The Battles That Created England 793-1100: How Alfred and his Successors Defeated the Vikings to Unite the Kingdoms

In popular imagination the warfare of the Early Middle Ages is often obscure, unstructured, and unimaginative, lost between two military machines, the ‘Romans’ and the ‘Normans’, which saw the country invaded and partitioned. In point of fact, we have a considerable amount of information at our fingertips and the picture that should emerge is one of English ability in the face of sometimes overwhelming pressures on society, and a resilience that eventually drew the older kingdoms together i...