In 1974 – while I was busy doing something else – the telephone rang in the premises of our self-styled West Midlands Rescue Archaeology Committee (WEMRAC) at 25a The Tything, Worcester. On the phone was Ashley Carter, of the Stafford and Mid Staffordshire Archaeology Society, who had dug some test pits on the line of a proposed ring road at Clarke Street and found a great quantity of orange pottery. He thought it looked Roman – and yet. Soon I was Ashley's guest at his house near Stafford, where the potsherds were stacked high on the kitchen table. They were symmetrical, and orange or pink or grey in colour, smooth but very sandy, depositing a little weep of sand every time you picked one up. After some minutes I found what I was hunting for – a thin band of rouletting around the shoulder, like a row of marks from a toothed wheel. This pottery was not Roman, but tenth-century, the pottery of the earliest English towns. And Stafford was one of these: now the county town of Staffordshire, and long ago a foundation of one of England's few female generals: Alfred's daughter, Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, who built her burh in a loop of the River Sow. Next year I excavated the Clarke Street site and began a ten-year campaign exploring Stafford. And the rest is history – or I would hope it to be.

This book offers an account of the campaign of 1975–1985, the discoveries made, the analyses undertaken and the conclusions drawn. The new information I offer is archaeological, but it is not presented here in the form of a conventional archaeological report of the kind intended only for other archaeologists. The archaeological records are held in Stoke-on-Trent Museum, where they are available for consultation. I recommend a visit anyway, to see one of the country's great collections, but it is not obligatory in order to access the archaeological evidence on which this book is based. That evidence has been sifted and digested and placed online as a publicly accessible archive in eleven volumes hosted by the Archaeological Data Service.