Rural and Urban Aspects of Early Medieval Northwest Europe

The articles here concern the period from the end of the Roman Empire up to the 10th-11th centuries and the lands between the Loire and the Rhine, most particularly the Low Countries. Rural history forms the subject of the first studies, which focus on the large ’classical’ estates of the Carolingian period. Adriaan Verhulst has argued convincingly that these were medieval creations, not any inheritance from Late Antiquity, and emphasizes their regional differences. The following section, on urban history, consists of three studies on the origins and early development of the key Flemish cities of Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp (this last now in English), and three broader-ranging essays which seriously challenge Pirenne’s long accepted views of town origins. In these the author makes full use of contemporary archaeological research to supplement the scanty written sources and to examine the possibilities of (dis)continuity from Roman times through the early Middle Ages.