The Children of Ash and Elm
The consorts of such lords, poetically exemplified by the figure of Wealþeow in Beowulf and by the Wife’s Lament of the Exeter Book, played critical roles in the management of the comitatus, as anthropologist Michael Enright has argued.24 A noble wife managed the elaborate drinking rituals through which the comites were bound into their lord’s serv
... See moreMax Adams • The First Kingdom
a medieval Welsh legend, one of the earlier of the so-called Mabinogion collection of tales, contains an inventory of ‘the ceremonial possessions of a traditional ruler: sword, knife, whetstone, drinking horn, cauldron, draughtsboard, mantle and the like’.17 Feasting, gaming, drinking: these were the pursuits of an élite who did not spend their liv
... See moreMax Adams • The First Kingdom
Early Iceland was a lawless, irreligious place peopled with Norwegian outlaws and their Scottish and Irish companions. Human sacrifices to appease the terrible forces that raged just beneath the surface of their meager soil were not unknown. There was no executive authority, no king, and no army, just a ragbag of laws mostly concerned with the appa
... See moreMichael Booth • The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
Where critical resources – wood pastures, water meadows, summer grazing – were shared between multiple communities, it seems likely that intercommunal rights must have been negotiated between groups with a mutual interest in protecting, defending and exploiting them. Commoners might always have managed their extensive resources co-operatively, as t
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