LAUSR

Afragment of carved limestone from the OldMinster atWinchester shows a prone captive with a cord around his neck, looped through his right hand, while a wolf licks his face (fig. 1).1Although an armed, mailed soldier strides away from the figure, the surviving surface of the frieze strongly suggests that the cord would have been staked into the ground rather than held by a captor. If the scene’s iconographic meaning is opaque—indeed, perhaps intentionally ambiguous—it is clear that the tethered figure formed a striking component of what would have been a large narrative frieze designed for inspection by the public.2 The sculptor has counted on this audience and calculated accordingly, for the recumbent figure’s hand is turned outward, as if presenting the rope for inspection, and a slight groove running around the figures helps them to stand out crisply from the ground.Displayed in one of themost prominent ecclesiastical institutions of the English world, probably installed on a wall that would have been visually accessible to people of many different social statuses, this relief forcefully brings captivity, imprisonment, and torture into the space of the spectator. But what did it mean for a large stone sculpture to depict captivity and punishment so publicly when, during the early Middle Ages, England had nothing like a modern police force or prison system? Without the resources to impose public order through state-sanctioned coercive institutions, the early medieval elite had to regulate public space with strategies that look remarkably different from those employed in societies accustomed to