The previous chapters have highlighted how geographical associations underpinned religious and familial influences on participation in the Third Crusade from north-western Europe. Religious houses, such as Forde Abbey and the hospital at Burton Lazars, were often patronised by benefactors who lived in the same locality. Similarly, whilst a crusading heritage or experience on crusade might lead to the joining of families together by marriage, analysis of familial associations with elite social networks has shown that barons routinely married their sons and daughters into the families of their geographical neighbours. This chapter studies the meaning and consequences of locality against the backdrop of the Third Crusade for the noble elite and, where the data permits, non-elite (artisanal) actors.

An assessment of the significance of territorial spaces, such as counties, to those who were associated with them has been an important element in analyses of noble elites. Some historians have approached this through patterns of marriage, friendship, and association – often based on witness lists – while others have concentrated on patterns of office holding and the membership of the retinues of magnates. More recently, localities have been seen as entities whose significance is best explored in cultural and conceptual terms – as imagined communities – rather than in concrete social ones. Coined by Benedict Anderson to address nationalism, imagined communities are socially constructed, imagined by people who perceive that they are part of a group. Unlike physical communities, such as villages or towns, members of imagined communities accept that they may never know most of their fellow members, yet they share in their mind's eye the image of their communion. However, the question of how imagined communities relate to networks of nobility in pre-nationalist Europe through family, friendship, and commercial or sporting association deserves greater attention. In this chapter, the tournament circuit is considered as a route to a better understanding of the relationship between an imagined noble community and crusading.