxford.

Binski, Paul 1996:  Medieval Death:  Ritual and Representation.  London.

Blair, John  2005:  The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society.  Oxford.

Crawford, Sally  1999:  Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England.  Stroud.

Daniell, Christopher  1997:  Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066 - 1550.  London.

Daniell, Christopher  2003:  From Norman Conquest to Magna Carta:  England 1066 - 1215.  New York.

Effros, Bonnie  1965:  Caring for Body and Soul:  Burial and the Afterlife in the Merovingian World.  University Park, PA.

Effros, Bonnie  2002:  Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul.  New York.

Effros, Bonnie  2003:  Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages.  London.

Finucane, R. C.  1982:  Appearances of the Dead:  A Cultural History of Ghosts.  London.

Fleming, Robin 1998:  Domesday Book and the Law:  Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England.  Cambridge.

Geary, Patrick J.  1978:  Furta Sacra:  Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages.  Princeton, New Jersey.

Geary, Patrick J.  1994:  Phantoms of Remembrance:  Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium.  Princeton, New Jersey.

Geary, Patrick J.  1996:  Living With The Dead in The Middle Ages.  London.

Gilchrist, Roberta & Sloane, Barney  2005:  Requiem:  The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain.  London.

Hadley, D. M.  2001:  Death in Medieval England:  An Archaeology. Stroud.

Jupp, Peter C. & Gittings, Clare (eds)  1999:  Death in England:  An Illustrated History.  Manchester.

Lepine, David & Orme, Nicholas (eds)  2003:  Death and Memory in Medieval Exeter.  Exeter.

Lucy, Sam  2000:  The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death:  Burial Rites in Early England.  Stroud.

Paxton, Frederick S.  1990:  Christianizing Death:  The Creating of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe.   London.

Schmitt, Jean-Claude  1998:  Ghosts in the Middle Ages:  The Living and The Dead in Medieval Society.  London.

Scott, Eleanor 1999:  The Archaeology of Infancy and Infant Death.  BAR International Series 819.

Stocker, David & Everson, Paul  2006:  Summoning St Michael:  Early Romanesque Towers in Lincolnshire.  Oxford.

Thompson, Victoria  2004:  Dying and Death in Later Anglo-Saxon England.  Woodbridge.

Wormald, Patrick  1999:  The Making of English Law:  King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, Volume 1:  Legislation and its Limits.  Oxford.

The Link Between Infants & Ghosts in Anglo-Saxon England

I recently came accross a theory which I found extremely interesting.

There is a serious dearth of evidence for infant burial in the pre-modern era.  There are a great many possible explanations for this ranging from the fact that infant bones are more delicate and therefore less likely to survive to the possible use of separate graveyards for infants and young children, something known from the Roman world.  During the early Anglo-Saxon period in England (about 500 — 700 BC) this lack of young children and infants is even more pronounced.  In fact, there have been only a handful of burials for children under five years of age ever found and the majority of these are multiple burials where the child is buried accompanying an adult.  This is not because infant mortality was less during this time, there's reason to believe that it was quite high.

The few unaccompanied infant burials that have been found for this period, however, offer a possible explanation for their rarity in the archaeological record.  These burials were found very close to the surface.  They only survive in places that haven't been ploughed in recent centuries and haven't had anything of a very invasive nature happen to the area since the Anglo-Saxon era.  There was one dig where they used machinery to peal back the layers of sod and managed to damage the only infant burial on the site in the process.  The theory, drawing from this and other sources, is that during the Anglo-Saxon period infants were not fully considered to be people yet.  It wasn't until later, around the ages of four or five years, that they were really considered human beings and therefore accorded the same funeral rites as others of the society.

As we enter into the conversion period (roughly the 6^th and 7^th centuries BC — the period of time that England was being converted to Christianity) there are a great many stories written down by monks and priests about the bodies of young children being rejected by the earth or rising from the grave of their own accord.  At the same time, burials of infants and young children become more common in accordance with Christian doctrine which dictates that a child is a person from the moment of birth.  But these burials are odd, with a high proportion of items that seem of talismanic significance and they often have rocks placed over the bodies, as though those burying the child were attempting to make sure the body stayed in the grave.  This, together with the stories suggests a very strong mental link for the Anglo-Saxons between infant deaths and revenants (corpse that rise from the grave).

As a side note, revenants are not zombies or vampires but rather bodies who rise on their own, usually without any part being taken by the soul of the dead person.  While there are stories that involve revenants calling others to the grave after them, they are rarely violent and only occasionally evil.  In many ways, stories of medieval revenants have more in common with modern ghost stories than the vampire stories of Easter Europe or the zombies of the Carribean.

Going back the original topic, a theory that has been suggested to explain this link is based off of the earlier Anglo-Saxon custom of shallow burial.  If the body is buried too shallowly there is a very high likelihood of animals scenting the corpse and digging it up again.  One could imagine that it would be rather a shock to the local community to bury a child one day and find the body back on the surface the next.  And if this custom of shallow burial was as common as is hypothesised then this reappearance of a recently deceased children would be fairly well-known.  Explaining both the strong link between the deaths of young children and revenant stories in the conversion period but also the anxiety demonstrated in the grave-goods of conversion period infant burials.

A bit grisly?  Yes.  Very interesting?  Most certainly!  *g*  Well, it caught my attention anyway.  Most of this comes from Sally Crawford's Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England.  With supplemental material from a variety of articles dealing with the ongoing argument over the occurrence of infanticide in medieval Europe.  A debate that is still far from decided and an issue that has been of great academic interest over the last five years or so.

There will be more — some funny some sad — whenever it takes my fancy to put them up here