James Campbell's work on the Anglo-Saxons is recognised as being some of the most original of recent writing on the period; it is brought together in this collection, which is both an important contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies in itself and also a pointer to the direction of future research.

    It dramatizes behavior in a complex social world--a martial, aristocratic world that we often distort by imposing on it our own biases and values. In this cross-disciplinary study, John Hill looks at Beowulf from a comparative ethnological point of view. He provides a thorough examination of the socio-cultural dimensions of the text and compares the social milieu of Beowulf to that of similarly organized cultures. Through examination of historical analogs in northern Europe and France, as well as past and present societies on the Pacific rim in Southeast Asia, a complex and extended society is uncovered and an astonishingly different Beowulf is illuminated.The study is divided into five major essays: on ethnology and social drama, the temporal world, the legal world, the economy of honour, and the psychological world. Hill presents a realm where genealogies incorporate social and political statements: in this world gift giving has subtle and manipulative dimensions, both violent and peaceful exchange form a political economy, acts of revenge can be baleful or have jural force, and kinship is as much a constructible fact as a natural one. Family and kinship relations, revenge themes, heroic poetry, myth, legality, and political discussions all bring the importance of the social institutions in Beowulf to the foreground, allowing for a fuller understanding of the poems and its implications for Anglo-Saxon society.

    This book is different, setting out to examine the experience of the lesser English lords and landowners, which has been largely ignored. Ann Williams shows how they survived the conquest and settlement, adapted to foreign customs, and in the process preserved native tradition and culture. Though the great earls and magnates fell with Harold, some of their dependents secured a place in the entourages of their supplanters, or were too useful to the royal administration (based largely on English procedure) to be completely displaced; in the Church, too, a reservoir of English sentiment survived. The testimony of the Anglo-Norman historians who chronicled the Conquest, together with other evidence, including the Domesday Book (based on the English system of local government), are an important source for our knowledge of how the lesser aristocracy and the free landholders felt about, and reacted to, their new masters. Dr ANN WILLIAMS was until her retirement Senior Lecturer in medieval history at the Polytechnic of North London.

    This volume uses archaeological and place-name evidence to present an authoritative account of the most significant of the English Kingdoms.