The narrator of Mother Night, the conflicted World War II double agent Howard W. Campbell, Jr, constructed many false lives for himself together with all their trappings, and was so deeply entrenched in these lives that it is difficult to discern who the true Campbell is – even for Campbell himself. Our Anglo-Saxon and Anglo- Norman elites were probably less likely to face ramifications on the level that the fictional Campbell did. But the idea is apt: it is within the trappings of display, the creation and representation of particular identities, that one creates the persona appropriate to the places and the persons viewing them. In the central middle ages, the use of space and objects within them combined to create the display of – and the embodiment of – an elite authority.

This, at some places and times, starts with a building and the movement through these buildings in order to act the role, adding in the objects and the people who created the spaces from the places. A building, as we have seen, is more than material culture. Like any other piece of material culture we have from the central middle ages, it is a means to see people, sometimes even individuals. Buildings, and the spaces within them, provide us with a very interesting opportunity to marry history and archaeology, in the best of possible circumstances, as some of these buildings have associated records. We know who was here, sometimes. And this is not just the lord and lady of the manor; sometimes we are lucky enough to know names of slaves, servants, household members, though this is rather the exception to the rule. But it is these exceptions that allow us a chance to get closer to a wider swathe of society. It allows us to try to know not just the people in the place, but the experience, if viewed carefully, thoroughly and, dare I say, maybe a little creatively.