Eduard Claudius's 1950 short story “Die Geburt” (TheBirth) opens in the spring of 1947 with the veteranGerman ironworker Laube crouching behind a cratewhile “Frauen in zerrissenen Schuhwerk, inverschmutzten Kleidern, mit stumpfen Augen undausgemergelten Leibern” (women in tattered footwear,in filthy clothes, with numb eyes and hag¬gardbodies) help disassemble his foundry's machinery forSoviet war reparations. Laube is plotting with thetechnician Hanke to sabotage the crane in an attemptto prevent the dismantling of this factory where hehas spent his working life “in das Getöse vonFlammen und Lärm, in den tollen Wirbel der Arbeit”(DG 422: in the roar of flames and noise, in thegreat whirl of work). When Hanke asks how long Laubewill stand by and watch “wie sie alles einpacken undnach Russland schicken” (how they are packing upeverything and sending it to Russia), Laube explodesin rage: “Unsere Fabriken? … Unser? … Was gehörteschon uns? Nichts.

Bede has told us about the upper classes, reporting as a trusted commentator near in time and ofering opinions on events, real or visionary. Archaeology, on the other hand, tells us about numerous individuals and individual actions, well located in both place and time. Their signifcance is not stated in words, but in materials and images with many possible meanings that must be deduced and decided by archaeological reasoning. The text is limited in scope and a record of one man's opinions; the archaeology is limitless in scope but more open to varied interpretation. Archaeologists also need to take care not to attribute cultural material too readily to the ethnic groups that Bede mentions – Angles, Saxons, and of course Britons – and to the speakers of the English, Welsh, Pictish and Irish languages that he recognised. Objects, and especially graves, have their own means of expression, that need not map onto these groups. The mixture of immigrants and indigenous people was well advanced by the later sixth century when British names are found among Wessex kings, and regions began to express their own identities. Since many of these regions coalesced into kingdoms at the time, and we know roughly where they were, I shall use these, and centuries, to indicate cultural regions and periods and ‘Old English’ for the language they spoke and wrote. Our own region is of course East Anglia, where the ship was found.

In our period neither text nor archaeology is the more senior account, just observations of the same world from diferent windows, and we shall be looking for ways in which they may converge. From archaeology we learn of the increasing investment by burial parties in the graves of individuals, the men in the late sixth-early seventh century and the women in the mid-seventh.

The history of the Isle of Man in the period 1405 to 1830 has for many years been overlooked. These centuries sit awkwardly in all the main narratives of historical development and debate which have touched on the Island. The Island's position has meant it has been outside the historiographical mainstream in England and elsewhere. Locally, there has been a culture of historical thinking and writing in the Island in the last century and a half, but for various reasons it has not placed particular emphasis on the late medieval and early modern period, sometimes seeing those centuries as ones of particular obscurity, decline and even corruption. It is this context which the current volume and its partner intend to address, with this introduction exploring some of the reasons why an island at the centre of the British Isles can still rely on its own core historical narratives established over a century ago while being largely invisible to those in the nations around it.

It was not that the Isle of Man was unknown to the historians who mapped the key outlines of English, British and Imperial history in the late nineteenth century. These were the decades in which the ‘visiting trade’ grew exponentially, with numbers passing through the Island growing to 347,968 in May-September 1887. Spencer Walpole completed his A History of England: From the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815, a key text in establishing the narrative outline of nineteenth-century history, in the period after 1882 when he became lieutenant governor of the Island. But the Island was invisible, particularly to the major ‘national’ historiographies led from leading higher education institutions in the years from the second half of the nineteenth century.

At first glance the development of Anglo-American prize law may seem like a topic with little practical relevance for modern readers, of use to scholars only. But the topic will continually resurface in the future in relation to the development of the (geo)politics in the maritime world, so long as the United States does not agree to remove it from its catalogue of military strategies. Robert Bayard's life has shown how such a system of law was successfully used to the detriment of independence-supporting seafarers during the Revolutionary War by the Vice-Admiralty Court of New York. It also demonstrated that colonial jurisdiction, though in theory following the same principles as in London, had massively diverged, with major consequences for claimants. The different approaches to judicial procedures and staff made New York's Vice-Admiralty Court a far more liberal and efficient system, governed practically by a different set of rules than its metropolitan counterparts. HCA 49/92 is a great tool for gaining an overview of the court's workings, but more in-depth research must be done here, particularly regarding the court's impact on military operations during the War of Independence and its development throughout the conflict.

Samuel Bayard's experiences on the other hand demonstrate that a generation later, America and Britain would be able to come together and forge a new way forward together, impacting on the development of maritime law worldwide. The transformation from illegitimate rebels and objects of adjudication in the Revolution, to adjudicators and recognised players in the global system by the 1790s is remarkable.

The impact of endemic plague on medieval art and architecture, a subject of sustained, energetic debate among scholars of Italian art and architecture since the middle of the last century, has received less focused attention from scholars of English art. Writing about English book production and illumination specifically or architecture and the arts more broadly, Francis Wormald, Lynda Dennison, John Harvey, Philip Lindley, Paul Binski, Joanne Filippone Overty, Michael A. Michael, and Zachary Stewart are among the scholars who have considered issues of disruptions to work and to artists’ training – to the “loss,” in Binski's words, of both “talent” and “procedural memory” – and in Michael's case, that most difficult issue, the Plague's possible effects on esthetic aspects of visual expression. As this study has argued, it was the Plague that precipitated the dramatic reversals of fortune that motivated the Bible's commission, influenced the conditions of its facture, and shaped aspects of its visual program and its translation (see above, Chapter 1, 38–9, and passim). One nonetheless looks in vain in the Bible's painted histories for direct references to the Plague, which are uncommon even in the illustrations in historical chronicles.