The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England

The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Michael Lapidge
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631224921
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England is a major reference-work covering the history, archaeology, arts, architecture, literatures and languages of England from the Roman withdrawal to the Norman Conquest (c.450 - 1066 AD). Maintains and stimulates an interdisciplinary approach to Anglo-Saxon studies. Includes contributions from 150 experts in the field. Accessible style and layout make the encyclopedia an excellent reference tool.

The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England

The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Michael Lapidge
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631224921
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England is a major reference-work covering the history, archaeology, arts, architecture, literatures and languages of England from the Roman withdrawal to the Norman Conquest (c.450 - 1066 AD). Maintains and stimulates an interdisciplinary approach to Anglo-Saxon studies. Includes contributions from 150 experts in the field. Accessible style and layout make the encyclopedia an excellent reference tool.

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Michael Lapidge
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 111831610X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 760

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Book Description
Widely acknowledged as the essential reference work for this period, this volume brings together more than 700 articles written by 150 top scholars that cover the people, places, activities, and creations of the Anglo-Saxons. The only reference work to cover the history, archaeology, arts, architecture, literatures, and languages of England from the Roman withdrawal to the Norman Conquest (c.450 – 1066 AD) Includes over 700 alphabetical entries written by 150 top scholars covering the people, places, activities, and creations of the Anglo-Saxons Updated and expanded with 40 brand-new entries and a new appendix detailing "English Archbishops and Bishops, c.450-1066" Accompanied by maps, line drawings, photos, a table of "English Rulers, c.450-1066," and a headword index to facilitate searching An essential reference tool, both for specialists in the field, and for students looking for a thorough grounding in key topics of the period

Writing, Kingship, and Power in Anglo-Saxon England

Writing, Kingship, and Power in Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Rory Naismith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107160979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
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

Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Tom Lambert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191089605
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
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.

The Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons

The Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons PDF Author: Paul Hill
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1526782502
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
This ninth century history of Alfred the Great’s leadership is “a work of extraordinary scholarship that reads with all the narrative style of a novel” (Midwest Book Review). In this compelling military and political history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Paul Hill explores England’s birth amidst the devastation and fury of the Danish invasions of the ninth century. Alfred the Great, youngest son of King Æthelwulf, took control of the last surviving Anglo-Saxon kingdom, bringing Wessex and the “English” parts of Mercia together into a new “Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.” This is a story of betrayal and of vengeance, of turncoat oath-breakers and loyal commanders, of battles fought and won against the odds. But above all, this is the story of how England came into being. Warfare in Alfred’s England changed from attritional set-piece battles to a grander strategic concern. This is explored, demonstrating how defense-in-depth fortification networks were built across the resurgent kingdom in the wake of Alfred’s victory at Edington in 878. The arrival of new Danish armies into England in the 890s would lead to campaigns quite unlike those of the previous generation. This is a human, as well as a military story: how a king demonstrated the importance of his right to rule. Alfred sought to secure the succession on his son Edward, who led his own forces as a young man in the 890s. But not everybody was happy in Alfred’s England. Despite the ever-present threat from the Danes, the greatest challenge facing Alfred arose from his own kin, centered deep in the heart of ancient Wessex. Alfred knew his was not the only branch of the family who claimed a right to rule.

The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World

The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World PDF Author: Alexandra Lester-Makin
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789251478
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This latest title in the highly successful Ancient Textiles series is the first substantial monograph-length historiography of early medieval embroideries and their context within the British Isles. The book brings together and analyses for the first time all 43 embroideries believed to have been made in the British Isles and Ireland in the early medieval period. New research carried out on those embroideries that are accessible today, involving the collection of technical data, stitch analysis, observations of condition and wear-marks and microscopic photography supplements a survey of existing published and archival sources. The research has been used to write, for the first time, the ‘story’ of embroidery, including what we can learn of its producers, their techniques, and the material functions and metaphorical meanings of embroidery within early medieval Anglo-Saxon society. The author presents embroideries as evidence for the evolution of embroidery production in Anglo-Saxon society, from a community-based activity based on the extended family, to organized workshops in urban settings employing standardized skill levels and as evidence of changing material use: from small amounts of fibers produced locally for specific projects to large batches brought in from a distance and stored until needed. She demonstrate that embroideries were not simply used decoratively but to incorporate and enact different meanings within different parts of society: for example, the newly arrived Germanic settlers of the fifth century used embroidery to maintain links with their homelands and to create tribal ties and obligations. As such, the results inform discussion of embroidery contexts, use and deposition, and the significance of this form of material culture within society as well as an evaluation of the status of embroiderers within early medieval society. The results contribute significantly to our understanding of production systems in Anglo-Saxon England and Ireland.

