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The earliest arbitration treaty? A reassessment of the Anglo-Norman treaty of 991*

Concluded at Rouen in March 991, the Anglo-Norman treaty has traditionally occupied a very small corner of the huge historiography for King AEthelred’s reign as one of the first of the king’s failures to deal with the threat of renewed viking raids. This article is an attempt to rethink the place and importance of this treaty in the scholarly literature by looking at it from the perspective of how diplomacy was practised in the earlier middle ages. It reveals the treaty as the earliest arbitration treaty in the medieval West and offers alternative ways of viewing the immediate context and circumstances of the negotiations, as well as the persistence of important diplomatic practices across a long period.