How to protect yourself from feudal violence, and other links

Today there is only time for a links post, I’m sorry about that. But happily I had most of one ready in the backlog drawer, and they’re all of reasonable moment.

The refuge site at Bléré Val-de-Cher, seen from above during excavation

Firstly, while I was still reading other blogs (a habit to which I hope to return), Archaeology in Europe fed me this link to Past Horizons, who had a report on an archæological site in Bléré-Val-de-Cher, an area much disputed between the counts of Blois and Anjou in the late eleventh century, which turns out to be the date of a cooking pot they’ve retrieved from an underground chamber beneath the floor of a house there. It looks pretty inarguably like a hidey-hole and there are some great pictures. But was it a peasants’ last resort (in which case that’s a lot of digging, guys, well done) or if not, whose?

Aerial view of Farfa Abbey

Then one of my old Oxford students, fellow frontierist Rodrigo García-Velasco, pointed me at this new virtual tour of the Abbey of Farfa, with 360° views of many of its more impressive chambers (though those need Quicktime). Granted not very much of it is still Carolingian but there is Romanesque enough to keep me happy and I gather some later architectural movements may also have had a trick or two up their sleeves that are visible here.

Portrait denier of Charlemagne

And then lastly, a work of great moment, the Kings College London project The Making of Charlemagne’s Europe, which as you may know from such august blogs as Magistra et Mater has been striving to get all charter material from the territories ruled by Charlemagne generated during his reign into a database for prosopographical, micro-historical and generally historiographical reasons, has now tentatively gone live to the web. They explain what they’re doing, report on a conference the project ran earlier this year and also, of course, have a blog. And where else are you going to find Jinty Nelson blogging? So I recommend you take a look! I’ve linked it from the sidebar as well, so you can always do it later…