Many of the formulas dealing with conflict highlight formal courts and judicial processes. Others represent extrajudicial settlements. In this respect they match, though in an entirely lay context, the picture of early medieval dispute settlement visible in other sources. They make particularly clear, however, that judicial and extrajudicial settlements were points on a complex and intertwined continuum. They also tell us that people – both litigants and authority figures – could manipulate and abuse judicial processes for their own purposes. The formulas are particularly interested in interpersonal violence. We find men assaulting each other on the road and taking each other’s property. We find men killing others for a variety of reasons. Those who committed homicide not only negotiated the payment of the required blood price, but actually paid it – and had their payment recorded in a security that protected them from any further trouble. Women too are accused of homicide, sometimes by poison or sorcery but sometimes by more active means. In the end, the formulas suggest that a culture assuming a right to personal violence was alive and well in the Carolingian period, despite strenuous efforts especially by Charlemagne and Louis the Pious to regulate it.

This chapter explores the different social contexts in which forms of money appear in the Iron Age Aegean world, and how these develop and converge in the emerging use of precious metal money before the spread of coinage. Early sanctuaries form such a context, where the deposition of metal votive offerings could reflect an increasing focus on organizing cult expenses. Another context is provided by compensation or wergeld payments, notable in the Homeric epics and a prominent focus of early written law. Next, emphasis is placed on the context of interregional and international trade. Through contacts with Levantine merchants Euboians adopted the use of precious metal money in the Geometric period, stimulating the active search for gold sources in the northern Aegean. From the mid-seventh century onwards, Greek efforts extended to the exploitation of silver sources, arguably stimulated by the opening up of contacts with 26th-dynasty Egypt. Preceding the production of silver coinage by more than half a century, silver trade with Egypt likely boosted the use of silver within the Aegean, which shortly after superseded gold as the preferred form of money.

This chapter demonstrates how the idea of reciprocity: the idea of ‘what is owed in return’ permeated ordinary life. Wergeld was what a free man could honourably accept in return for an affront. Anglo-Saxon kings and their entourages were supported by a system of ‘uplifting’ resembling that of the Scottish clan chieftains, provided with food and drink and fodder collected from the farms of the districts they travelled through. The peasant families of the kingdom were expected to feed the king and his familia as if this remote group of high personages were literally their guests. It is suggested that the system may have originated in a period when the people of small regions were obliged to hand over produce to support a dominant figure with whom they felt a strong connection. The evidence suggests of later manorial custom suggests that hospitality continued to provide a language in which social relationships, even exploitative ones, might be expressed in a way which preserved people’s sense of worth.

Chapter 3 argues that a particularly powerful ‘legitimising notion’ was that people’s rights, status, and even their ownership of property, derive from the remote past, even if this was often an imagined past. Anglo-Saxon conquest narratives played a very important part in forming an ‘imagined community’, a people’s sense of their common identity, invoked particularly when the country was under threat. The narrative of Gildas’ ‘Downfall of Britain’ recurs throughout the book as legitimising the association of freedom, land, and public obligation.