Building Anglo-Saxon England

A radical rethinking of the Anglo-Saxon world that draws on the latest archaeological discoveriesThis beautifully illustrated book draws on the latest archaeological discoveries to present a radical reappraisal of the Anglo-Saxon built environment and its inhabitants. John Blair, one of the world's leading experts on this transformative era in England's early history, explains the origins of towns, manor houses, and castles in a completely new way, and sheds new light on the important functions of buildings and settlements in shaping people's lives during the age of the Venerable Bede and King Alfred.Building Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates how hundreds of recent excavations enable us to grasp for the first time how regionally diverse the built environment of the Anglo-Saxons truly was. Blair identifies a zone of eastern England with access to the North Sea whose economy, prosperity, and timber buildings had more in common with the Low Countries and Scandinavia than the rest of England. The origins of villages and their field systems emerge with a new clarity, as does the royal administrative organization of the kingdom of Mercia, which dominated central England for two centuries.Featuring a wealth of color illustrations throughout, Building Anglo-Saxon England explores how the natural landscape was modified to accommodate human activity, and how many settlements--secular and religious-were laid out with geometrical precision by specialist surveyors. The book also shows how the Anglo-Saxon love of elegant and intricate decoration is reflected in the construction of the living environment, which in some ways was more sophisticated than it would become after the Norman Conquest.… (more)

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LibraryThing member jsburbidge

This is a remarkable and magisterial book.

It combines a great deal of detailed study -- and detailed, well-produced pictures and diagrams -- with an overarching perspective leading to some far-reaching conclusions. Blair's argument -- that the built form of Anglo-Saxon England did not, in general,

lend itself to extensive archaeological preservation, and that it also reflects a set of social patterns distinct from those on the continent (or, notably, after the Conquest -- with elements of the continental pattern slipping in shortly before the Conquest) -- has important implications for how we understand the social and governmental patterns of the Anglo-Saxon period, and should be framed with Wormald's book on the origins of English law for anyone with an interest in the period beyond simply reading alliterative poetry or tracing the broad history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

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