Early Medieval Settlements — Helena Hamerow

books and books review, history
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Cover of Early Medieval Settlements


Early Medieval Settlements
Helena Hamerow
225 pages including index
published in 2002

I wasn’t quite sure whether I should get this book — complete title: Early Medieval Settlements – The Archaeology of Rural Communities in North-West Europe 400-900 from the library. It looked as if much of what it covered I had already read about in Chris Wickham’s books Framing the Early Middle Ages and The Inheritance of Rome, only concentrating on the archaeological side of things rather than the history, which I’m more interested in. I also worried about whether it wouldn’t be too dry or technical, something I had problems with occasionally in the Wickham books. On the other hand, it was short, a quick scan didn’t make it look too boring and reading the introduction showed me it was meant as a general introduction to this subject, rather than an indepth analysis, all of which persuaded me into getting this.

The fact that I finished it means I made the right choice. Helena Hamerow writes well, knows her subject and also knows when to go into detail and when not to, making good use of footnotes. The end result is a good overview of the archaeology of everyday rural life around the North Sea coasts of the modern Netherlands, Germany and Denmark during the transition from Late Antiquity into the early Middle Ages and its relationship to the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England in the same period. Hamerow, as she explains in the first chapter, meant this book both as a general introduction to this period and area and as a pointer for her (monolingual) UK colleagues working on Anglo-Saxon England to the work done on the continent in the same period. Each chapter therefore ends with a quick overview of the relevant English archaeology.

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The saddest page on Wikipedia

history, Wikipedia
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Michel Vuijlsteke linked to this sad, moving article at The Awl about the last two surviving veterans of World War I:

There are two veterans of the First World War left in the world. Of all the parts of the world that move on without you, of all the borders beyond the horizon, of all the varying speeds and trajectories and characters and stories colluding together in giant waves of “now,” “yet-to-come,” “once was,” and then it boils down to two. It’s not even the whole hand.

Nine years ago, there were 700 left alive.

With the recent deaths of Frank Buckles, John Babcock and Harry Patch, we are left with Claude Choules and Florence Green. (Upon learning this, Claude remarked: “Everything comes to those who wait and wait.”) Nearly 10,000,000 men were killed in the conflict, 65 million participated, and now we are left with two. Think about that. Think about those numbers. What are you supposed to do when an era is inches away from disappearing?

Two days after this article appeared, Claude Choules died, leaving Florence Green as the last surviving veteran of World War I and Józef Kowalski, who fought in the Polish-Russian War as the last surviving WWI era veteran, but there are no more surviving witnesses of the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow. When Harry Patch died two years ago we lost the last survivor of the trench warfare at the Western Front; nobody’s left to tell us if Blackadder goes Forth got it right. Before that, when Henry Allingham died, just a week before Patch’s dead, we lost the last surviving founding member of the RAF, the last surviving RNAS veteran and the last eyewitness to the Battle of Jutland. Thus history passes out of living memory.

And hence the List of surviving veterans of World War I is the saddest page on Wikipedia, slowly shrinking in size, now with only two names left and no idea what to do with it if these last two die as well. Should the page then be deleted, its history gone as well, or kept in some way as a monument to this history? There’s still no consensus and time is ticking…

The Ian Tomlinson verdict: will it change anything?

Ian Tomlinson, Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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Probably not, thinks septicisle:

As wearingly familiar as this sad tale of changing stories, incompetence and abuses of power is, the real outrage is that the overall cause remains the same. Just as the officers on the morning of the 22nd of July 2005 were briefed that those they were after were “up for it” and ready to commit acts of mass murder, giving the impression that lethal force was permissible even when it hadn’t been authorised, so the police prior to the G20 had made clear just how determined they were to crack down hard on those who were out to smash up the City. We duly saw police medics brandishing batons, those without the first idea how to “safely” use a truncheon flinging it around, and of course, the storming of the entirely peaceful Climate Camp, since found to have been illegal. Ian Tomlinson died both as he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and because he was vulnerable to just such an injury as he received; dozens of others got cracked heads or worse just for daring to take part in a demonstration. It would be nice to think that following such regrettable incidents that future policing would have been rethought, but no, as the example of Alfie Meadows so pungently demonstrates.

I agree. The deaths of Ian Tomlinson and Jean Charles de Menezes before him were the result of a deliberate policy to make the Metropolitian Police more ‘ard and confrontational. In de Menezes case it was the whole anti-terrorism mentality that was to blame, wherein any terrorism suspect is incredibly dangerous and needs to be “taken out” or London would disappear in a mushroom cloud; combine that with the fuckups that happened while de Menezes was under suspicion and you get why he was shot in the head in the metro. From that point of view the fact that he was innocent doesn’t matter; what does is that his exxecution send the message that the Met is serious about terrorism.

With Tomlinson’s death a similar sort of attitude is to blame, one that’s perhaps even more pernicious as this time it wasn’t about keeping London safe from terrorism, but about showing who’s boss in the city: the police or the demonstrators. The Met was and is incredibly aggressive in its policing of political demonstrations because it and its political masters want to discourage them; Tomlinson’s death is a side effect of this.

Without a change in attitude, de Menezes and Tomlinson won’t be the last victims of the Metropolitian Police, but the likelyhood of this change is small.

Nick Mamatas not noticable — further decline of Wikipedia

Wikipedia
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Nick Mamatas’ entry on Wikipedia is considered for deletion:

A lack of reliable third part sources necessary for WP:BLP. Also, publications don’t seem notable and awards are regional, not enough to distinguish person as notable.

This is a writer who has written several science fiction and horror novels, been published in America as well as several European countries (Germany and Italy) and is the editor for the well received Haikasoru line of Japanese science fiction books For Viz Publications. He has received favourable critical reception for both his writing and his editing work, including several Bram Stoker Award nominations, a World Fantasy Award nomination, a few Hugo Award nominations, including one this year for Best Editor, long form and so on and so forth. In the greater scheme of things he may just be a minor writer at the moment working in still somewhat disreputable genres, but he’s clearly influential enough and noticed enough by his peers to be worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, with plenty of material out there to be able to write a reasonable encyclopedia entry about him. Everything therefore in the original argument of why Mamatas needs to be removed from Wikipedia is wrong, which is par for the course for a lot of deletions.

Searching for Wikipedia on this very blog will show a lot of other examples of this sort of heavyhanded and dumb “cleansing” of Wikipedia, usually aimed at subjects not traditionally part of an encyclopedia. But that’s the whole point of why Wikipedia can be better than any traditional encyclopedia, because it has room for any subject of worth to be included, no matter how obscure. It can be a generalist encyclopedia and go into enormous depth on every subject imaginable. A certain kind of Wikipedia editor doesn’t get this however and feels the need to patrol the project for subjects and articles they deem unworthy of inclusion because, umm well, they clutter up the place?

Hence absurdities like this, where somebody who clearly hasn’t the faintest idea about the subject he’s judging thinks “Nick Mamatas” needs to be deleted because his publications aren’t noticable and his awards, including the World Fantasy Award nomination are purely regional…