Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-06, Section: A, page: 2621.

Director: Thomas Head.

The creation of boundaries is one of the most fundamental activities of human communities. Through definition of their geographical limits, communities establish their relationship to the landscape and the nature of their political authority over it. Through boundaries, ethnic and racial distinctions are made which in turn help to strengthen ties between the political center and peripheral groups within the realm.

Two models informed the creation of boundaries in Anglo-Saxon England. On one hand, a distinction between wilderness and settled land served as the basis for boundaries when writers described kingdoms in general terms. The royal court, and the order it provided, was thought to be the only alternative to a hostile wasteland which existed to all sides. One traveled between kingdoms only by passing through this unclaimed frontier. On the other hand, later Anglo-Saxon kings proved able to establish finite boundaries in the landscape where their kingdoms met others and to demarcate clear juridicial and economic units within their own realms. As the royal bureaucracy grew more sophisticated in the ninth and tenth centuries, the need for increasingly precise boundaries grew as well.

At the center of both models lies the royal court. Since royal authority derived in large part from social relationships between the king and his subjects, these relationships are central to the definition of political geography in the period. The king's ability to give gifts of land to both secular lords and religious institutions defined royal power and formed the connection between king and landscape. As West Saxon hegemony expanded in the tenth century, the nature of these gifts changed as well, resulting in a more law-based paradigm for boundaries and political geography.

Boundaries also served to impose a political identity upon all people living within them. As Wessex expanded in the tenth century, it brought ethnically distinct people into the realm under the aegis of "Englishness." Likewise, those living outside the boundaries, such as the Welsh and the Danes, are more easily homogenized and vilified as outsiders.