This substantial and engrossing book is the product of immense research efforts. The author has been ambitious and assiduous in collecting and collating data relating to the environment of Anglo-Saxon social, economic and religious life, both landscaped and built. He is able to bring to this a wealth of practical experience with both historical records and archaeological remains from the period, and characteristically combines that with a bold determination to strive not only for satisfactory but above all for comprehensive explanations of what is typically complex and fragmentary evidence. Both the data made available and referenced in this book, and the framework of ideas in relation to which those are discussed, will be of indispensable value in Anglo-Saxon studies for years to come.

The result is a large-scale portrayal of England over much of the Anglo-Saxon period, and into the Norman period, packed with detail like a Breughel painting and anything but an elevated or abstract ‘broad-brush’ overview. The relatively marginal treatment of the fifth and sixth centuries is surprising. Blair’s explanation that he chooses not to discuss a period for which the evidence is ‘pure archaeology’ (page 20) gives a telling emphasis to the extent to which documentary evidence remains crucial to his multidisciplinary perspective. The conjoined declaration that Helena Hamerow has already published practically all that can be written on the subject so far (page 14) is possibly a compliment that she herself will not welcome having to live up to. In Anglo-Saxon history and archaeology alike, a long scholarly heritage has left us with a mass of subdivision into self-contained fields of specialisation: for instance, in rural and agrarian settlement and life as distinct from the urban, and in both of those areas a tendency to focus on the formal patterning of space and architecture as more palpable and tractable than the economic and social activities that they were the sites of. Ecclesiastical sites are usually dealt with separately, too, while in a wider perspective still settlement and funerary archaeology live largely separate lives, as do artefactual studies and their many sub-fields, including art history. Blair’s new book, by contrast, represents a sustained, critical and authoritative effort – and indeed a successful one – to create an integrated view. It focuses primarily on the construction of an occupied landscape and sites for residence, work, religion, defence, government and special communal events: the diverse stages and scenes of Anglo-Saxon life as it developed over around half a millennium. That is self-evidently a vast amount to tackle.

The publication eschews any form of abstract or précis of its contents, and it is best to use its five-part structure for an overview of the contents, while noting also that the emphases in a short four-page ‘Conclusion’ serve to highlight essential topics of argument that run across the sectional divisions. Part i, ‘Contexts’, provides a very long introduction, covering (not in this order) sources and historiography; the subjects of landscape and of cognitive aspects of settlement history and archaeology; and, of particular importance, geographical factors – including a dramatically new representation of regionality within Anglo-Saxon England, while also emphasising the significance of external, usually overseas, connections. The three core parts of the study represent successive phases of development in the settled environment of England: a First Transformation, c 600–700; Consolidation, c 700–920; and a Second Transformation, c 920–1000. A single chapter on the eleventh century as Part v points out that the Conquest of 1066 should not be treated as the dramatic break-point that it so often is. It is consistent with that well-explained, though not controversial, position that also the foregoing Transformations are not directly associated with demographic watersheds – the coming of either the Saxons or the Vikings. Neither are those phenomena dismissed, though, or their relevance diminished; rather they are incorporated heuristically into more gradual, cumulative processes that eventually lead to thorough tipping points in how the population lived and used its environment.

If there is one central component of the whole picture I found myself more uncertain about than any other it is the emphasis on a particularly stubborn form of regionality. That concerns particularly an ‘eastern zone’ of East Anglia and the East Midlands up to and including both sides of the Humber estuary, with a strong emphasis on how persistently it remained different in settlement and landscape evidence, and in many aspects of material life, from southern England, the south west, the West Midlands and the north. Taking a longue durée perspective, Blair also proposes to see the famous Roberts and Wrathmell ‘central province’ of agrarian land-use and settlement in High-medieval England as the product of eventual expansion of this eastern zone into the south (see especially pages 72–3).

