Hoskins Day 2025
Saturday 10th May, 2025.
12noon – 5pm.
Attenborough Lecture Theatre, University of Leicester.
FREE but pre-booking vie EVENTBRITE
Hoskins Lecture 2025
Looking at Medieval Houses: Dwellingscapes before the ‘Great Rebuilding’ presented by Prof. Mark Gardiner.
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.
Keynote Speaker: MARK GARDINER
Mark Gardiner 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.
His interests include medieval archaeology, stone buildings and stone masons, carpentry and carpenters, medieval handcrafts, medieval settlement, medieval landscape, houses.
Editor (alongside Stephen Rippon – author) Medieval Landscapes (Landscape History After Hoskins, 2), 2007. The medieval period was at the centre of W G Hoskins concerns: the period when his ‘palimpsest’ of the English landscape was, if not quite wiped clean, very thoroughly overwritten. The essays here demonstrate how researchers have moved beyond issues of describing and ‘reading’ the landscape to address the social and ideological – as well as economic – functions of landscapes, and to seek explanations for regional difference.
Programme
Attenborough Building, University of Leicester.
- Doors open 12 noon.
- Complementary buffet lunch 12 till 14:00
- Tours of the David Wilson Library Local History Collection and the Special Collections 12:15 and 13:00
- Second hand book stall
Lectures start at 14:00
- 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.
- Hoskins Lecture 2025
- Mark Gardiner Looking at Medieval Houses: Dwellingscapes before the ‘Great Rebuilding’
End around 16:30.
This is a FREE event but we would appreciate pre-booking via EVENTBRITE to give us some idea on numbers for catering.
