England is a territory carved out by military conquest from the decaying corpse of the Roman Empire. A unified English kingdom was born from the struggle of the various small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms against Scandinavian invaders whom the English eventually overcame and absorbed. Today the Vikings have a strong image in popular culture, while their victims-turned-conquerors remain largely unknown.

This book offers an examination of the life and times of the English warrior from the Continental homeland in the first century AD, through the period of migration and conquest, local internal struggles and the Danish wars to the slaughter of the English leadership at the battle of Hastings.

This important new work is not intended to be a bald listing of the battles and campaigns from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other sources, but rather it is an attempt to get below the surface of Anglo-Saxon warriorhood and to investigate the rites, social attitudes, mentality and mythology of the warfare of those times.

The latest thinking from many disciplines is brought together in a unique and fascinating survey of the role of the military in Anglo-Saxon England. The author combines original translations from the Old English and Old Norse source documents with archaeological and linguistic evidence to present a comprehensive and wide-ranging treatment of the subject. Students of military history will find here a wealth of new insights into a neglected period of English history.