Professor Tom Moore
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I like your analogy with Glastonbury, but, you know, assembly places.
So, you know, anybody who's sort of looked at early medieval world, you can think of assembly places there being somewhere where even if you have a king, that king has to negotiate their power.
They have to come and they have to have the other members of those communities come together and negotiate their authority, you know, make that decision as a collective.
And again, this is a rural community, so people are most of the time in their farmstead still.
They're perhaps sending one member to come to those assemblies, represent them, make those decisions as a collective.
So this is a really exciting time because it's that idea that we have kings, but these are not kings as you might think from the high medieval period.
This is more about a negotiated power structure.
Opera perhaps, and why I find them exciting, is that those societies are trying to work out how do you do that?
How do you negotiate power in a different way that hasn't really existed before?
Certainly chariots, you know, are something that shows sort of characteristic of the British Iron Age.
I mean, we only know them from burials, really, from East Yorkshire in the Middle Iron Age, but in the Late Iron Age, we know they existed from the parts we find.
And even Caesar mentions how important chariots are in warfare for the Britons.
Yeah, I mean, one of the exciting things about Melsonby is the idea that we have some other vehicles as well.
These four-wheeled wagons, you know, which if we compare them to what's happening on the continent, where they're thought of as being sort of ceremonial vehicles, as you say, either for the funerary event or for display.
Yes, you can imagine people kind of processing round in these vehicles, you know, perhaps being taken to the funerary rite on these vehicles.
One of the other exciting things from Melsonby, and we kind of get a bit obsessed by the vehicles and the chariots, which are exciting, don't get me wrong, but is the cauldron, is the wine mixing vessel that we have there from the earlier hoard that was discovered there, a large bucket for drinking beer.