The W G Hoskins Lecture 2025
Looking at Medieval Houses: Dwellingscapes before the ‘Great Rebuilding’ presented by Prof. Mark Gardiner.
The thirty-fourth Hoskins lecture
10 May 2025
The Hoskins Lecture keynote presentation was delivered by Mark Gardiner who is Professor Emeritus of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Lincoln. He has worked on analysing the structures of excavated buildings since he uncovered his first more than thirty years ago. He subsequently studied standing medieval masonry and timber-framed buildings, publishing on the interpretations of their structural history and social implications.
The term ‘landscapes’ invokes visions of fields, woodlands and meadows, but W. G. Hoskins also saw villages and their houses as very much part of the rural scenery. Late medieval peasant houses have been studied as buildings rather than architecture; functional structures rather than designed ones. It is a nice distinction: Nikolaus Pevsner famously said that a bicycle shed was a building, but Lincoln cathedral was architecture. This lecture will argue that medieval peasant houses belong to a tradition which is closer to architecture than mere building. Houses were designed to be looked at and admired. They were self-consciously constructed within the landscape, intended to be viewed, both from the exterior by passers-by, and from the interior to reinforce a sense of identity. But we need to work out the way in which houses were intended to be seen, using the evidence of surviving buildings. This lecture will suggest that we can use the studies of scholars of standing buildings to begin to think about the way villages appeared and were viewed by those passing through them. In short, it seeks to show that houses were an intrinsic and actively managed part of the rural landscape..
Spotlight on Centre Research
Chloe Phillips – Discovering Black histories in Cornwall’s archives
Rob Hedge – Peasants in their Place: knowing and naming in the medieval Severn Valley.