A building is never simply just bricks, stone, mortar, wood. Sarah Waters’ protagonist points this out to us as she sifts through the debris of a bombed-out London house in 1944: the lives within these bricks were not just what was important to her job as an ambulance driver, but what, she mused, was more important to everyone. Materials create buildings, and are certainly a part of their construction, use and identity as a place. This should never be discounted. But a building is more than a thing. A building moulds and creates the places between the materials; this is the space where people live their lives. Insomuch as the building is itself a thing, an end to itself, the examination of a building with the material culture and people within it provides insight into lives known and unknown: the named inhabitants, the individuals we know, as well as the anonymous ones who are a part of a place the same as anyone else. Combining buildings, space, material culture and people give us the opportunity to see life in the everyday, the trajectory of a place and people. As a building or a place is ‘planned, built, inhabited…so its meaning changed’. This ‘palimpsest’ of a place is not simply a matter of rebuilding and reuse, but also of our own interpretations of the past within these places. Seeing a place, and people within it, across a period of time allows us to see the society that created these places and the forces that shaped and changed the societies themselves.

This is a notion that is as applicable to the past as it is to the present. In a period of transition in history, buildings, places and the people within them can give us another indication of how these transitions were experienced and enacted within societies. It is unquestionable that England and Normandy c. 900–c. 1200 were societies in transitions, not simply due to the somewhat over-emphasized event of the Norman invasion of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066.