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The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century
0 - Default Title
Description
In the first half of the tenth century, successive members of the Cerdicing dynasty established a loose domination over the other great potentates in Britain. They were celebrated as kings of the whole island, but even in their Wessex heartlands they probably had few means to regulate routinely the conduct of the general populace. Detailed analysis of coins, shires, hundreds, and wapentakes suggests that it was only around the time of Edgar (957/9-975) that the Cerdicing kings developed the relatively standardised administrative apparatus of the so-called 'Anglo-Saxon state'. This substantially increased their ability to impinge upon the lives of ordinary people living between the Channel and the Tees, and served to mark that area off from the rest of the island. The resultant cleft undermined the idea of a pan-British realm, and demarcated the early English kingdom as a distinct and coherent political unit.
In this volume, George Molyneaux places the formation of the English kingdom in a European perspective, and challenges the notion that its development was exceptional: the Cerdicings were only one of several ruling dynasties around the fringes of the former Carolingian Empire for which the late ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries were a time of territorial expansion and consolidation.
Product details
- Edition:
- illustrated
- Number of Pages:
- 320
- Release Date:
- 2015-07-07
- Publication Date:
- 2014-12-18
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press (UK)
- Languages:
- Original: English
- ISBN10:
- 0198717911
- ISBN13:
- 9780198717911
- Weight:
- 646 g
- Height:
- 16.1 cm
- Width:
- 24 cm
- Thickness:
- 2.2 cm
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