This brief chapter on Britain around the year 500 sets the scene for a chronological survey of the early medieval island. But it is difficult at this point to see very much with certainty. Britain at the outset of the period covered by this volume lies under a veil of obscurity. Precious few written sources survive to give an account of the major contours of its history, and those that do survive are unreliable, brief or highly stylised. Archaeological remains survive in larger quantity (at least from some regions) but, against such a partial historical background, they pose significant problems of interpretation.

This chapter focuses on changes in the first century and a half or so of early medieval Britain. By the end of the period, in the middle of the seventh century, numerous kingdoms of varying size and strength can be discerned. Their violent interactions are relatively well known; the situation at the period’s outset, however, is much more obscure. In this chapter we will look at the developments in North Britain, beyond the former Roman frontier, as well as in the south, noting the many points of contact and comparison. We will also consider the practicalities of how kings established themselves by using the material and symbolic trappings of power. We will focus on religious change, as well, for this was an important era in the spread of Christianity. And we will pay particular attention to Gildas, a British writer of (probably) the sixth century whose work, while contentious and opaque in many respects, continues to be the key textual source for Britain in this period.

This chapter looks at Britain’s place within the wider world of the early Middle Ages. Contemporary views tended to place Britain on the fringes, which made its people conscious of distance and difference when dealing with the rest of Europe. At the same time, they were also often eager to demonstrate their accomplishments to their neighbours. The chapter goes on to look more specifically at major channels of communication between Britain and other areas, with particular reference to how contacts were built between regions, individuals and institutions in ways that were often personal or transitory – meaning that Britain’s international connections were in a constant state of renegotiation. These major strands of contact look west to Ireland, east to Scandinavia and south to mainland Europe.

This chapter assesses aspects of early medieval society: how people actually lived and related to one another. It begins by looking at some of the overarching schemes – kinship, lordship and rank or status – before moving on to a series of specific, representative topics, including slavery, the status of women, sex and sexuality, and law, disputing and justice. These themes emphasise the contingency of early medieval society. There were relatively few hard and fast strictures, and plenty of room for negotiation depending on circumstances. The relatively formal-seeming sources often betray a rather less formal reality.

This chapter looks at how kings and their kingdoms worked, with particular reference to the limitations as well as the strengths of early medieval government. Kings operated in similar ways across Britain, especially in cultivating a special status grounded in rights and privileges, warfare and descent. But there were also important differences between regions and kingdoms that emerged through the early Middle Ages. Some, such as England, saw kings gain considerably in material power. In others, such as the Welsh kingdoms, royal power remained more circumscribed. These shifts need to be read not only from the king’s perspective, in terms of strength or weakness, but from others’ point of view: was it always a good thing to be subject to a strong, demanding king? Did weak kingship have its own advantages for the rest of society? To focus these points, the chapter then turns to a case study of one particularly well-known king, whose reign produced many examples of energetic and highly theorized kingship: Alfred the Great.

This chapter provides an overview of content and language integrated learning as a constantly evolving approach to learning and teaching in our multilingual and multicultural classrooms. Bilingual education was described by Cazden and Snow several decades ago (1990) as a ‘simple label for a complex phenomenon’. This complexity is evidenced by the different models that bilingual education encompasses on a global scale – for example, Garcia (2009) identified at least thirty-three different designations. Moreover, given the unprecedented movement of peoples, classrooms as multilingual and multicultural spaces are changing rapidly, with resulting ‘super-diversity’, (Vertovec, 2007, p. 1024) impacting at all levels on learning practices.

This chapter turns to what life was actually like in physical terms. It looks at where people lived and how they related to the landscape around them. We will consider population and the structure of rural society in terms of units and the obligations of different kinds of people or land. We will then go on a tour of four early medieval estates recorded in contemporary documents, and end up considering the dominant, central places that structured the surrounding territory.