Herredstinget i Danmark:Materialitet, minder og mindesten

In medieval and early modern times, district things (Danish: herredsting) were held in the open air and, from the mid-1600s, also in small courthouses. The sites have been demolished, but they can still be localised in the landscape through place names, historical maps and written sources. This article explores the material expression of the thing sites through contemporary written and pictorial sources, memories in the past and interpretations in the present. The design of the thing sites is typically represented with a focus on the constituent parts of the layout, the materialised legitimacy, but local accounts can expand the description from the perspective of the listener and contribute to our understanding of the layout with memories of lost sites. The similarities in shape between prehistoric stone monuments and later thing sites may have contributed to the construction of memories in the past and questionable analogies today. Some of the sites were marked with memorial stones in the 20th century, and this article is the first attempt to establish an overview of such sites and to discuss the transformation of thing sites to sites of remembrance and oblivion.