Introduction

Summary

I have made a heap of all that I could find.

Nennius

In 2013, a survey on British social class divisions was published. Titled ‘The Great British Class Survey’, the research was done in partnership with the BBC, and was ‘one of the largest ever studies of class in Great Britain’, based on 160,000 responses. It concluded that British people can be divided into seven different social classes, ranging from the elite (the top tier) to the precariat (the lowest). The survey was acclaimed for its scale and also because it took into consideration not only so-called economic capital (income and assets), but also cultural capital and social capital. The survey followed the method developed by Pierre Bourdieu in his 1960s survey on French culture, organized and published in his book La Distinction.

The ‘Great British Class Survey’ is very interesting and bold. The study pointed out the complexities of British social differentiation, but it only alluded to a connection between the increasing number of social classes and the distance between the elite levels and the ones below. The research thus missed something very important: the strong focus on the empirical data led the sociologists to omit analysis of the historicity of social classes. Yet, they alluded to something even more crucial: despite what is alleged in neo-liberal thought on the subject, and, more currently, in neo-right and alt-right speeches, social classes still matter.

This book sets out to examine evidence for the crystallization of the aristocracy during the long eighth century. The research aims to define the aristocracy, explore its characters and internal stratification and examine its relationship with other sectors of society. It focuses on the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, and approaches the evidence from this period from a theoretical perspective that is self-consciously and unashamedly Marxist. This approach to the Northumbrian evidence is unusual, and it is from this that the originality of the research derives. In its theoretically driven approach, the current book is inspired by the works of Timothy Reuter. The great question Reuter addressed was the early medieval aristocracy, and he was not afraid to draw models, concepts and insights from other disciplines such as anthropology. His models for understanding the aristocracy focused primarily on the relations into which aristocratic families were inserted, rather than the institutions.