The Mercian Chronicles

The eighth century has long been a neglected backwater in English history: a shadowland between the death of Bede and the triumphs of Ælfred. But before the hegemony of Wessex, the kingdom of Mercia - spread across a broad swathe of central England - was the dynamic heart of a kingship that discovered the means to exercise central political authority for the first time since the Roman empire. That authority was used to construct trading networks and markets; develop economic and cultural links with the Continent, and lay the foundations for a system of co-ordinated defence that Ælfred would reinvent at the end of the ninth century.

In this, the latest of his sequence of histories of Early Medieval Britain, Max Adams re-connects the worlds of Oswald, Bede and Ælfred in an absorbing study of the landscape, politics and society of a fascinating century.