Review of 'Danes in Wessex : the Scandinavian impact on southern England, c.800-c.1100'

The 13 essays in this book are the outcome of a conference (with the addition of a few other papers) held at Winchester University in September 2011. I don’t know whether the long gestation period before publication has been intentional, but it has served to ensure that this has appeared 1000 years after the second Viking age was permanently established with the accession of Cnut to the throne of England. The essays represent a series of multi-disciplinary approaches to the engagement of the Scandinavians with Wessex in the two Viking ages in the later ninth and early tenth, and the later tenth and early 11th centuries. My comments on these inevitably reflect, in a far from even-handed way, my own concern with various aspects of landscape development in these periods, but there are points of interest in all of them, which, as Barbara Yorke points out in her ‘Foreword’, should provide all students of the period with material to ponder and enjoy.