The partial – not complete – scepticism on my part comes despite fully sharing a sense of wonder at some of the stark regional differences within England: between areas where pottery was habitually used and others where it is absent, and between areas with a monetised economy and areas without, for instance; and, indeed, with some large areas where it is practically impossible to show evidence from material remains of the presence of any human population at all. An emphasis on regionalism, moreover, has had a long and central influence on the archaeology of Britain and specifically Anglo-Saxon England – for instance, Cyril Fox’s Highland and Lowland Zones, and E T Leeds’s ‘Geographical considerations’ based in the major lowland river systems. It may be teasing the author a little to describe the postulated regional structure as a ‘grid’ that he not only perceives but rather determinedly looks at his distribution plans through, but the analogy is apt. The extent to which different regional population densities in the period could have co-acted with regional material cultural variation to produce even more decisive contrasts in critical mass and archaeological visibility may be underestimated, plus the cumulative impacts of subsequent and contemporary landscape character and use, the range of modern development and the effectiveness of archaeological reporting and recording. Some of the relevant maps and discussions do seem to over-emphasise contrasts. The Middle Anglo-Saxon settlement site distribution mapped in figure 5, for instance, does not include West Heslerton or any of the other evidence identified in North Yorkshire by Dominic Powlesland, while the absence of Middle Anglo-Saxon settlement in the Middle Trent region is stressed by referring to south-western Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, which excludes the well-known site of Catholme just across the border in Staffordshire.

One of the major ways in which the dichotomy between rural and urban settlement is bridged in Blair’s study is through an emphasis on central places, principally seen as an evolving pattern of elite (in some cases intermittent) residences and defensible strongholds, although these can be religious centres too. Sitting on the fence is not something one would normally expect to accuse John Blair of, but there does appear to be an unresolved divergency between a conventional history that emphasises the dominant Mercian kingdom of the eighth century as the cradle of a system of fortified burh-sites and a preparedness to identify as ‘the dominant orthodoxy’– apparently quizzically – the idea that it was primarily Alfred’s reign that saw this strategy adopted in Wessex under critical military pressure (see page 201). I myself would not simply discount the records relating to the sites that can surely be identified as Taunton (Somerset), Benson (Oxon) and Merton (Surrey) as eighth-century royal tūns, within or without the ambit of Wessex, which were fought over, solely because those records appear only in the first recension of the Chronicle of a century or more latter (page 194 n 55). Positively, though, the use of the evidence of place names, not only the more familiar burh-tūn formations but also the more challenging -ingtūn names, in the context of a series of detailed case studies, makes for a highly illuminating discussion. Similarly, I found startling but powerful the proposition that the hall-life of heroic epic poetry – above all, Beowulf – is not merely idealised but also no less historically retrospective in that poem than the representations of ostentatious pagan funerals. Whether that quite compensates for the difference between the archaeological modesty of the evidence for the suggested royal hall close to an Iron Age hillfort at Irthlingborough (Northants) and the increasing confidence with which it referred to is another matter: what has been found is a corner of a building represented by six post-holes and a very short length of post-trench associated with a handful of sherds of Ipswich Ware and rather more Anglo-Saxon pottery of nondescript quality. The post-holes of 0.5m in diameter and depth are substantial but not outstandingly large.

Both comparable and illuminating is the case of the site of Catholme. Blair’s interpretation of the site could scarcely contrast more starkly with my own recently published suggestions (Hines Reference Hines2018). Blair’s view of the site as ‘something rather special’ is partly based on as yet unpublished proposals concerning two phases of grid-planned layout at the site; he proposes that it was a central place of assembly or ritual in the late seventh century (page 159). My own ‘possible reinterpretation’, based upon a re-modelling of the chronological evidence, was conversely that Catholme was ‘less stable and organized’ than previously thought and a ‘near perfect’ example of the progressive reduction in status of ceorl-class settlements between the fifth/sixth centuries and the tenth/eleventh. When Christopher Smart’s analysis in the forthcoming jointly authored book Planning in the Early Medieval Landscape is available, it will be possible to re-consider both cases. There is, though, a key difference in starting points here between John Blair and myself: he has approached Catholme primarily in light of a wider model of settlement and social history, whereas I took as my point of departure a series of specific problems with the chronological evidence of the site involving both stratigraphy and the radiocarbon evidence. However, Blair most emphatically does not treat the detailed site evidence casually, any more than I fail to correlate the results with a wider cultural picture – within which, in fact, we both agree that Catholme is rather unusual.

