Language, Law, and Landscape in the Anglo-Saxon World

Legal assemblies in the pre-Roman Germanic world derived their power from ritual actions and patron deities. This legitimacy persisted throughout the period of state formation and formed a basis for popular negotiation with the expanding rule of chieftains and kings. In Anglo-Saxon England the significant landscapes of meeting, which included stones, trees, and hills, continued to have symbolic value after Christianization. Through analysis of place-names and early administrative boundaries, it is possible to reconstruct pre-state territories and their central assemblies, and to trace their history into later periods as archaic places of memory.