“How deserted lies the city, once so full of people”. The reclamation of intramural space in Anglo-Saxon literature

Bintley, Mike (2017) “How deserted lies the city, once so full of people”. The reclamation of intramural space in Anglo-Saxon literature. In, Boulton, Meg, Hawkes, Jane and Stoner, Heidi (eds.) Place and Space in the Medieval World. 1 ed. Routledge, pp. 63-73. (doi:10.4324/9781315413655).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

This chapter considers some of the ways in which the ruins of Roman Britain, and in particular its walled towns, were co-opted into Anglo-Saxon mythologies of origins by Bede and other early English writers. It addresses the manner in which the narrative of destruction and ruination inherited from Gildas, presented Anglo-Saxon authors with a dark ancestral past that was overcome through the rehabilitation and Christian renovatio of intramural space. To erase the ruins is to erase the visible public triggers of memory; a city without ruins and traces of age is like a mind without memories. Although the ruins of Rome in Anglo-Saxon England were never consciously erased in this way, what took place instead was a process of spiritual reclamation. Anglo-Saxon England inherited its narrative of urban ruin from Gildas, whose description of the adventus Saxonum and the destruction of Britain's towns was probably penned about a the mid-fifth-century events it describes.

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