Max Adams

Somewhere between the departure of the Roman legions in the early fifth century and the arrival of Augustine's Christian mission at the end of the sixth, the kingdoms of Early Medieval Britain were formed. But by whom? And out of what? The First Kingdom is a skilfully wrought investigation of this mysterious epoch, synthesizing archaeological research carried out over the last forty years to tease out reality from the myth.

Max Adams explores Britain's lost early medieval past by walking its paths and exploring its lasting imprint on valley, hill and field. Each of his ten walk narratives form a portrait of a Britain, of fort and fyrd, crypt and crannog, church and causeway, holy well and memorial stone.

The magisterial biography of Oswald Whiteblade, exiled prince of Northumbria, who returned in blood and glory to reclaim his birthright. A charismatic leader, a warrior whose prowess in battle earned him the epithet Whiteblade, an exiled prince who returned to claim his birthright, the inspiration for Tolkein's Aragorn.

Oswald of Northumbria was the first great English monarch, yet today this legendary figure is all but forgotten. In this panoramic portrait of Dark Age Britain, archaeologist and biographer Max Adams returns the king in the North to his rightful place in history.

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.