Late Anglo-Saxon Ely: A Monastery and its World
A FenArch Event – See Poster Below
The monastery at Ely was re-founded around 970, and rapidly grew to become one of the richest and most revered religious houses in England. This talk will look at how Ely established itself, and particularly at how it interacted with the society and landscape of the region in the late tenth and eleventh centuries. To do so, Rory Naismith will consider a range of unusual sources from Ely (including lists of peasants, agricultural records and guild statutes) which shed light on how the monastery ran its lands and dealt with locals.
Dr Rory Naismith is Professor of Early Medieval English History at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He focuses on the economic and social history of England and its neighbours in the early Middle Ages. Books include Early Medieval Britain c. 500-1000(2021), Citadel of the Saxons: the Rise of Early London (2018), and Money and Power in Anglo-Saxon England: the Southern English Kingdoms (2012).
