MERCIAN CHRONICLES (HB)

The eighth century has long been a neglected backwater in English history: a shadowland between the death of Bede and the triumphs of Aelfred. But before the hegemony of Wessex, the kingdom of Mercia was the dynamic heart of a kingship that discovered the means to exercise central political authority for the first time since the Roman empire. In this, the latest of his sequence of histories of Early Medieval Britain, Max Adams re-connects the worlds of Oswald, Bede and Aelfred in an absorbing study of the landscape, politics and society of a fascinating century.