One of the paradoxes of rebellion and other political disputes in the early and central Middle Ages is that religious communities should have been so regularly involved in them. This may hardly be surprising in terms of medieval political thought, given the significance of ecclesiastical criticism of earthly rule as a cause and consequence of Gregorian reform in both the sixth and eleventh centuries. All the same, violent manifestations of political dispute – particularly where they concerned the earthly interests of religious leaders – did not preclude the participation of religious houses. In their opposition to secular lords and rulers, political actors frequently needed recourse to religious legitimacy, such as was the case with the monastic imprisonment of Emperor Louis the Pious by his son Lothar in 833, which demonstrated the nature of what Mayke de Jong has termed the ‘Penitential State’. Narrative chroniclers of the Middle Ages were adept at ensuring that disputes between secular and religious authority were at the forefront of accounts of violent conflict between ecclesiastical and secular lords; this was about more than representation. As the invocation of Saint Germanus in Raoul Glaber's account of King Robert's siege of Auxerre in 1003 demonstrates, the link between sanctity and space could be crucial.

In another eleventh-century case, if Stuart Prior's argument for the discovery and use of a site at Montacute (Som.) can be accepted, it was the denial of the sanctity of space that was at stake. Prior suggests that a Somerset hill's long association with Glastonbury (and possibly Saint Patrick) and twelfth-century evidence for the discovery of a ‘miraculous’ cross there in the mid eleventh century may explain why that particular hill rather than one nearby at a better ‘tactical location’ was chosen for the building of Montacute Castle. Prior emphasises the significance of ‘popular veneration’ by the local population, reading the castle as an attempt ‘to graphically portray the Norman lord's god given right over the biblical facets of dominion’.