Exchanging Medieval Material Culture Studies on archaeology and ...

Th e practice to construct sites with a similar morphology seems
to have had mainly residential and ornamental meanings, as a
visual reference to the status and position of the nobility. Th is
was also suggested by Frans Verhaeghe53. Th e next step was
that other social groups copied the social meaning and symbolic
function of the structure and moats.
Th is might have happened in a hypothetical sequence in which
fi rst other courts and farms inside or next to the comital estates
and/or estates with comital antecedents copied the motte-andbailey
moated structure. An interesting example is the central
court of the estate of Saint Peters Abbey of Ghent in
Middelkerke. Th is estate was already transferred from comital
hands into the possession of the abbey at the end of the 10th
century. By the time the motte-and-bailey sites originated in
the coastal landscape, this estate was since long in the hands of
this large abbey, which transformed its estate centre into a
moated site with upper court and lower bailey probably somewhere
between the 12th and 13th century. Th is seems to indicate
that the use of this system and the imitation of these structures
kept its connotation of status and importance and its
relation to estate management by regional elites. In a second
stage, the symbolic and social signifi cance of moats in general
was transformed from these and other sites to signal their relatively
autonomous social position in the 13th- and 14th-century
coastal landscape.
In this respect it is remarkable that the late medieval moated
sites are relatively more common within the comital estates
than compared to the allodial lands of the free holders farms.
In Mannekensvere 53.4 % of the farms had a moat, in Slype
even 56.8 %, while in free-holder Leffi nge the percentage is
44.6 % and in Wilskerke, a small parish situated between
Slype and Leffi nge even 35.5 %. If this pattern can be confi
rmed elsewhere, this suggests that the use of moats was fi rst
of all connected to the known status of agency of local elites
in the context of comital estates, connected to the idea of
social independence from feudal structures, which is in fact
not a paradox in the context of the coastal landscape and
social property relations54.
7 Conclusions
Th e phenomenon of the moated site of coastal Flanders was one
of the fi rst important themes in Frans Verhaeghe’s research. He
rather early touched the archaeological problem of the cognitive
aspects of material culture and of the use of symbols as “active
means of constructing continuously changing realities”55.
He was right in stressing the link between the general social
and symbolic meaning and use of these moats and the use of
moats in the high status motte-and-bailey castles. What
remained unclear was how the actual transfer of the idea of
using a moat happened between the noble castle sites and the
53 In 1986, Verhaeghe took the view that the 13thand
14th- century moated farmsteads were most of
all sites of the higher strata of the (free) farmers,
but also could be farms given in fi ef (as part of a
rural feudal estate) (Verhaeghe 1986: 79-81).
<strong>Medieval</strong> moated sites in coastal Flanders 297
Fig. 6 Th e former central court of the high medieval estate De Vier
Dijken.
farmsteads in coastal Flanders. Th e interdisciplinary approach
of the phenomenon, with attention for the context of the social
property relations of the medieval moated sites, brought some
new elements to the discussion. First of all, the actual context
of the origin of the social dispersion of moated sites in coastal
Flanders is connected with the presence of large comital
estates in the area. Th ere is a distinctive concentration of sites
with a motte-and-bailey-structure, in itself probably an imitation
of the motte-and-bailey castle sites, inside the comital
estates. Several of these sites were clearly connected with
members of a coastal regional elite network. Th ese estate offi -
cials and knights combined several functions, from military
to regional administrative and juridical functions, as comital
representatives in the coastal region where the territorial
basis of the power of the Flemish counts was situated. Th e
members of this group played a distinctive role in the landscape
of the estates, controlling the fi nancial revenues and
signalling their relative status through churches, village
names and motte-and-bailey sites of relatively modest size
and proportions compared to the ‘real stuff ’. Nevertheless,
the group of estate elites seems to have been able to use these
structures as a sign to defi ne themselves. Th e suggestion by
the written sources that the most important members of this
network had an infl uence in the events around 1128, when
the choice for a new count was at stake aft er the old one had
been murdered, suggests indeed that the coastal knights had
a certain social position to display.
Coming from this group then would have followed the transfer
of the idea of using a moat as a kind of social emulation, to
lower classes, from the 13th century on. An interesting idea is
the one that the ‘ordinary’ moated sites from the late medieval
period knew a distinctive higher concentration inside the old
comital estates compared to the non-comital estates. Would
this strengthen the idea that the transfer and the emulation
54 Tys 2004.
55 Verhaeghe 1998, 271.