Viking Law and Order: Places and Rituals of Assembly in the Medieval North

In the Viking and medieval North, law was not simply something written down: it was enacted in particular places, before communities, through assemblies and ritual. Alexandra Sanmark follows those meeting places across the Norse world to ask how they developed and what they reveal about political order.

Archaeology and landscape evidence are read alongside written sources, allowing assembly sites to be studied as physical settings as well as institutions. Sanmark pays particular attention to the relationship between place, authority and communal decision-making. The book gives unusually concrete form to the workings of law and governance in the medieval North, where political life was often rooted in the landscape itself.