This is the first book dealing solely with human burial in the Middle and Late Anglo-Saxon periods. Although not designed to cover the subject comprehensively, its ten papers give a good impression of a rich field of research. No fewer than six are case studies based on specific sites, two of which are effectively interim reports on excavations at the significant sites of Worcester Cathedral and Bamburgh. The others explicitly illustrate and develop interpretative approaches. Nick Stoodley and Annia Cherryson's surveys of sites in and around the wīc of Southampton are exemplary in showing the relevance of context (both regional and urban): not least for the early examples of true churchyards at Southampton. Howard Williams's discussion of seventh-century burials at Harford Farm, Norfolk, largely reprises a half-chapter of his 2006 monograph, Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain.

Based more broadly, Sally Crawford and Dawn Hadley tackle the sensitive topic of physical normality and variance in the buried populations from historical and archaeological viewpoints respectively, producing a mature discussion of attitudes of intense human significance. Nonetheless, it is a valid concern that a preoccupation with identifying difference within this archaeological field could in practice marginalize ‘the rest of the Christian faithful’, as Hadley refers to them in her final sentence – not, apparently, punning on the double sense of the noun ‘rest’.

Jo Buckberry's introductory chapter to the volume highlights ‘cemetery diversity’ in the period and, with James Holloway's survey of charcoal burials, forms a useful, up-to-date summary of familiar material. Elizabeth Craig and Jo Buckberry's paper examining the distribution of osteological stress-markers throughout the buried population at Raunds Furnells, Northamptonshire, consequently represents a different angle that is welcome as well as innovative; this exercise calls for widespread replication. It is, though, frustrating that the presentation of their statistical results, a series of chi-square values for relationships between stress-indicators and details of burial form and location within the cemetery, is so summary that much intrinsic detail is invisible: for instance, we are not told the number and identity of the individuals bearing all three of the stress-markers. These data are presumably in Craig's unpublished 2006 Bradford MSc dissertation, but there was plenty of room to include them here.

Regrettably, the book is somewhat marred by poor grammar and spelling; that is the shared responsibility of the editors and publishers, and one that, out of respect for the readership, should be taken seriously. But what this field of research wants most of all is to leave off the repetitive insistence on its status as a ‘recent’ breakthrough. This is wearing pretty thin now. Modern work on this topic can be traced from Miranda Hyslop's (1963) discussion of a gradual transition to Christian burial practices in the ‘final phase’ of Early Anglo-Saxon furnished burial, and Sonia Hawkes's development of that thesis in discussing the cemeteries at Winnall, Hampshire (in Meaney and Hawkes 1970, 45–55). Arguing that the nationwide evidence then suggested a comprehensive shift to burial in consecrated graveyards around the mid-eighth century (some of which were true churchyards, not all), Hawkes was in turn endorsing a tenet of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquaries and a key element in the Revd James Douglas's ground-breaking dating and identification of Early Anglo-Saxon burials of 1793: in other words, that the medieval traditions crediting Cuthbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, with the institution of a wide-ranging reform of burial practices, and of establishing Christian cemeteries, on his return from consecration in Rome by ad 741, were valid.

It is invidious to divide early medieval scholarship into rival camps of historians and archaeologists, but important to recognize that the questions raised against this view from the later 1970s were primarily based upon historical, and continental, sources. The principal archaeological problem was the inadequacy of dating evidence to identify burials of the eighth to eleventh centuries ad, and it was particularly as radiocarbon-dating facilities multiplied and techniques and calibration improved, that material evidence accumulated showing that the course of development was less straightforward. It is misleading, though, to consider burial archaeology in isolation. The growth in interest in and understanding of the funerary evidence of the Middle and Late Anglo-Saxon periods since the 1980s is largely matched in the archaeological study of these periods generally. Besides the improvement in ‘scientific’ techniques, fundamental to this shift in attitudes has been the rapprochement between historical, textual and archaeological approaches, so that later Anglo-Saxon England is now discussed confidently in terms of a multidisciplinary cultural history.

It is not needful or helpful to keep tilting at the windmill of a ‘traditional’ failure to recognize the diversity and importance of this material. As this book shows, the study of funerary practice in Middle and Late Anglo-Saxon England has come of age both methodologically and empirically, and can command attention on its own merits.

Craig, E F 2006. ‘An osteological and palaeopathological assessment of stress indicators and social status at Raunds Furnells, Northamptonshire’, unpub MSc diss, University of Bradford

Hyslop, M 1963. ‘Two Anglo-Saxon cemeteries at Chamberlain's Barn, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire’, Archaeol J, 120, 161–200

Meaney, A L S and Hawkes, S C 1970. Two Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries at Winnall, Winchester, Hampshire, London: Society for Medieval Archaeology

Williams, H 2006. Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press