The final chapter of this book considers the wider landscape and movement within it. Opposition may have been encompassed in a single act, particularly a public declaration made as a statement of rebellion in a place that played a central role in the landscape, but the outcome of opposition was often played out through a series of actions. Sometimes protagonists consciously linked these actions and sometimes the links might become important in retrospect but the wide geographical area within which actions were played out often has a significance of its own. While some of the links between places, particularly those close together, have been considered in earlier chapters, here we are as much concerned with the actions of individuals and groups taken in the ‘spaces between’ places.

In the denial of territory to an opponent who might otherwise stake a ‘legitimate’ claim, such appropriation of landscape in the creation of what might now be termed ‘bandit country’ or ‘badlands’ is a phenomenon which may be equated with aspects of modern civil wars, particularly ‘asymmetrical’ guerrilla warfare where opponents are not evenly matched. In terms of the Middle Ages, it should be noted that scholarly consideration of spatial ‘anti-legitimacy’ owes much to the study of the literature of outlawry and ‘otherness’, including the othering of Grendel in the Beowulf poem. While such literary othering of space features in this chapter (though Beowulf itself does not), at stake here are the ways in which those contesting power moved across landscapes as part of their strategies of domination.

The first part of this chapter is concerned with the balances between practical issues in strategic decision-making. Picking up for a final time the sequence of events in the rebellion of Æthelwold across southern England, the chapter leads on to discussion of the symbolic aspects of the notion of the construction of ‘othered’ space – effectively ‘badlands’ or ‘bandit country’ – in chronicles and narrative sources. The focus is then on ways in which an oppositional movement could centre on a battlefield, making the site, through its relationship with the landscape around it, a centre of rebellion.