It is to be stressed that there are many fundamental aspects of the interpretation of the whole evidence from Anglo-Saxon England that Blair has examined in respect of which I fully endorse the presentation made in this book of the evidence and the problems it poses – indeed, I applaud the ideas and the emphatic way in which those are conveyed. The exclusion of York from the set of wīc-type emporia may seem a little cavalier, but the concurrent explication of the problems faced in even hypothesising, let alone demonstrating, the economic activity that sustained the wīcs is exemplary. The second core way in which the rural–urban dichotomy is overcome is in fact by emphasising the sort of polyfocal dispersal of urban functions that some twenty-five years ago I suggested could be labelled ‘proto-urban’ (Hines Reference Hines1994) – albeit taking a rather more evolutionary perspective than I would now. Blair makes a highly valuable case, perhaps not so much for a true reversion to this pattern in the ninth century but rather for a rebalancing towards an inland economy that made better use of such a pattern then, while also pouring properly sceptical cold water on over-easy claims of a tenth-century roll-out of a network of trading burhs to supersede the wīcs. In light of the many kilns found at Ipswich itself, however, it is not easily discernible what is meant by using the seismological term ‘epicentre’ to describe the area of Norfolk east of the Wash from which Ipswich Ware pottery ‘percolated’, and misleading to illustrate the distribution on a map that cuts off the eastern coast of East Anglia and barely squeezes in Ipswich itself (figure 60).

In respect of rural settlement and the agrarian landscape, meanwhile, Tom Williamson’s very practically rooted argument for intensification of arable production on heavier clay soils is convincingly embedded in a fuller model of social change across the eighth and ninth centuries but culminating in the tenth (see esp. page 336). Concurrently, the case for the predominance of what was essentially an infield–outfield agrarian regime on into the tenth century is also well made. One slip that needs to be corrected, however, is that Blair identifies the phrase dæ¯l londes in a Worcester charter concerning two hides at Clifford Chambers (Warwickshire) dated to ad 922 (S1289) as a compound noun meaning ‘share-land’ (page 331); in fact, the grammar of the clause ic sylle sumne dæ¯l londes means it can only be translated as ‘I [Wilfrid Bp. of Worcester] give a certain portion of land’, as also the identical phrase in another Worcester charter relating to Warwickshire of ad 991 where the portion of land is described as being ‘in two places’ (S1366: the verb in this case is ic…gebōcie, ‘I grant by charter’). This is an important matter, and it is proper therefore to put the record straight. There does appear to have been effectively a technical term for ‘shareland’ as common land in tenth-century Old English, namely gedāl- or gedēl-land, and it seems possible that Blair has mistakenly cited the wrong charter for Clifford Chambers in place of S1311 of ad 966 in which a later Bishop of Worcester granted a further two hides that did include healf hīd gedāl landes, ‘half a hide of shareland’. The really vital question in relation to this term is what gedālland means in the context of clause 42 of Ine’s law-code, and whether that dates from as early as the late seventh century, or when it might have been added to the code.

It is inevitable with a study of this remarkable scope that one may disagree with specific points, and even possibly conclusively refute some, without that necessarily undermining the overall hypotheses which are proposed. Approaches that have been questioned here include cases where empirical evidence is arguably over-generalised and cases where a priori theory seems to shape interpretation of actual evidence more than may be justified. There is a consistency in both approaches; and that both are features of the study points not only to honest engagement with the subject matter but also to a balanced standpoint overall. John Blair’s Building Anglo-Saxon England can perfectly fairly and respectfully be described as deliberately provocative – but purely as a corollary of a serious heuristic endeavour to reach a deeper and fuller level of understanding of fundamental aspects of the period. I do not hesitate to recommend this book to all; and not least as an invitation to all to join in the quest and the debate with the same level of energy and ambition.