Domesday Book presents the digested results of a systematic survey of landholding in England, probably conceived at the end of 1085 and carried to fruition over the next year or so. To show legitimate succession of tenure, it also incorporates infor-mation about holdings at the end of the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042–66). The Domesday project is one of the most ambitious governmental undertakings of the Middle Ages, and its contents provide a solid bedrock on which to base studies of many aspects of eleventh-century England. However this information represents the product of a precise set of inquiries focused strongly on rural property and its value, which translated into its fiscal liability: the survey is structured by shire, and within each shire by the lands of each of the ‘tenants in chief’ of 1086 (i.e. those who held land direct from the king), usually organized by hundred. Other aspects of contemporary society impinged on the survey but were of tangential interest and so were treated inconsistently, and generally much less fully. Towns fell into this category, as did details of the monetary system. The presence of moneyers or minting was noted among the customs of twenty-nine locations, ten in connection with conditions under Edward, fourteen in 1086 and five in both (Map 1). Actual coins show that this record is only partial: about three times that many locations had been named on coins in the decades before and after the Norman Conquest. Most but not all of the mint-places were among the 112 locations described as towns in Domesday Book (Map 2). Moreover, even where the Domesday survey does refer to minting or moneyers, it usually gives just a terse statement about how much income was produced for the king. Only in one case (Oxford) is a moneyer named as such, and then only in his capacity as a landholder within the town.

Even this information is valuable given how little is known about the monetary system beyond the coins themselves. Yet Domesday Book has the potential to make a second, indirect, contribution to knowledge of the coinage. It names thousands of individuals who held property in England, running the gamut from the king, major aristocrats and leading ecclesiastics down to very small-scale landholders, many of whom must reflect better-to-do members of the peasantry.

This book is about Britain, and the people who dwelt there, between about 500 and 1000. At this stage Britain was not thought of as the basis of a shared nationality or government: it was an island that contained numerous distinct groups with different languages and ways of life, as well as strong views of their own history and ethnicity. Its population was a small fraction of what it is now, with precious few towns, and most people devoted their time to producing food from land and livestock. Resources and education were distributed very unevenly according to status and gender – and justice, too, was harsh and often slow and imbalanced. By modern standards, early medieval Britain was in many ways a very harsh place. Nonetheless, its people had much to take pride and interest in. They would have seen important changes going on around them as a sequence of new kingdoms took shape, and as Christianity came to be a force at all levels of society. They would have learnt their place in that society, and in the world at large, by swapping stories and poems. At times they would also have seen new immigrants enter their community, or been migrants themselves, or adopted – either bit by bit or by a sudden leap – a whole new identity, taking on new customs and languages in the process. They would have been conscious of several intersecting layers and kinds of belonging, from families and localities upwards to kingdoms and a religious community that spanned the whole continent. All of this is interesting partly because of what it sets up – most obviously, the modern nations of England, Scotland and Wales as cultural and/or political entities – but the early Middle Ages are also interesting in themselves, as an era of possibility and change in Britain without regard for outcomes that lay centuries in the future. This book seeks to show how the latter approach can challenge and enrich the former.

How did people get the things they needed but could not grow or make from their own resources? This chapter examines networks of exchange; that is to say, of people exchanging things among themselves. It surveys first the major kinds of exchange – gift, tribute and purchase – before looking at the means and mechanics of exchange, including money and precious metal. Finally, we will look at the locations of exchange, among which were various forms of towns; the functions of these will be considered, including military and administrative roles as well as trade.

This chapter is framed around a very simple question with many complex answers: how do we know about the early Middle Ages? There are a number of secondary questions that lie behind this one: what don’t we know about the early Middle Ages? How reliable and representative is the material that does survive? What factors have affected the preservation of that information? All of these should be kept in mind when reading the rest of this book, as the sources for this period are often unusual and challenging. Much can depend on short or ambiguous texts. Readers may also notice unaccustomed forms of evidence playing a prominent role: place names, archaeological finds, inscriptions and literary texts all feature.

This chapter considers the idea of history, in its broadest sense, as it applied during the early Middle Ages. How were people and events of the past pictured, structured and recreated? When and why were they written about? Since we as modern historians depend so heavily on the historical writings of previous generations, from the period we are looking at to our own, ideas of what history is and how it works are topics of central importance. The case studies pursued in this chapter exemplify different ways in which the past was treated. Genre, audience and context were crucial: individual writers each had their own concerns to pursue. At the heart of the issue are of course texts that called themselves histories, which were written as coordinated, authoritative accounts of the past. But even these were composed according to the expectations of the day, with different valances assigned to truth, embellishment and objectivity. Æthelweard’s Chronicle, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain represent three distinct deployments of this tradition. But ‘history’ was far from the only way of handling the past. Other genres deployed accounts of historical figures and events, including heroic verse (Beowulf) and pithy genealogical inscriptions (the Pillar of Eliseg).

This final chapter has two aims. One is to give an outline of the shape of Britain, and of its subsequent developments, in the eleventh century. These included the establishment of a new dynasty in Alba, and the Norman Conquest of England, the latter leading to realignment of the relations between all the major powers of Britain, as well as between the British kingdoms and mainland Europe. The second main aim is to isolate some of the overarching changes in the period covered by this volume.

Language is a fundamental element of life and identity, and can serve to divide or unite, to clarify or obfuscate, and to empower or diminish. This chapter examines aspects of language in early medieval Britain, a place that saw important changes in what tongues people used and the connotations they carried. Four themes will guide us as we go along. The first two are the roles of Latin and the various vernacular languages. Third is the interaction of those languages when they came in contact with each other. Finally, we will look at the functions of writing.

This chapter looks at how the idea of Britain evolved during the early Middle Ages. As there was mostly no single authority that could exercise hegemony over the whole island, it represented a fragmented political space, and generally featured in the minds of contemporaries more as a physical reality, or as an idea, a claim to power that could be projected on to neighbours through thinking of the past. Here, three specific eras of thinking about Britain will be assessed: that of Gildas in the immediately post-Roman centuries; that of Bede and the Historia Brittonum in the eighth and ninth centuries; and finally the tenth century, when claims to rule over all Britain were made and pursued by kings of the English, provoking responses from observers in western and northern parts of the island.

Britain between 650 and 850 still consisted of numerous competing kingdoms, which in this period can be thought of as moving in three broadly distinct orbits: North Britain beyond the Firth of Forth, which was the domain of the Pictish and Dál Riatan kingdoms; middle Britain, between the Forth and the Humber, which was dominated by the powerful kingdom of Northumbria; and south Britain below the Humber, within which the Mercians were pre-eminent among the English and Brittonic kingdoms for most of the period described here, with Wessex emerging as a stronger player along and south of the Thames, especially in the ninth century. This chapter examines these three segments in turn, with final consideration of economic developments, and the initial encroachment of the vikings, that cut across wider geographical divisions.