Some people at a … thing.

I can’t be any more specific than that; it’s simply a thing:

A thing or ting (Old Norse, Old English and Icelandic: þing; other modern Scandinavian languages: ting) was the governing assembly in Germanic and some Celtic societies, made up of the free people of the community and presided by lawspeakers, meeting in a place called a thingstead. Today the term lives on in the official names of national legislatures and political and judicial institutions in the Nordic countries, and (in the Manx form of tyn) as a term for the three legislative bodies on the Isle of Man.

Ha. It’s even related to the more common thing of today:

The Old Norse, Old Frisian and Old English þing with the meaning “assembly” is identical in origin to the English word thing, German Ding, Dutch ding, and modern Scandinavian ting when meaning “object”. They are derived from Common Germanic *þengan meaning “appointed time”, and some suggest an origin in Proto-Indo-European *ten-, “stretch”, as in a “stretch of time for an assembly”.

The evolution of the word thing from “assembly” to “object” is paralleled in the evolution of the Latin causa (“judicial lawsuit”) to modern French chose, Spanish/Italian cosa and Portuguese coisa (all meaning “object” or “thing”).

In English the term is attested from 685 to 686 in the older meaning “assembly”, later it referred to a being, entity or matter (sometime before 899), and then also an act, deed, or event (from about 1000). The meaning of personal possessions, commonly in plural (possibly influenced by Old Icelandic things meaning objects, articles, or valuables), first appears recorded in Middle English in around 1300.

Found at wikipedia in the information trail of my previous post.

Image: The Icelandic alþing in session, as imagined in the 1870s by British artist W. G. Collingwood, from the above url.