‘Anglo-Saxon’ is a term with a long and nuanced history. This study assesses where the word itself comes from, why it has been felt appropriate to separate the pre-Conquest epoch from later English history and why the Anglo-Saxons have taken on so many different meanings in subsequent times. Beginning with the deployment of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in the eighth to tenth centuries, the focus then turns to how the period before 1066 was constructed as a formative time for English national and institutional identity. This process began in the later Middle Ages, but the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ itself only began to be used again in the sixteenth century. It later took on powerful political and cultural resonance, which eventually gave rise to a racial understanding of ‘Anglo-Saxon’. The difficult legacy of these many layers of later usage, including developments since the Victorian peak of Anglo-Saxonism, is also assessed.

In this short note I query not so much the use of the word ‘vikings’ or the fraught question of whether it should be capitalised, but rather whether ‘the Vikings’ is a useful concept that helps us understand history, or whether it creates an inaccurate essentialist category for which there is no historical evidence. The piece argues for more nuance and specificity when dealing with Scandinavia and the Scandinavian diaspora in our period, and argues that the variety of phenomena across times and space warrants more serious consideration. The time has come to ditch this twentieth-century concept and to return to the sources.

The significance of Abbo of Fleury’s time in England to the intellectual life of tenth- and eleventh-century Ramsey is widely appreciated. Less well understood is what English monks knew of Fleury’s claims of Abbo’s sanctity. The present article explores knowledge of Abbo’s cult in England through a close study of Oxford, Bodleian MS Lat. misc. c. 75, a twelfth-century witness to Aimo’s Vita et miracula s. Abbonis of which the Life’s editors were unaware. The manuscript is introduced, its textual relationship to the Vita’s other witnesses is examined and a stemma for the Vita’s textual transmission is proposed. Textual interpolations made at Ramsey are then analysed for the additional information which they provide about Abbo’s legacy there before a possible context for the Vita’s transmission to Ramsey is proposed. An appendix of variants between the Ramsey witness and the Vita’s printed edition is also provided.

Verses by Arnórr ‘jarls’-poet’, preserved in Orkneyinga saga, describe a battle in which Earl Thorfinn of Orkney fought the English south of the Isle of Man. The thirteenth-century saga-author associated these verses with a campaign supposedly fought in the 1030s or 1040s, but this account is doubtful. Turning to the Norwegian expedition of 1058, this article considers whether the verses might originally have referred to that campaign and later become linked with a different story. New readings of the key stanzas are proposed, and a new sequence, with consequences impacting on the chronology and circumstances of Thorfinn’s life and death. There are ramifications for discussions touching the saga tradition, Arnórr’s career, Malcolm (Máel Coluim) III Canmore’s career, and his marriage to Ingibjorg.

This article reflects on the phrase ‘early medieval’ as applied to European history between the end of Roman political rule in the West and some indeterminate point in the tenth or eleventh centuries. It is framed with reference to Michael Wallace-Hadrill’s 1974 lecture entitled ‘Early Medieval History’, which serves as a foil for a discussion of the evolving historiographical landscape from 1974 to 2024. The origins and the chronology of the term’s adoption into English usage are reviewed and, with an eye to discourses of modernity, the elements of middle-ness and early-ness are dissected. Points of comparison and contrast with the notion of ‘early modernity’ are noted, while an emphasis on the entanglement of middle-ness with European-ness leads into a discussion of whether the term has any applicability to extra-European history. The article concludes by highlighting the value of the weak relationship of ‘early medieval’ to modernity.

This article surveys how the Welsh and their territory have been described, from the early Middle Ages to the present. It begins by examining the terms used by Welsh writers in the early medieval period, before proceeding to consider English nomenclature and the important shift from Brit(t)ones to Walenses in the twelfth century. This shift is re-examined through the lens of the Vita Griffini, which reveals the political motivations behind the increasing focus on Wales and the Welsh. Despite this development in nomenclature, the island of Britain remained central to the identity of the Welsh. This is evident in vernacular texts, especially poetry, and this article explores the different names used in this context. It concludes with a brief foray into the early modern period, ultimately illustrating the continued relevance and significance of the identities fashioned in the early Middle Ages to writers in subsequent centuries.

