Inventing a Medieval Liberty in the landscape: Materiality, virtuality, and the Liberty of Whitby Strand

Abstract

A contribution to the scholarship on jurisdictional immunities, this chapter uses the ideas of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on the relationship between materiality and virtuality to analyse the creation of the Liberty of Whitby Strand in the late twelfth century. Building on the conception of jurisdictional immunities as constitutional structures, social phenomena, and mediums for communication, this chapter argues they were virtual realities emerging from an ongoing dialogue between the material and the virtual. It suggests that an existing physical space - matter, the problems it posed and the human solutions to those problems - was already virtualised in ways which made the invention of a jurisdictional immunity possible and probable, and considers how the people of Whitby Strand actualised this immunity.