Making Kingdoms and Creating Communities in the 1st millennium AD

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• published: 23 Oct 2015
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Making Kingdoms and Creating Communities in the 1st millennium AD: re-framing Rulership and Governance in the Irish Sea region Patrick Gleeson NUI, GALWAY This paper explores the emergence of kingdoms in the Irish Sea region during the first millennium AD. While scholarship has largely moved beyond anachronistic Celtic and Insular paradigms for this region, many aspects of the study of kingdoms are still hamstrung by their legacy, particularly, a perception of power as small-scale, transitory and lacking the type of developed governmental apparatus which characterise Anglo-Saxon or Continental polities. To develop more nuanced analysis of the genesis and evolution of kingdoms in the Irish Sea, this paper frames analysis around evidence for expressions of power, and the practices which facilitated the manufacturing and challenging of authority. Focusing particularly on the 4th-9th centuries, it explores the how different scales of polity and community came about, were negotiated and moreover, articulated as kingdoms. Analysing evidence for inter-polity relationships, the evolution of assembly structures, collective identities and royal governance, it will suggest that the trajectory of different, interwoven kingdoms describes important similarities with the emergence of regional kingdoms in other areas of late- and post-Roman northwestern Europe, and suggests a much more complex, dynamic political landscape than is often allowed.