Description
Book SynopsisIn the first dedicated treatment of Anglo-Saxon assembly politics since the 1950s, Roach takes into account recent discussions of continental rulership in the early Middle Ages. He investigates the constitutional aspects of assemblies and the symbolic and representational nature of these gatherings, and challenges existing models of the late Anglo-Saxon state.
Trade Review'This book by Levi Roach deserves a warm welcome not only as the first monograph to be devoted to historical aspects of pre-Conquest English assemblies since T. J. Oleson's The Witenagemot in the Reign of Edward the Confessor, but also as the first extended treatment of the subject in any form since then.' David Rollason, English Historical Review
'The last decades have brought new understandings of continental political institutions. It is one of the many virtues of Levi Roach's splendid book that he has read so widely in this revisionist literature on Carolingian and Ottonian political institutions and practices … Given that Roach has addressed so many topics, different readers will inevitably be attracted to different elements in the book. The discussion of the performative elements of assemblies is particularly fine because so thoroughly versed in the Ottonian scholarship.' Geoffrey Koziol, Early Medieval Europe
Table of Contents1. Introduction: assembling consent in ninth- and tenth-century England; 2. Assembly attendance; 3. Meeting places and times of assemblies; 4. Royal charters and assemblies; 5. Legislation and consent: law making and assembly politics; 6. The witan and the settlement of disputes; 7. The 'further business' of the witan; 8. Symbols in context: ritual and demonstration at assemblies; 9. Ritual and reality: the problem of the sources; 10. The role of the witan: celebration and persuasion; Appendix: meetings of the witan, 871–978.