This article explores how kinship impacted upon the careers of two powerful queens of Mercia: Cynethryth, wife of King Offa (757–796) and Æthelswith (d. 886), wife of Burgred (r. 852–874). Cynethryth is chiefly remembered for her unique appearance on coins and the witnessing of royal charters. It has been assumed that she was a descendent of Cynewise, wife of Penda of Mercia (d. 655). It is suggested that both women were members of West Saxon royal families. Æthelswith’s powerful connections ensured that she was a major player at the Mercian court, jointly issuing royal charters and appearing regularly in the witness lists. She was the first English queen to dispose of land in her own right and may have been the first crowned queen in England. She was the last queen of an independent Mercia before its subsummation within a new ‘Anglo-Saxon’ realm created by her brother Alfred.

Latin and vernacular histories of England and Britain from the early twelfth century onwards testify to various names for the exceptional prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain. A British tradition prioritized by Geoffrey of Monmouth shows a split, attributable to the unfamiliarity of an archaic term, between names translatable as ‘Giants’ Dance’ and ‘Giants’ Ring’. The Old English name which gives us ‘Stonehenge’, meanwhile, identifies the megalithic structure with a place of judicial incarceration or punishment. While imaginative, that is significantly embedded in a phase of later Anglo-Saxon history when displays of authority were determinedly imposed on the landscape. Archaeological evidence shows that Stonehenge itself served as the site of one execution, possibly more, in the late eighth or ninth century. Recognition of this stage in the long sequence of societal engagement with the monument sheds light both on the site itself and its context, before and through the transition to Norman England.

English kings from the late ninth century onwards were sometimes presented as kings of Britain. While this is widely attested, less studied is how the English positioned themselves in relation to Britain – or rather, how English they considered Britain to be. A number of late Old English poems engage deeply with the problem of Britain, but have so far escaped attention in this broader context. In multiple cases, late Old English poems elide non-English peoples and present English dominion as normative and unmarked throughout Britain. This is particularly prominent in the Old English poetic Menologium, which is studied here in detail. The treatment of Britain in late Old English poetry also leads to a reinterpretation of one of the most well-known Old English historical poems, The Battle of Brunanburh. The battle becomes a defence of a particularly English version of Britain, with the invading enemies being successfully driven out.

This article presents a reassessment of the entire corpus of heriots – a post obitum transfer of military equipment and/or money to one’s lord – as well as a detailed survey which exposes the high degree of inconsistency between the values of II Cnut and the evidence found across wills and other sources. Rather than seeking to explain away the inconsistencies revealed by this analysis (as previous scholarship has often sought to do), I argue that such variation was a regular feature of heriot payments and, furthermore, that negotiation played a key role in the process, wherein heriot payments were subject to unilateral or bilateral alteration according to the needs of the testator or the recipient. This variability accounts for the disparities found across the corpus. Moreover, it is theorised that the possibility for the negotiation of one’s heriot allowed for the use of the heriot as a tool of disproportionate extraction.

This paper is the first attempt to assess the Isle of Axholme in the early medieval period, to determine its nature as a hitherto overlooked key point of economic, ritual, and geographic articulation along Northumbria’s southern frontier in the seventh century. First, an introduction to the current scholarly paradigm on the military campaigns of seventh-century English kings along this frontier is undertaken, followed by an analysis of recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the kingdom of Lindsey, and how this relates to Hatfield and the Isle of Axholme. The Isle is then used to discuss the locations of four major battles: the Battles of the River Idle, Heathfelth, Maserfield, and the River Trent. All but Maserfield can be reasonably argued to have taken place along the borders of the Isle, and in these cases, their locations are discussed. Still, an argument can be made to place Maserfield within this southern frontier too. As a result, this paper highlights the socio-economic and geopolitical importance of Lindsey, and reveals the Isle as an area of cyclical border conflict within a Humber-based frontier zone and, in doing so, offers a new perspective on Northumbria’s southern limits.