Places I’ll Remember? Reflections on Alfred, Asser and the Power of Memory in the West Saxon Landscape

We are shaped by our memories and by others’ memories of us. That statement may be a truism, but there are few places better than a Festschrift where one can get away with starting a paper in such a manner. And it is a valuable truism. Those memories which shape us, as so many studies have shown, are shaped by place, and the places themselves are shaped by memory. This has been demonstrated in neuroscientific terms over the last four decades by the identification of the role of ‘place cells’ within the hippocampus of the brain linked to the subjective ‘sense of place’, in part linked to the creation of personal memory, while the significance of Lieux de mémoire in French historiography provides an endorsement of what many of us already feel.1 The development of the spatial turn has proved a particularly rich field in the study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture: Nicholas Howe showed the ways in which the experiences of place—those of the modern scholar and the medieval sense of place—can collide in a visit to a location, often in a way that forces us to consider how we approach the past.2 A range of work on Anglo-Saxon landscapes, addressing the context of place-names, settlement, and perception has proved particularly fruitful in the last decade or so.3