It is surprising as well as regrettable how scarce are detailed English-language studies of the earlier medieval archaeology of the closest parts of the continent to Britain, and how limited British scholarly engagement with those areas has been. Northern France and the Netherlands are not the limits of the author’s attention in this book, but they are the centre of its focus. A range of reasons, some of them genuinely excuses, can be found for this situation: not least the often local horizons of research and publication strategies in the areas in question, until recently at least, and of course the notorious barrier that ‘other’ languages pose to British scholars – more understandably, perhaps, in the case of Dutch, but even French.

What Loveluck provides is a clearly structured and thorough review of sites in this area and their implications. The opening chapters can give the impression that the reader is in for a heavily theoretical journey, but once the foundations are laid here the superstructure is in a quite different style. In this field, a speculative mode of history and archaeology can be justified: for the earlier centuries at least, documentary sources are sparse, the whole period bridges the better illuminated ancient and later medieval worlds and their systems and, consequently, theories about the inter-related nature of social and economic patterns, and about consistency and dominant directions of change, have to be considered. The interpretation of the archaeological evidence, especially for basic economic relations, is never going to be straightforward.

While happy to present data in relatively straightforward, descriptive terms, Loveluck is not without his own particular theses. He emphasises the complexity of factors operating in social and economic culture. He stresses especially the case for impulses to change and agency being exercised from lower down in the social hierarchy rather than being predominantly or even exclusively imposed from above in the interests of those already in power. He argues for consistency, but not uniformity, in relations over a very large area. Within the book that is expressed in a near-exclusive focus upon settlement contexts from site-type to topography as – however abstract those categories per se – the relevant and almost determinative situations. This attention to what he usefully labels ‘behavioural settings’ runs throughout thematic chapters on broad classes of communities in rural, urban, coastal and military contexts.

Structurally, the book is divided into two parts around the date of ad 900: interestingly, more or less in the middle of the core Viking period. The patterning of the themes by chapter sees the review climb the social scale from peasant to king in the ‘Carolingian’ section and then turn to come part of the way down in the ‘Viking to Angevin’ section. However one interprets the evidence, this book will serve excellently as a clear, comprehensive and illustrative guide to a range of sites that are largely hidden to an Anglophone readership. The commentary primarily brings out evidence for interdependency and connections, lifestyles and comparability from region to region. Tellingly, the author is fond of the word ‘connectivity’. An early emphasis on stability in the settlement situation is apparent, as too is an interesting empirical case for a strong growth in the visibility and impact of the Church.

Of course, there are topics one would debate. References for the ‘growing evidence’ of fifth- and sixth-century settlement in the eastern English fenlands (p 78) would have been welcome. With this breadth of perspective, a smoothing out of fluctuations in the evidence can be a risk: I suspect that the dip in visible prosperity and economic activity at Flixborough in the ninth to mid- or later tenth centuries is more widely mirrored elsewhere, at least in England, than Chapter 7 indicates. Perhaps most importantly, the emphasis on potential evidence for peasant enterprise – not least the importance of allodial settlement expansion and exploitation of relatively marginal areas – might have had more space for the point that social mobility can also involve the descent of, say, failing elite families or junior scions of those households, as well as social climbing.

There will and there should be matters to discuss and it is not least for that reason that this is an excellent book. It is theoretically aware and critical in character but not densely speculative as a result; it examines a mass of archaeological evidence. It provides us with an informative, clearly laid-out and appropriately commented survey of a substantial period within a considerable area of north-west Europe that has hitherto been far too obscure.