At the heart of this study lies an excavation campaign in Stafford undertaken by Martin Carver as Director of the West Midlands Rescue Archaeology Committee and Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit from 1975 to 1985. The campaign focused on important research questions about Anglo-Saxon towns. What pre-existing centres prompted their location? What was the impetus behind their emergence? What did strategic, defensive, administrative and trading concerns contribute to their form and development? Despite subsequent work, these questions remain pertinent. Funding was not found for comprehensive post-excavation analysis and publication. The archive was placed in Stoke-on-Trent Museum and the Archaeology Data Service published it online. This therefore is not an excavation report, but a summary and study of the discoveries with novel hypotheses.

Stafford sits on a peninsula in a loop of the River Sow. The layout of the medieval town remains visible in the modern street pattern. An axial street – Greengate Street – connected the neck of the peninsula to the north with a river crossing in the south. Perpendicular streets ran east to a causeway between the river and the King's Pool. The excavations offered insights into different parts of the town – St Bertelin's Church, St Mary's Grove and Bath Street in the heart of the medieval town to the west of Greengate Street, Tipping Street leading east to the causeway and Clarke Street at the eastern edge. Radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology and a well-defined pottery sequence provided a clear broad chronology. Contemporary developments occurred on most sites in the tenth to eleventh centuries and the later twelfth to thirteenth centuries, with an expansion of some activity into the sixteenth century. During the tenth century there was a timber church with a central pit including a cross or coffin under St Bertelin's Church, a grain-processing centre suitable for producing up to 200 bannocks per day at St Mary's Grove, a smithy at Bath Street, a pottery workshop at Tipping Street and a tip at Clarke Street. By the later twelfth century the timber church at St Bertelin's had been rebuilt in stone. From the later twelfth century into the thirteenth century a craftworking site emerged at St Mary's Grove and a smithing workshop developed at Tipping Street, serving a community of tailors, carpenters, gardeners and farmers; continued tipping at Clarke Street was superseded by construction of a house with a hearth and a hut. Craft-working activity along with renewed grain processing continued at St Mary's Grove through into the sixteenth century.

Martin Carver provides a welcome and accessible account of the excavations with well-presented black-and-white maps, plans, diagrams and photographs integrated into the text. Occasionally the text on these figures is too small and blurred at the edges, but it remains discernible. More than this, he sets out some very important original hypotheses. He defines and identifies two urban communities in the tenth to eleventh centuries and the later twelfth to thirteenth centuries, based on the scale of specialist production and reliance on imported foodstuffs (grain and cattle in particular). Since there is significant interruption at many sites between these periods – destruction by fire at St Bertelin's, quarrying at St Mary's Grove and ploughing at Tipping Street – he envisages an ‘extraordinary switchback ride of boom and bust’ (p xii). He sees the origins of the tenth-century town in Æthelflæd of Mercia's foundation of a burh at Stafford in 913 and its demise as a result of William i's campaign around Stafford in 1069–70. More generally, he argues against an earlier origin for the Mercian burhs and the contribution of religious communities to their location and development. He sees them as royal initiatives for strategic and military purposes, self-consciously imitating Roman towns and forts. At Stafford he proposes that a tenth-century military garrison encouraged the development of an urban centre serving a regional market, but not a supra-regional market. All of these are novel, plausible and important suggestions deserving serious consideration; even if (as he acknowledges) the dating does not require precise origins in 913 or demise around 1069–70, there is still room for an earlier religious community around St Mary's and St Bertelin's, and there remain alternative models that might have prompted the design of burhs and alternative possibilities for the nature of the communities at Stafford.