The central argument of The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century is that the English kingdom which existed at the time of the Norman Conquest was defined by the geographical parameters of a set of administrative reforms implemented in the mid- to late tenth century, and not by a vision of English unity going back to Alfred the Great (871-899). In the first half of the tenth century, successive members of the Cerdicing dynasty established a loose domination over the other great potentates in Britain. They were celebrated as kings of the whole island, but even in their Wessex heartlands they probably had few means to regulate routinely the conduct of the general populace. Detailed analysis of coins, shires, hundreds, and wapentakes suggests that it was only around the time of Edgar (957/9-975) that the Cerdicing kings developed the relatively standardised administrative apparatus of the so-called 'Anglo-Saxon state'. This substantially increased their ability to impinge upon the lives of ordinary people living between the Channel and the Tees, and served to mark that area off from the rest of the island. The resultant cleft undermined the idea of a pan-British realm, and demarcated the early English kingdom as a distinct and coherent political unit. In this volume, George Molyneaux places the formation of the English kingdom in a European perspective, and challenges the notion that its development was exceptional: the Cerdicings were only one of several ruling dynasties around the fringes of the former Carolingian Empire for which the late ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries were a time of territorial expansion and consolidation.

Æthelflæd (c. 870–918), political leader, military strategist, and administrator of law, is one of the most important ruling women in English history. Despite her multifaceted roles and family legacy, however, her reign and relationship with other women in tenth-century England have never been the subject of a book-length study. This interdisciplinary collection of essays redresses a notable hiatus in scholarship of early medieval England. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England argues for a reassessment of women’s political, military, literary, and domestic agency. It invites deeper reflection on the female kinships, networks, and communities that give meaning to Æthelflæd’s life, and through this shows how medieval history can invite new engagements with the past.

This volume examines the aristocracy in Tuscany and in England across a period of two and a half centuries (1000-1250). It deals first with Tuscany, tracing the history of the aristocracy and illustrating its nature and evolution, and observing aristocratic behaviour and attitudes, and how aristocrats related to other members of society. Peter Coss then examines the history of England in the same periods. It is not, however, a comparative history, but employs Italian insights to look at the aristocracy in England and to move away from the traditional interpretation which revolves around Magna Carta and the idea of English exceptionalism. By offering a study of the aristocracy across a wide time-frame and with themes drawn from Italian historiography, Coss offers a new approach to studying aristocracy within its own contexts.

This book brings together new research that represents current scholarship on the nexus between authority and written sources from Anglo-Saxon England. Ranging from the seventh to the eleventh century, the chapters in this volume offer fresh approaches to a wide range of linguistic, historical, legal, diplomatic and palaeographical evidence.

Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England explores English legal culture and practice across the Anglo-Saxon period, beginning with the essentially pre-Christian laws enshrined in writing by King Æthelberht of Kent in c. 600 and working forward to the Norman Conquest of 1066. It attempts to escape the traditional retrospective assumptions of legal history, focused on the late twelfth-century Common Law, and to establish a new interpretative framework for the subject, more sensitive to contemporary cultural assumptions and practical realities. The focus of the volume is on the maintenance of order: what constituted good order; what forms of wrongdoing were threatening to it; what roles kings, lords, communities, and individuals were expected to play in maintaining it; and how that worked in practice. Its core argument is that the Anglo-Saxons had a coherent, stable, and enduring legal order that lacks modern analogies: it was neither state-like nor stateless, and needs to be understood on its own terms rather than as a variant or hybrid of these models. Tom Lambert elucidates a distinctively early medieval understanding of the tension between the interests of individuals and communities, and a vision of how that tension ought to be managed that, strikingly, treats strongly libertarian and communitarian features as complementary. Potentially violent, honour-focused feuding was an integral aspect of legitimate legal practice throughout the period, but so too was fearsome punishment for forms of wrongdoing judged socially threatening. Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England charts the development of kings' involvement in law, in terms both of their authority to legislate and their ability to influence local practice, presenting a picture of increasingly ambitious and effective royal legal innovation that relied more on the cooperation of local communal assemblies than kings' sparse and patchy network of administrative officials.

Interrogations of materiality and geography, narrative framework and boundaries, and the ways these scholarly pursuits ripple out into the wider cultural sphere. Early medieval England as seen through the lens of comparative and interconnected histories is the subject of this volume. Drawn from a range of disciplines, its chapters examine artistic, archaeological, literary, and historical artifacts, converging around the idea that the period may not only define itself, but is often defined from other perspectives, specifically here by modern scholarship. The first part considers the transmission of material culture across borders, while querying the possibilities and limits of comparative and transnational approaches, taking in the spread of bread wheat, the collapse of the art-historical "decorative" and "functional", and the unknowns about daily life in an early medieval English hall. The volume then moves on to reimagine the permeable boundaries of early medieval England, with perspectives from the Baltic, Byzantium, and the Islamic world, including an examination of Vercelli Homily VII (from John Chrysostom's Greek Homily XXIX), Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā's Arabic descriptions of Barṭīniyah ("Britain"), and an consideration of the Old English Orosius. The final chapters address the construction of and responses to "Anglo-Saxon" narratives, past and present: they look at early medieval England within a Eurasian perspective, the historical origins of racialized Anglo-Saxonism(s), and views from Oceania, comparing Hiberno-Saxon and Anglican Melanesian missions, as well as contemporary reactions to exhibitions of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Pacific Island cultures. Contributors: Debby Banham, Britton Elliott Brooks, Caitlin Green, Jane Hawkes, John Hines, Karen Louise Jolly, Kazutomo Karasawa, Carol Neuman de Vegvar, John D. Niles, Michael W. Scott, Jonathan Wilcox

By tapping into the vast reservoir of undertreated early English documents and texts, the collected studies explore how individuals living in the late tenth through fifteenth centuries engaged with the authorizing culture of the Anglo-Saxons.

'Here lies our leader all cut down, the valiant man in the dust.' The elegiac words of the Battle of Maldon, an epic poem written to celebrate the bravery of an English army defeated by Viking raiders in 991, emerge from a diverse literature – including Beowulf and Bede's Ecclesiastical History – produced by the peoples known as the Anglo-Saxons: Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain from Lower Saxony and Denmark in the early fifth century CE. The era once known as the 'Dark Ages' was marked by stunning cultural advances, and Henrietta Leyser here offers a fresh analysis of exciting recent discoveries made in the archaeology and art of the Anglo-Saxon world. Arguing that the desperate struggle (led by Alfred the Great) against the Vikings helped define a distinctively English sensibility, the author explores relations with the indigenous British, the Anglo-Saxon conversion to Christianity, the ascendancy of Mercia and the rise of Wessex. This vivid history evokes both the emergent kingdoms of Alfred and Offa and the golden treasures of Sutton Hoo. It will appeal to students of early medieval history and to all those who wish to understand how England was born.

One opens each new volume expecting to find the unexpected - new light on old arguments, new material, new angles. MEDIUM AEVUM

divAn imaginative reassessment of Æthelred "the Unready," one of medieval England’s most maligned kings and a major Anglo-Saxon figure The Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred "the Unready" (978–1016) has