The English warrior from earliest times to 1066

by Stephen Pollington

England is a territory carved out by military conquest from the decaying corpse of the Roman Empire. A unified English kingdom was born from the struggle of the various small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms against Scandinavian invaders whom the English eventually overcame and absorbed. Today the Vikings have a strong image in popular culture, while their victims-turned-conquerors remain largely unknown. This book offers an examination of the life and times of the English warrior from the Continental homeland in the first century AD, through the period of migration and conquest, local internal struggles and the Danish wars to the slaughter of the English leadership at the battle of Hastings. This important new work is not intended to be a bald listing of the battles and campaigns from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other sources, but rather it is an attempt to get below the surface of Anglo-Saxon warriorhood and to investigate the rites, social attitudes, mentality and mythology of the warfare of