This book brings together the cumulative results of a three-year project focused on the assemblies and administrative systems of Scandinavia, Britain, and the North Atlantic islands in the 1st and 2nd millennia AD. In this volume we integrate a wide range of historical, cartographic, archaeological, field-based, and onomastic data pertaining to early medieval and medieval administrative practices, geographies, and places of assembly in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Scotland, and eastern England. This transnational perspective has enabled a new understanding of the development of power structures in early medieval northern Europe and the maturation of these systems in later centuries under royal control.
In a series of richly illustrated chapters, we explore the emergence and development of mechanisms for consensus. We begin with a historiographical exploration of assembly research that sets the intellectual agenda for the chapters that follow. We then examine the emergence and development of the 'thing' in Scandinavia and its export to the lands colonised by the Norse. We consider more broadly how assembly practices may have developed at a local level, yet played a significant role in the consolidation, and at times regulation, of elite power structures. Presenting a fresh perspective on the agency and power of the 'thing' and cognate types of local and regional assembly, this interdisciplinary volume provides an invaluable, in-depth insight into the people, places, laws, and consensual structures that shaped the early medieval and medieval kingdoms of northern Europe.
Author(s): Sarah Semple, Alexandra Sanmark, Frode Iversen, Natascha Mehler, Halldis Hobæk, Marie Ødegaard, Alexis Tudor Skinner
Series: The Society for Medieval Archaeology Monographs, 41
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 370
List of figures
Preface
Summary
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1 Introduction
1.1 Summary
1.2 Introduction
1.3 The 'thing'
1.4 The value of studying early medieval assembly
1.5 The scope of this volume
2 Research histories
2.1 Summary
2.2 Genesis: Assemblies and national consciousness
2.3 Romanticism, nationalism and the 'thing'
2.4 Research traditions 1900 to present day
2.5 Conclusion
3 Methods and approaches
3.1 Summary
3.2 Written sources
3.3 Mapping the 'thing'
3.4 Limitations
4 'Lawthings' and inauguration sites in Scandinavia
4.1 Summary
4.2 Reconstructing the 'thing' system in Scandinavia
4.3 The laws, law provinces and 'things'
4.4 The provincial 'thing' sites in Scandinavia
4.5 Royal inauguration sites in Scandinavia
4.6 Discussion
5 Landscapes of law in Norway
5.1 Summary
5.2 Introduction
5.3 The Norwegian kingdom: The historic 'thing' system
5.4 The Borgarthing law province
5.5 Hålogaland law province
5.6 The Gulathing law province
5.7 Conclusions
6 Colonisation and control: Assembly systems in new territories
6.1 Summary
6.2 Law and assembly in the Norse settlements
6.3 Iceland
6.4 Faroe Islands
6.5 Orkney and Shetland
6.6 The Danelaw
6.7 Discussion
7 Assembly and trade in Iceland and beyond
7.1 Summary
7.2 Regulation and assembly in the Commonwealth Period
7.3 Regulation of trade in Iceland in the later Middle Ages
7.4 Trade and markets at the Icelandic local spring assemblies
7.5 Trade at the Icelandic general assembly of Þingvellir
7.6 The Icelandic model in context
7.7 Discussion
8 'Things' in the north
8.1 Summary
8.2 The shadow of the past
8.3 Basic structures and beginnings?
8.4 'Things' in operation
8.5 'Things' in the landscape
8.6 Contemporary thing structures and features
8.7 'Things' in context
8.8 Kings, 'things' and the church
8.9 Summary
9 Concluding thoughts
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
