Chapter 1

Sir Frank Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England (first published in 1943, still in print in its latest edition) remains classic. For a sense of the wealth and sophistication of the Anglo-Saxons, the principal modern authority is James Campbell, whose collected essays are available in two volumes, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London 1986), and The Anglo-Saxon State (London 2000). He also served as principal editor of a very useful collection of studies The Anglo-Saxons (London 1982), notable not least for the fact that it introduces a general readership to the thinking of Patrick Wormald, the principal authority on Anglo-Saxon law. For the wealth of England, besides Campbell, see John R. Maddicott, ‘Trade, Industry and the Wealth of King Alfred’, Past and Present, 123 (1989), 3–51, with a subsequent debate in this same journal by Ross Balzaretti and Janet L. Nelson, Past and Present, 135 (1992), 142–63. For biographies of the principal figures, see Ann Williams, Aethelred the Unready (London 2003); M.K. Lawson, Cnut: The Danes in England in the Early Eleventh Century (London 1993); Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor, 2nd edn (London 1997), and the still indispensable D.C. Douglas, William the Conqueror (London 1964), with a particularly useful series of essays on the Confessor’s reign, Edward the Confessor: The Man and the Legend, ed. Richard Mortimer (Woodbridge 2009). For events seen from the perspective of England’s queens, see Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith (Oxford 1997). Amongst individual topics considered, there is a wealth of information on medieval textiles in the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles (Woodbridge 2005–). For elves, Karen L. Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Chapel Hill 1996); for vampires, Geoffrey of Burton’s Life and Miracles of St Modwena, ed. Robert Bartlett (Oxford 2002). For the structures of society, Robin Fleming, Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge 1991), and Emma Mason, The House of Godwine (London 2003). For the St Brice’s Day massacre, Ann Williams, ‘“Cockes Amongst the Wheat”: Danes and the English in the Western Midlands in the First Half of the Eleventh Century’, Midland History, 11 (1986), 1–22. For pre-conquest Normandy, David Bates, Normandy Before 1066 (London 1982), and for the Conqueror’s family background, Elisabeth M.C. van Houts, ‘The Origins of Herleva, Mother of William the Conqueror’, English Historical Review, 101 (1986), 399–404. There is a wealth of material, several hundred essays all told, to be excavated from the annual publication of the Proceedings of the Battle Conference, Anglo-Norman Studies (Woodbridge 1978–), a series initiated by R. Allen Brown that has at last enabled scholars on both sides of the great divide of 1066 and on either side of the Channel to come together to discuss leading themes in both Anglo-Saxon and Norman history. For the Bayeux Tapestry, there are excellent colour reproductions by Wolfgang Grape, The Bayeux Tapestry (Munich 1994) and the more tradional David M. Wilson, The Bayeux Tapestry (London 1985). For the battle itself various studies are assembled by Stephen Morillo, The Battle of Hastings: Sources and Interpretations (Woodbridge 1996), complementing Morillo’s monograph, Warfare under the Anglo-Norman Kings, 1066–1135 (Woodbridge 1994). For the logistics of the 1066 campaign, the remarkable calculations of Bernard S. Bachrach, ‘Some Observations on the Military Aspect of the Norman Conquest’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 8 (1985), 1–25, are cited here with relish though not necessarily with complete confidence in their accuracy. For the suggestion that it was William of Arques, rather than William of Normandy, who visited England in 1051, I am indebted to Peter Davidson and to my Norman Conquest special-subject class at Norwich.