Paper short abstract:

Landscapes of violence articulate meaning through culturally embedded symbolic vocabularies. This paper explores how these meanings can be unpicked through an inter-disciplinary analysis of battlefield landscapes in early medieval Britain.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes as its starting point the idea that warfare is a communicative strategy that - through the medium of violence - enacts social ideas of power, domination and hierarchy. It is, in other words, a performance that simultaneously enacts and absorbs cultural ideas that exist within a wider cognitive framework. Like other ritual and symbolic behaviour, the places where violence occurs should not be considered as mere backdrops to the action (or, as traditional military history would have it, a tactical resource to be exploited or an obstacle to be circumvented) but as socially constructed places with profound embedded meaning.

Social attitudes to landscape undoubtedly impact on the way that warfare is practised - most obviously in the choice (or avoidance) of locations for battle - but also by informing the wider cognitive framework in which violence - with all its performative symbolism - is conceptualised.

After outlining the theoretical basis for the crucial relationship between landscape and warfare, the paper goes on to reference several battles recorded in documentary sources of the early Middle Ages in Britain. In an avowedly inter-disciplinary approach, the paper shows how ancestral, territorial, religious and supernatural power were manifested and articulated through violent action in the landscape.