Introduction

Landscape perspectives have transformed our understanding of the early medieval world, but their emphasis is often upon the world of the living: settlements, farms, field systems, roads and estates. In many accounts, burial places are absent or play only a supplementary role in shedding light on inhabited space. Conversely, early medieval graves, well-recognised since the eighteenth century, have tended to be intensively studied through the artefacts and bodies they contain rather than in terms of their spatial dynamics.

This gap has been filled in different ways over the last fifty years. Some studies have explored the shifting landscape locations of ‘pagan’ and ‘conversion period’ cemeteries. The origins of minster churches and their burial grounds, and the subsequent development of the parochial system, have also been linked to the origins of ‘Christian’ burial in different guises, although it is now recognised that ‘field cemeteries’ were the norm for the rural population until the Viking Age. These publications and others have made major contributions to understanding early medieval mortuary geography, yet just as many landscape studies have ignored burials; recent papers, even when taking a ‘landscape’ perspective, have tended to regard burial sites as undifferentiated dots on a distribution map and as little more than bi-functional places of corpse-disposal and commemorative landmarks.