This book is ostensibly about Earl Uhtred of Northumbria, son in law of King Ethelred II and "most important man in the north of England", but like Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, it is really a history of a place and period made more accessible (more "reader-friendly") by focussing like a biography on one key figure. That key figure, Earl Uhtred, was treacherously murdered in 1016, setting in train a bloodfeud that spanned the closing years of Anglo-Saxon England and the early years of Norman rule.
The first chapter explains exactly what a bloodfeud was and was not, setting it in context as something familiar and normal and "right" in an age when "justice" was hard to come by. This is followed by the best brief history of Anglo-Saxon England I have ever read, taking us from the original settlements to Alfred and Wessex and the Danes, the emergence of the Wessex dynasty as Kings of all England, and so to the great King Edgar (excellently depicted, by the way, in Anya Seton's Avalon).
The focus then switches to the north and the history of Northumbria and the northern context before returning to the south and Edgar's son Ethelred the Ill-advised (more often known as the Unready, but Ill-advised is a better translation) and Athelstan and Edmund Ironside, and how the situation in which Canute was able to demand the attendance, unarmed, of such a man as Uhtred, came about.
It is not just a story of a bloodfeud, it is a whole history of the period up to the Conquest by one who, again like Barbara Tuchman, is an entertaining and fluent writer and also an historian with an intimate knowledge both of his chosen period and of the man and the sequence of events that in his view best represent and embody that period.
Highly recommended both to those already hooked on the Anglo-Saxons and to newcomers.
JM