The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century

The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century PDF Author: George Molyneaux
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192542931
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
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.

The English and Their History

The English and Their History PDF Author: Robert Tombs
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101873361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1106

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Book Description
Named a Book of the Year by the Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, The Times, Spectator, and The Economist The English first materialized as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. From the armed Saxon bands that descended onto Roman-controlled Britain in the fifth century to the travails of the Eurozone plaguing the prime-ministership of today's multicultural England, acclaimed historian Robert Tombs presents a momentous and challenging history of a people who have a claim to be the oldest nation in existence. Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship, Tombs sheds light on the strength and resilience of English governance, the deep patterns of division among the people who have populated the British Isles, the persistent capacity of the English to come together in the face of danger, and not the least the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it and yet been shaped by it. Momentous and definitive, The English and Their History is the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century.

Citadel of the Saxons

Citadel of the Saxons PDF Author: Rory Naismith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786734869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
With a past as deep and sinewy as the famous River Thames that twists like an eel around the jutting peninsula of Mudchute and the Isle of Dogs, London is one of the world's greatest and most resilient cities. Born beside the sludge and the silt of the meandering waterway that has always been its lifeblood, it has weathered invasion, flood, abandonment, fire and bombing. The modern story of London is well known. Much has been written about the later history of this megalopolis which, like a seductive dark star, has drawn incomers perpetually into its orbit. Yet, as Rory Naismith reveals – in his zesty evocation of the nascent medieval city – much less has been said about how close it came to earlier obliteration. Following the collapse of Roman civilization in fifth-century Britannia, darkness fell over the former province. Villas crumbled to ruin; vital commodities became scarce; cities decayed; and Londinium, the capital, was all but abandoned. Yet despite its demise as a living city, memories of its greatness endured like the moss and bindweed which now ensnared its toppled columns and pilasters. By the 600s a new settlement, Lundenwic, was established on the banks of the River Thames by enterprising traders who braved the North Sea in their precarious small boats. The history of the city's phoenix-like resurrection, as it was transformed from an empty shell into a court of kings – and favoured setting for church councils from across the land – is still virtually unknown. The author here vividly evokes the forgotten Lundenwic and the later fortress on the Thames – Lundenburgh – of desperate Anglo-Saxon defenders who retreated inside their Roman walls to stand fast against menacing Viking incursions. Recalling the lost cities which laid the foundations of today's great capital, this book tells the stirring story of how dead Londinium was reborn, against the odds, as a bulwark against the Danes and a pivotal English citadel. It recounts how Anglo-Saxon London survived to become the most important town in England – and a vital stronghold in later campaigns against the Normans in 1066. Revealing the remarkable extent to which London was at the centre of things, from the very beginning, this volume at last gives the vibrant early medieval city its due.

Making Money in the Early Middle Ages

Making Money in the Early Middle Ages PDF Author: Rory Naismith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691177406
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
An examination of coined money and its significance to rulers, aristocrats and peasants in early medieval Europe Between the end of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the economic transformations of the twelfth, coined money in western Europe was scarce and high in value, difficult for the majority of the population to make use of. And yet, as Rory Naismith shows in this illuminating study, coined money was made and used throughout early medieval Europe. It was, he argues, a powerful tool for articulating people’s place in economic and social structures and an important gauge for levels of economic complexity. Working from the premise that using coined money carried special significance when there was less of it around, Naismith uses detailed case studies from the Mediterranean and northern Europe to propose a new reading of early medieval money as a point of contact between economic, social, and institutional history. Naismith examines structural issues, including the mining and circulation of metal and the use of bullion and other commodities as money, and then offers a chronological account of monetary development, discussing the post-Roman period of gold coinage, the rise of the silver penny in the seventh century and the reconfiguration of elite power in relation to coinage in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the process, he counters the conventional view of early medieval currency as the domain only of elite gift-givers and intrepid long-distance traders. Even when there were few coins in circulation, Naismith argues, the ways they were used—to give gifts, to pay rents, to spend at markets—have much to tell us.