Description
Book SynopsisAnglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs is the first detailed consideration of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon society dealt with social outcasts. Beginning with the period following Roman rule and ending in the century following the Norman Conquest, it surveys a period of fundamental social change, which included the conversion to Christianity, the emergence of the late Saxon state, and the development of the landscape of the Domesday Book.While an impressive body of written evidence for the period survives in the form of charters and law-codes, archaeology is uniquely placed to investigate the earliest period of post-Roman society - the fifth to seventh centuries - for which documents are lacking. For later centuries, archaeological evidence can provide us with an independent assessment of the realities of capital punishment and the status of outcasts.Andrew Reynolds argues that outcast burials show a clear pattern of development in this period. In the pre-Christian centuries, ''deviant'' b
Trade ReviewThis scholarly and accessible study, which recognises the stark and often brutal reality of social power and judicial process, is recommended to anyone with an interest in early English society or the evolution of the English landscape. * Chris Scull, British Archaeology *
Table of Contents1. Sources, Approaches, and Contexts ; 2. Burials, Bodies, and Beheadings: Interpretation and Discovery ; 3. Social Deviants in a Pagan Society: the Fifth to Seventh Centuries ; 4. Social Deviants in a Christian World: the Seventh to Eleventh Centuries ; 5. The Geography of Deviant Burial in Anglo-Saxon England ; 6. Themes and Trajectories: the Wider Social Context ; Appendix 1. A handlist of Anglo-Saxon law-codes prescribing capital punishment, mutilation, and burial in unconsecrated ground ; Appendix 2. A handlist of early Anglo-Saxon deviant burials ; Appendix 3. A handlist of select burials from execution cemeteries ; Appendix 4. A handlist of execution and related sites, and other burial places in Anglo-Saxon charter bounds ; Bibliography
