Germanic peoples brought into the Roman empire the assumption, standard in the smaller-scale societies of the North, that political practice was at its base collective… There is a continuity in this respect which stretched from the small, face-to-face, polities of the North right up to very large, hierarchical and potentially anonymous ones such as Carolingian Francia. #
Early medieval assemblies were different, and represent in almost all respects a break with the Roman past… The Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian thing has more in common with the Frankish placitum generale than the latter has with anything in the Roman world. #