While the blurb suggests that this is a history of Alfred and his times, it would be better to think of it as an archaeological interrogation of the historical evidence. Working from very different evidence bases, archaeology and history often come to quite different conclusions about what happened, with scholars in each discipline naturally tending to favour their own speciality. As such, Aelfred’s Britain is a helpful read for a historian, as it challenges many of the assumptions that historians have made about Alfred’s era based upon sources that King Alfred largely ensured told the story that he wanted told. Admittedly, historians have been aware for quite some time of this potential bias but an awareness of the bias does not help, on its own, to rectify it, without evidence from other sources.

Adams, and a generation of archaeologists, have been busily searching for this evidence, although it comes with its own set of inherent biases. In particular, archaeology is site specific: it tells you about what happened in a particular place. As we can’t dig everywhere, this inevitably skews our evidence to the sites that have been excavated, which in no wise constitute a random sample.

As such, Aelfred’s Britain is a valuable addition to the Alfredian literature, although by the book’s design it’s somewhat bitty: it took me a long time to finish as it’s a book that almost asks to be put aside for a while and then picked up again.