King Edgar ruled England for a short but significant period in the middle of the tenth century. Two of his four children succeeded him as king and two were to become canonized. He was known to later generations as "the Pacific" or "the Peaceable" because his reign was free from external attack and without internal dissention, and he presided over a period of major social and economic change: early in his rule the growth of monastic power and wealth involved redistribution of much of the country's assets, while the end of his reign saw the creation of England's first national coinage, with...

The Anglo-Saxon period was crucial to the development of the English landscape, but is rarely studied. The essays here provide radical new interpretations of its development.

The landscape of modern England still bears the imprint of its Anglo-Saxon past. Villages and towns, fields, woods and forests, parishes and shires, all shed light on the enduring impact of the Anglo-Saxons. The essays in this volume explore the richness of the interactions between the Anglo-Saxons and their landscape: how they understood, described, and exploited the environments of which they were a part. Ranging from the earliest settlement period through to the urban expansion of late Anglo-Saxon England, this book draws on evidence from place-names, written sources, and the landscape...

King Edgar ruled England for a short but significant period in the middle of the tenth century. Two of his four children succeeded him as king and two were to become canonized. He was known to later generations as -the Pacific- or -the Peaceable- because his reign was free from external attack and without internal dissention, and he presided over a period of major social and economic change: early in his rule the growth of monastic power and wealth involved redistribution of much of the country's assets, while the end of his reign saw the creation of England's first national coinage, with...

A new, distinct script, English Vernacular minuscule, emerged in the 990s, used for writing in Old English. It appeared at a time of great political and social upheaval, with Danish incursions and conquest, continuing monastic reform, and an explosion of writing and copying in the vernacular, including the homilies of AElfric and Wulfstan, two different recensions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, two of the four major surviving manuscripts of Old English poetry (the -Beowulf- and -Junius- books), and many original royal and ecclesiastical diplomas, writs and wills. However, although these...