Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Ælfred’s Britain: War and Peace in the Viking Age > Status Update

"The end of the Scandanavian Kingdom of York and the final Unification of Kingdom that might be called England seems a reasonable place to draw a line under the Viking Age. But...that narrative does not end in 954." - Perhaps the political history of 'England' doesn't actually start until 1066

"The Danelaw territories of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were the most prosperousin lowland Britin, a function not just of entrepreneurial savvy and proximity to Continental markets but also, perhaps, because of the earlier fragmentation of great estates which allowed smaller, more enterprising landowers to exploit rural resources and adopt new tecgnologies."

"When they are excavated, some of these minster establishments look for all the world like small towns" - there is an history of urbanisation in England buried in this book. The Anglo-Saxons never took over Roman towns. Later towns were founded around Church establishments. The Vikings tooks to urban living immediately. Finally Anglo-Saxon towns were formed around the burhs that were built to push the Vikings back.

"The implication is that assimilated Danes, settled north and east of Watling Street since the days of the 'mycel here', now Christianized and perhaps, Like Urm, married into native families, resented the overt heathenism of the two Irish Norse kings..." - why did Danes in England assimilated so much quicker than the Norse in Ireland?

"Some place names seem to reflect a revival of paganism in the North" - obviously, Christianity was the religion of the elite, but how Christian were the ordinary Anglo-Saxons? The ease of Danish assimilation suggests that their not that much difference between the two populations.

"REX TOTIUS BRITANNIAE" - King of England wasn't Athelstan's aim

"From the seventh century it had been the practice of the earliest Christian kings of Northumbria to gift daughters (and sisters) to the church and to endow them with large estates from which they could implement dynastic policy via extensive networks of patronage." - following the example of the mother church in Rome.

"The grandsons of Ivarr had reconquered Dublin and wrested control of its sister city, York, after 918. Dublin now underwent rapid urban expansion..." - he hasn't really explained why the Vikings were able to do this, and why they were unable to do this in their homelands, geography, demographics? English urbanisation, however, seems to be a defensive reaction to the Vikings, rather something persued for its self.

"There is no hint that Lincoln offered any provision for the veneration of the pagan idols of its conquerors" ... what is there in Scandinavia?

"It may be significant that both Oswold and Eadmund seem to have been the focus of head cults, a deeply ancient, pre-Christian Insular phenomenon" - and right hand cults?