Anglo-Saxon FAQs

Stephen Pollington

This book has been written as a series of simple questions and concise answers, in the form of an FAQ document. The inspiration for the book comes from the many occasions when the author was asked questions such as “Did they have fire?” or “Didn’t they all just wear skins?” or “Did they really have metal?” Perhaps the inability to distinguish between Anglo-Saxons and Palaeolithic cave-dwellers stems from the fact that the Anglo-Saxons are almost invisible in our modern educational time-line – the salient points are ‘Romans’, 'Vikings', ‘Normans’, ‘Tudors’ and ‘Victorians’ and everything else melds into a generic groups of fur-wearing, club-wielding savages.

More serious - and much harder to answer in a few words - are questions such as “How do you know what Old English sounded like?” or “Couldn’t they have kept worshipping their heathen gods away from the church, so it would never have been recorded?” or “What makes you think they had sails on their ships?” These are intelligent questions about which many books and articles have been written, and the answers are perhaps still not accepted as definitive by all.

In these pages you will find an attempt to answer some of those awkward questions you want to ask – or would rather someone else asked.

32 illustrations - 11 in colour

£9·95 128 pages