Our knowledge of the people we loosely call the Anglo-Saxons has been transformed in recent years by evidence from several sources, some traditional, others much more recently developed. Sixty years ago, what we knew of the Anglo-Saxons was based chiefly upon transmitted text, such as the writings of the Venerable Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Domesday Book, laws, and monastic charters. The editing and interpretation of written sources has continued with impressive results. However, the greatest expansion of our knowledge has come increasingly from archaeological investigations and discoveries that give new insights into the day-to-day lives and deaths of the people of that period. As John Blair points out, the accumulation of data outstrips analysis (15). This is a work of synthesis and the bibliography has more than 750 references. It is noteworthy that only around 20 percent of them are to works or publications before 1990, and the bibliography includes a significant number of references to “grey literature”—material in print but not published, mostly archaeological reports. It is also a very large book with copious and informative illustration.

Blair has already written a major work, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (2005), and here he turns to a study of the built environment of Anglo-Saxon England. We are confronted with a world in which almost all building was ephemeral because it was of timber, unlike the Roman world, in which stone had been ubiquitous. He sets out to analyze the nature of settlement in the landscape and consequently to explore what that reveals about the nature of Anglo-Saxon society and the course of its development. The study focuses on the area within which discoveries of settlement of the middle Anglo-Saxon period (ca. 600–850) are concentrated, to the east and north of the Fosseway, which he identifies as his core zone. Although this region has produced an enormous number of finds of metallic objects and of pottery, there is little recognizable building during the middle period. He argues convincingly that the whole of this area was linked culturally and economically with the northern world of Norway, Denmark, Jutland, and southern Sweden and employed the building traditions of that region—wooden structures with plank foundations—a method of construction that leaves very little evidence in the ground, unlike the more widely understood earth-fast post method. This eastern region, he argues, was the wealthiest in middle Anglo-Saxon society and the area that, once Christianity was established, saw the introduction of new ideas about layout, with most settlement planned according to modules based on a fixed unit.

Building on his analysis of the emergence of ordered settlement, Blair discusses the transformation of middle Anglo-Saxon society as kings and their aristocratic followers reorganized the landscape to support their essentially nomadic lifestyle, which by the eighth century started to settle into a more sedate pattern as they moved to colonize the monastic centers their predecessors had nurtured in the seventh century. The eighth-century kings began to assert themselves in a society now more open to contact and influences from Frisia, Francia, and Rome and the material wealth that brought flowed through the wics and out into a countryside where trade seems to have been widespread and vigorous. The reach of the Mercian rulers extended to Wessex, which Blair sees as deeply influenced by their administrative innovations and by the creation of a system of defense and oversight that predated the Wessex burhs of King Alfred and his successors.

Production of goods and associated trade transferred into the shelter of walled sites, mostly the old Roman towns. This move did not imply the existence of true urban societies, which only emerged much later, in the early tenth century, although it was prompted by the Viking incursions. During the tenth century, we see the development of urban societies, with their distinctive plans and building types. This is also the period of a major growth of wealth, recognized through an expanding coinage, which enabled the reorganization of the monasteries and the acquisition of the landed estates upon which their flowering was built. Blair sees the monasteries as a driving force in the reorganization of tenth-century agriculture into the common open-field system, with its associated closely structured villages. The new wealth, driven by the influx of silver from the continent, enabled magnates to release land as bookland, to be acquired by their followers, a process now often apparent to us as places with names formed by a personal name plus -tun. By the early eleventh century, the aristocracy had developed a sophisticated building vocabulary that embraced upper stories, private chambers, and indoor latrines, in constructions which were increasingly fortified. The peasantry, meanwhile, were losing their freedom of action as the aristocracy exploited their position to tighten their grip on production, though it appears that the relative freedom and prosperity of the peasantry continued in much of his core eastern region, reminding us of the diversity of English society, in its structure and culture.

This detailed analysis is founded upon a close examination of the many new sites which are emerging through rescue archaeology and by the use of data from the distribution of coins now recorded by the Early Medieval Coin Register at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which also contains details of other, mostly metal, objects found by metal detectorists: 1,394,850 items as of February 2019. The result is a wide-ranging book in which the built environment is only the starting point for an examination of the changing structure of early medieval English society. Inevitably a work as wide-ranging as this is open to criticism, particularly, I feel, in regard to the nature of the tenth- to eleventh-century expansion of English society. However, the breadth of vision and the brilliance with which this enormous study has been conducted should excite and inspire both students and scholars of Anglo-Saxon England.