On St Kilian’s feast day (just recently on 8 July), relics (the skulls of Killian and his followers preserved in a glass case), are – I’ve read - paraded through the town and put on display in the cathedral. Thankfully Irish/German relations today have moved beyond beheadings and patronage.
What this story does highlight is the importance of and persistence of institutions to manage relationships.2 Douglass North defined institutions as the “humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interactions”.3 As Andy Haldane highlighted “a common denominator among all … thinkers, from Smith to Veblen to Coase to North, is that institutions rise in importance as societies become more complex, integrated and information-rich.