Table of Contents

Part I: States
1: Introduction
2: Geography and Politics
3: The Form of the State
Part II: Aristocratic Power-Structures
4: Aristocracies
5: Managing the Land
6: Political Breakdown and State-Building in the North
Part III: Peasantries
7: Peasants and Local Societies: Case Studies
8: Rural Settlement and Village Societies
9: Peasant Society and its Problems
Part IV: Networks
10: Cities
11: Systems of Exchange
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Chris Wickham received his DPhil from Oxford in 1975. He has taught at the University of Birmingham since then and is currently Professor of Early Medieval History. He has been editor of Past and Present since 1995.

Reviews

history doesn't get any better Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic Monthly a tremendous achievement, demonstrating mastery over half a dozen fields of scholarship. David Abulafia, THES It raises the bar for all future discussion of large-scale historical change, and not just for this period, but it also shows us how we may occasionally scramble over it. TLS Combining close documentary analysis with the latest archaeological research, it is extraordinarily ambitious and wide-ranging, and one of the great scholarly achievements of the year. Dominic Sandbrook, The Daily Telegraph The reader will not only learn an immense amount but constantly and actively engage both with the material and the arguments of this tremendously rich book. John Hudson, BBC History a magisterial study Medium Aevum, Vol. LXXV