The personal website & blog of Dr Caitlin Green
The Land on the Edge project was commissioned by Historic England and Lincolnshire County Council as part of the wider Inns on the Edge project (Historic England project number 8398). The long, low-lying coastline of Lincolnshire has changed dramatically and repeatedly over the centuries and millennia, and one of the key aims of the Land On The Edge strand was to produce a detailed academic report…
[The following short piece was originally published in the Lincoln Record Society News Review, 18 (2021), pp. 2–4; the version presented below is the fully-referenced version of this text; a PDF of this article is available at Academia.edu ] The aim of the following note is to direct attention to an often-overlooked Arabic account and map of Lincolnshire found in the Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī khtirāq…
The aim of the following draft is to offer some thoughts on a local name from thirteenth-century Lincolnshire, Macamathehou , that involves a version of the Arabic name Muhammad (Middle English Makomet/Macamethe , Old French Mahomet ). Whilst it has been plausibly seen as an instance of a variant of the name of Muhammed being used to mean 'heathen', 'pagan idol' or similar (based on the false but…
The following brief note is concerned with the so-called 'bluestones' and the 'Bluestone Heath Road' of eastern Lincolnshire. In origin, the stones themselves seem usually to be glacial erratics—non-local boulders carried here from northern Britain by the ice-sheets—that were used as focal points for their communities, for example functioning as meeting-stones, court-stones, judicial stones, or…
The following draft is concerned with the curious use of the nickname 'Cousin Jack' for the Cornish in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The 'Great Emigration' of the Cornish between around 1815 and the First World War saw what has been termed the 'wholescale scattering' of the Cornish to the new mining frontiers of North and South America, Australia and South Africa. From at least the…
The focus of this post is on two important yet lost elements of the pre-modern landscape of Lincolnshire, namely a large area of common land named Lissingleys—very probably the meeting-place for the whole of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian Lindsey—and the road running north-eastwards from Lincoln to the coast at Grimsby. The latter routeway is first recorded in 1675, but is believed to have…
A previous post discussed a find of a Northern Song dynasty Chinese coin from England whose context suggested that it may have been a genuine ancient loss from the medieval period, along with a variety of textual and archaeological evidence for contact between England and East Asia in the Middle Ages. The following post returns briefly to this question, noting the recent discovery of a second…
The aim of the following brief note is simply to share a recent find of a late ninth- or early tenth-century Byzantine coin that was discovered amongst the rocks at low tide on Carbis Bay beach, Cornwall. Carbis Bay is part of the wider St Ives Bay, where several sites have produced finds of Early Byzantine material and there seems to have been a significant early medieval site at Phillack on the…
The following post is largely the text of a lecture that was given at the time of the launch of the first edition of my Britons and Anglo-Saxons back in 2012, with a handful of minor additions. It offered a little light-hearted musing on the importance, or apparent lack thereof, of pre-Viking Lincolnshire; in the absence of a formal launch for the second edition of the book in 2020 due to the…
I'm pleased to announce that the second edition of my Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400–650 has now been published and is available to buy as both a paperback (401 pages, ISBN 978-0-902668-26-3) and a PDF ebook. Britons and Anglo-Saxons was first issued in 2012 and represents the published version of my Oxford DPhil thesis. It offers an interdisciplinary approach to the history of the…
[The following piece is currently being written up as an article; an update on this will be placed here soon.] The aim of the following piece is simply to share some interesting accounts of the tin-trade in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly one written in Arabic and another in Persian. Taken together, these two accounts suggest that tin from southwestern England ( i.e. Cornwall…
A previous post on here listed a number of field and other local minor names from Lindsey that made reference to folkloric and monstrous creatures inhabiting northern Lincolnshire; the aim of the following brief discussion is to offer some further names of the same type, based this time on the Place-Names of Lincolnshire , volumes 1–7. Once again, it should be noted that the majority of these…
