The Welding of the Race ("449"-1066)

This is the raw material of English identity. Covering over six centuries from the first Saxon warships landing on British shores to the Norman Conquest, this volume assembles the surviving accounts, chronicles, and testimonies that document one of history's most consequential cultural mergers. Here are the fragments of Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and other sources that together tell how Roman Britain gave way to Anglo-Saxon England, how Christianity arrived and transformed a pagan world, and how the kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria rose and fell before the final Norman conquest. The text presents the arrival of the Saxons as military allies turned conquerors, the violent collisions between tribes, and the slow religious transformation as Christianity took root. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where England actually came from, not the myth but the messy, violent, fascinating reality of a people being forged from the wreckage of Rome.