Beyond the Burghal Hidage

This volume, an outcome of a Leverhulme Trust-funded research project, by John Baker and Stuart Brookes, sets out to reconstruct the physical evidence of the Anglo-Saxon military responses to the Viking incursions between the late eighth and the eleventh centuries; and in the process better to outline and to understand the strategies as they changed character from the defensive to the offensive. In this survey of civil defence, the authors adopt a landscape approach which is problem-orientated and combines both documentary and archaeological material: it is also part of the reinvigorated effort to accommodate place-name studies into landscape research. In this case, the importance of place-names, both to reconstruct communication routes and to identify beacons and minor defensive sites as elements of military networks, is critical. The authors argue that it is possible to delineate the English state’s development by looking at the ‘physical expression of the process of civil defence’. Warfare was so embedded in early medieval societies that defence had a vital part to play in the formation of state institutions. The theoretically-informed historical overview considers these matters and the chronology, scale and character of the military effort over three hundred years. This landscape approach, which owes something to Luttwak’s work on Roman imperial military strategies, has been used to identify at least five ‘grand strategies’ between the eighth and the early eleventh centuries through the recognition of differing responses to military threats. The five strategies are mainly composites built from case-studies. The strategies essentially show flexibility between the reliance on the use of frontiers and a ‘defence in depth’ which countered enemy incursions into the Wessex interior by a pragmatic use of old and new strongholds. The sophisticated work on landscapes demonstrated here has produced a more complex relative chronology for regions even though absolute dating remains elusive. The authors have worked within this constraint and, through the use of ‘contextualised’ and ‘circumstantial’ evidence, have considerably extended our appreciation of Anglo-Saxon military organisation

Archaeology · Character (mathematics · Chronology · Eleventh · Offensive · Operations research · Political science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · Byzantine Studies and History · Classics · Computer Science · Engineering · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History