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In 2020 the convergence of Brexit, COVID-19 and the ‘migrant crisis’ put Kent in the headlines as never before: images of refugees on beaches, lorries queued on the county’s motorways and the white cliffs of Dover crumbling into the sea were all used to support claims that severing ties with the EU was the best – or worst – thing the UK had ever done. In this coastal driftwork, Phil Hubbard considers the past, present and future of this corner of England, alighting on the key sites which symbolise the changing relationship between the UK and its continental neighbours. Moving from the geopolitics of the Channel Tunnel to the cultivation of oysters at Whitstable, from Derek Jarman’s celebrated garden at Dungeness to the art-fuelled gentrification of Margate, Borderland bridges geography, history and cultural studies to show how ideas of national identity and belonging take shape at the coast. In doing so, the author argues that the ongoing crises of global displacement, climate change and ecological disaster require an expansive geographical imagination, with the current fixation on the sovereignty of our national borders appearing increasingly futile at a time of rapid global change.
possibly mythical) manuscript copy of the sequel to William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland . In the company of the ‘eco-warrior’ Rhab Adnam (a version of Renchi Bicknell, the artist who shares the walk around the M25 in London Orbital ), Sileen performs a ‘triangulation’, on foot, between the traces of the church of St Mary Matfellon in Whitechapel, the Castle Mound in Oxford, and Cambridge. In Oxford, an eccentric academic named Hinton joins them (an allusion to C. Howard Hinton of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings ), and in Cambridge they encounter Simon
The aim of this study was to pursue greater knowledge of vocal expressions in the borderland between speech and song through collaboration between researchers with different approaches, with a view to developing an interdisciplinary method for the analysis of such expressions. The research presented here is the outcome of the research project ‘In the Borderland between Song and Speech. Vocal Expressions in Oral Cultures’ carried out in 2011–14 with support from the Swedish Research Council. The
134 v 5 v Moral borderlands: Criminality during the occupation Examining misconduct has already required a blurring of the lines between illegal and legal definitions of behaviours in occupied France. This chapter leans towards the legal by considering general criminality, another neglected area in works on the occupation. Studying criminality poses well-known challenges. Police reports and statistics evidently only demonstrate reported crimes, simply offering a glimpse into actual criminality –albeit a useful, suggestive one. Thus, the reality of
The Welsh borderlands were a distinctive territory where two peoples came together throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. It was here that men skilled at law drew up the Dunsate Agreement, to solve the impending problems with cattle theft. This book explores what sets the Dunsate Agreement apart from other Anglo-Saxon law codes grappling with cattle theft, highlighting that creators of this document, and the community that it concerns, included both Anglo-Saxons and Welsh. It argues that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle represents the military culture of the Welsh borderlands in a distinctive way which aligns its inhabitants with outlaws. The book articulates a discernible culture in the Welsh borderlands prior to 1066. Bede's The Historia Ecclesiastica has long been interpreted as a narrative of Anglo/British strife. His rancour towards the pagan Mercians provides substantial information about the life of Penda of Mercia, whose entire reign over this borderlands kingdom was defined by consistent political and military unity with Welsh rulers. Expanding on the mixed culture, the book examines the various Latin and Old English Lives of the popular Anglo-Saxon saint, Guthlac of Crowland. Vernacular literary tradition reveals a group of Old English riddles that link the 'dark Welsh' to agricultural labour through the cattle they herd, and who have long been understood to show the Welsh as slaves. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is frequently cited as a paradigm of Anglo/Welsh antagonism. The book reveals that the impact of the Norman Conquest on the Anglo-Welsh border region was much greater than previously realised.
5 •• The Welsh borderlands in the Anglo‑Saxon Chronicle The previous chapters of this book have proposed that the Welsh borderlands had a culture of their own and were understood as a distinct region by the authors of those early Anglo-Saxon texts that mention this territory. This chapter moves forward chronologically to the tenth and eleventh centuries and suggests that political alliance in the Welsh borderlands during the later Anglo-Saxon period was a significant pattern across time. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a major historical source for the later
6 •• The transformation of the borderlands outlaw in the eleventh century Chapter Five argued that the Welsh borderlands are depicted as a politically allied and distinctive territory throughout the eleventh century in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The military customs of this region are also singular in being closely aligned with a culture of outlawry, but those living in the borderlands during the Anglo-Saxon period were not divorced from society in the same ways as the outlaws of later romances. As Chapter Five has discussed, the characterisation of the
3 •• The Welsh borderlands in the Lives of St Guthlac1 Chapter Two argued that Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica depicts a mixed Anglo-Welsh culture in the Welsh borderlands in the seventh century. This chapter extends this argument into the eighth century through an examination of the various Latin and Old English Lives of the popular Anglo-Saxon saint, Guthlac of Crowland (d. 715). Guthlac’s Mercian youth and later career as a hermit in the Fens link him indelibly to two of Britain’s most geographically ambiguous spaces, and I argue that the group of AngloSaxon
2 •• Penda of Mercia and the Welsh borderlands in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Bede’s eighth-century Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, one of the earliest and most historically significant surviving texts of the Anglo-Saxon period, narrates the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity and the nascent formation of what might be called an ‘English’ identity. The Historia Ecclesiastica has long been interpreted as a narrative of Anglo/ British strife, because Bede is so critical of the Britons, who are in his perspective heretical. Yet because of Bede
3 Border crossings, shame and (re-)narrating the past in the Ukrainian–Romanian borderlands Kathryn Cassidy In April 2008, I celebrated my birthday in the village of Diyalivtsi,1 where I had been living since October 2007, while carrying out research on informal economic practices in the Ukrainian–Romanian borderlands. My host, Rodika, and I had spent some time preparing food and drink for visitors and the first to arrive were our good friends and neighbours Luchika and her daughter Zhenia. Luchika and her son-inlaw Dima were both cross-border small traders of