Robin Fleming - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Books by Robin Fleming

Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise of the Middle Ages, c. 400–c. 1070

Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England

Kings and Lords in Conquest England

Papers by Robin Fleming

Picot (fl. 1071x5–1092), administrator

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Old Buildings, Building Material, and the Death of Recycling in Post-Roman Britain

This chapter sketches out two long-standing and ubiquitous material practices in Roman Britain: t... more This chapter sketches out two long-standing and ubiquitous material practices in Roman Britain: the reuse and refurbishment of old masonry buildings, walls, and foundations; and the repurposing of stone, brick, and tile. Both the reuse of buildings and building material, so I argue, were standard practices in Britain from the second century on, but both disappeared within a few generations of the Roman state’s withdrawal from Britain. So it is the process of the decline and fall of these practices and the reasons that stand behind their ending that are the focus of my chapter. Its emphasis reflects the fact that although I am very interested in ancient recycling practices, as an early medieval historian, I am more engaged by the story of their demise. This chapter is more focused upon the demise of such practices.

Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070

The enormous hoard of beautiful gold military objects found in 2009 in a field in Staffordshire h... more The enormous hoard of beautiful gold military objects found in 2009 in a field in Staffordshire has focused huge attention on the mysterious world of 7th and 8th century Britain. Clearly the product of a sophisticated, wealthy, highly militarized society, the objects beg innumerable questions about how we are to understand the people who once walked across the same landscape we inhabit, who are our ancestors and yet left such a slight record of their presence. "Britain after Rome" brings together a wealth of research and imaginative engagement to bring us as close as we can hope to get to the tumultuous centuries between the departure of the Roman legions and the arrival of Norman invaders nearly seven centuries later. As towns fell into total decay, Christianity disappeared and wave upon wave of invaders swept across the island, it can be too easily assumed that life in Britain became intolerable - and yet this is the world in which modern languages and political arrangem...

Writing Medieval Biography 750–1250: Bones for Historians: Putting the Body back into Biography

Aristocratic landholding and royal power in the eleventh century

Kings and Lords in Conquest England, 1991

Landholding and alliance in late Saxon England

Kings and Lords in Conquest England, 1991

Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom Early Medieval England

The American Journal of Legal History, 2000

Domesday Book and the tenurial revolution

Anglo-Norman Stud, 1986

Much of the scholarly literature on late and post-Roman recycling focuses on either the pragmatic... more Much of the scholarly literature on late and post-Roman recycling focuses on either the pragmatic or the ideological reuse of spolia. This article, however, examines the widespread late- and post-Roman practice in Britain of including recycled Roman building material in ritual activities, especially in closure deposits made in wells. Deposits like these, which are found in more than forty wells, and which dated between c. 370 and c. 430, are described and analysed.

A workshop held 5–6 June at the University of Michigan, organized by Robin Fleming and Katherine ... more A workshop held 5–6 June at the University of Michigan, organized by Robin Fleming and Katherine French. (This is a small, 8-page booklet, and when printed back-to-back and stapled, runs chronologically. In the pdf, however, the papers do not fall in their proper order).

Program for the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Haskins Society

From 7–9 November the Haskins Society will hold its annual meeting at Carleton College. This yea... more From 7–9 November the Haskins Society will hold its annual meeting at Carleton College. This year's keynote speakers are Martin Millett, Joyce Hill, and Bruce O'Brian. We are also featuring a special roundtable on the "The Scripts of Robert of Torigni," which will include Tom Bisson, Erik Kwakkel, Patricia Stirnemann, Elisabeth Van Houts, and Benjamin Pohl. The link will take you to the full program and registration form. http://www.haskinssociety.org/conference2014

The society's name commemorates and honors one of the United States' most eminent medieval histor... more The society's name commemorates and honors one of the United States' most eminent medieval historians, Charles Homer Haskins . A major influence in American graduate education, he taught many fine students, some of whom taught senior members of the society. His work on the twel/h-century renaissance, medieval science, and the rise of the university was seminal, and he effectively pioneered the study of medieval culture as an autonomous field.

“Preconquest England,” Oxford Medieval Studies On-Line Bibliography, ed. Paul Szarmach (Oxford, 2012)

"Scavenging and Its End in the Early Medieval Britain"

Romano-British society depended on complex systems of production, supply, and transportation to p... more Romano-British society depended on complex systems of production, supply, and transportation to provide it with basic commodities, such as iron, pots and lead, which were widely available and inexpensive. But when the economy imploded in Britain, when money ceased to have value, and when the Roman state withdrew, it was impossible for these systems of production to persevere, and the people of Britain underwent dramatic material impoverishment. This lecture will lay out evidence which argues that many individuals and communities in the 5th and early 6th centuries engaged in the scavenging and recycling of material from abandoned Roman sites as a basic subsistence activity. It will also chart the decline of this practice in the later sixth and seventh centuries, and show how newly forming elites came to lay claim to the landscape and to the labour of others in such ways that allow them to produce basic commodities like freshly-smelted metal, which in turn made them rich. In short, the rise and fall of scavenging allows us to witness the ways in which social stratification developed in one early medieval society.

“Land Use and People”

This chapter examines the extraordinary transformations of landscape and people from the seventh ... more This chapter examines the extraordinary transformations of landscape and people from the seventh through the eleventh centuries. Although the West Saxon re-conquest of the Danelaw in the tenth century, the conquests of England by Cnut the Great and William the Conqueror in the eleventh, and the problems of Stephen’s reign and their resolutions in the twelfth century were the ruination of many landholders and the making of others, the major changes concerning land use and people described in this chapter had little to do with grand politics. Instead, they were determined by the ways many hundreds of thousands of people came to farm and pay what they owned their betters, and by the sorts of communities in which they chose or were told to live.