Aim:
IP1 - Creating Kingdoms in the Middle Ages - Rethinking the Role of Assembly Sites - will focus on how supra-regional royal power established solid administrative systems in new subordinated provinces and conquered kingdoms.
IP2 - Landscape, Authority and Power: past and current understandings of assembly places and structures in Britain and Europe - will investigate past and current scholarship, emphasising divergences in assembly practices and structures as well as shared traditions and themes at a NW European level, AD 400-1300.
The Thing in the North, its mercantile aspects and the implications (AD 800-1500)
IP3 will analyze the mercantile aspects of assembly sites and their effects, focusing on economic activities, such as trade, craft and exchange, at or near thing sites.
IP4 - Assembly and Colonisation (AD 800-1500) - will explore the establishment of the Norse thing organisation and assembly sites in the areas of Norse settlement and colonisation, compared and contrasted to the situation in the Viking homelands, and set within the wider context of assembly in Northern Europe.