This post is primarily intended to share images of some of the interesting early maps of Cornwall that still exist, dating from the medieval era through until the early seventeenth century, following on from a similar post on early maps of Lincolnshire . Details of each map and a brief discussion of the principal points of interest are provided in the captions to the following image gallery, which…
The aim of the following brief note is to direct attention to a burial from a late ninth- to early eleventh-century cemetery in York. The burials here were originally excavated in 1989–90, but an osteological analysis in 2015 suggested that one of the people buried here was a man of possible African or mixed ancestry. Reconstruction painting of the wooden houses of the Viking-Age city of Jorvik…
[The following post has now been fully revised, expanded and published as C. R. Green, 'King Alfred and India: an Anglo-Saxon Embassy to Southern India in the Ninth Century', in Early Medieval England and its Neighbours (formerly Anglo-Saxon England ), vol. 52 (2026). You can read it for free here , as the article is Open Access] One of the more intriguing references to early medieval contacts…
The following brief note is concerned with an intriguing fifteenth-century reference to both Bactrian camels and dromedaries (aka Arabian camels) in England, examining both the context of these specific animals in late medieval Kent before moving on to look at the wider evidence for the presence of camels in medieval Britain and Ireland. King Arthur riding a camel on a glass roundel of c. 1500;…
The aim of this post is simply to share some recent images of the underwater prehistoric forests at Trusthorpe and Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. The submerged forest at Trusthorpe is only rarely seen, especially since beach replenishment works along the coast here; however, an unusually low tide on Monday 13th August, 2018, exposed at least two of the tree stumps and I was able to take the following…
The aim of the following post is to briefly discuss another global distribution from Late Antiquity, this time of Indo-Pacific beads. Indo-Pacific beads were made in southern India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia from the third century BC onwards, and by c. 400 to 700 AD they have an impressive distribution stretching from northern and eastern Africa across to China, Korea and Japan, with recent…
The existence of early medieval Christian and secular centres in the Hayle Estuary, Cornwall, was mentioned in a previous post . The aim of the following post is simply to share—for the sake of interest—a number of pictures of some of the key sites and finds from this area, not least the important late fourth-/fifth-century chi-rho stone now built into Phillack Church, along with a brief…
This post is concerned with a rather curious and unique find of an eleventh-century Northern Song dynasty coin from China in Cheshire, looking first at its archaeological context before going on to explore the evidence for a degree of contact between people from East Asia and Britain in the medieval era, a topic that is of interest whatever the origins of this particular coin may be. A Northern…
The following brief post is concerned with an early twelfth-century Byzantine ambassador to England who had the intriguing name of Wlfricus —or Wulfric—of Lincoln. Needless to say, this is a most interesting name for the first documented medieval ambassador from Constantinople to England to bear, and what follows looks briefly at what little we know of this embassy and its context. A contemporary…
The long, sandy beach of Porthminster, with its calm, blue waters, is located just below the railway station at St Ives , Cornwall, and has found favour since the late nineteenth century as a resort, especially after the retirement of its seine fishing fleet. However, its history stretches back much further than this, with its present-day sands and landscaped green areas said to conceal the buried…
The focus of the current post is an unusual find of Barbary ape remains from a fifth- or sixth-century AD context at Wroxeter (Shropshire), once the fourth largest city in Roman Britain. The Barbary ape, or more properly the Barbary macaque , is primarily a North African species of monkey, but the Wroxeter find forms part of a small body of archaeological evidence for their presence as exotic pets…
The origins and identity of St Ia, the patron saint of St Ives, Cornwall ( Porthye/ Sancta Ya in 1284, Porthia in 1291), has rarely been seriously investigated, beyond noting the existence of late medieval legends that claim she arrived in Cornwall c. 500 AD from Ireland on a leaf.( 1 ) However, recent work suggests that St Ia may be rather more interesting than she at first appears, perhaps…
The aim of following post is to share an interesting fifteenth-century image of the meeting between King Henry IV and the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos in 1400 at London. The emperor was touring western Europe trying to solicit help for the Byzatine Empire against the Ottoman Turks and visited England for two months over the winter of 1400–01, staying with king for Christmas and being…