ABSTRACT
The topography as well as the ideology of late Anglo-Saxon punishment interested Patrick Wormald keenly. He was probably the first scholar to appreciate the legal and social identity of the hæðenan byrgels that occur in several sets of charterbounds: not cemeteries remembered from the pre-Christian era, but unhallowed spots to which the corpses of criminals and other social outcasts were consigned.1 Some friends will long remember his enthusiasm for locating the spot ‘where the cnihtas lie’ in the Witney charter-bounds of 1044. This attempt to understand the dire associations between such liminal places and such social and moral outcasts as the cnihtas of Witney – living, dead and undead – is offered in his memory. He might have been a little resistant to its emphasis on folk-culture, but I think that he would have found it interesting.
