This book contains historical errors. Some I am aware of, some, doubtless, will be painfully obvious to scholars of the period, but most of them will remain unknown or at least unprovable. The Anglo-Saxon period lasted over 600 years and yet we have less data about it than we do about a single modern day. How the daughter of an ordinary thegn would have lived and thought and hoped and strived, we can really only guess at. The written records we have relate mostly to royal and monastic houses. The archeology is full of hints and suggestions, and a great deal of wonderful jewelry and art, but little to suggest the specifics of the life of what we might best describe as a middle-class young woman. An enormous amount of Anglo-Saxon scholarship has been done and is being done, but it yields little in the way of consecutive historical narrative such as we would associate with other periods of history. Rather, through the interpretation of scattered documents, excavations, and placename studies, combined with analogies to other times and places, certain patterns of life and practice emerge, though tentatively at best. Reading histories of the period, one often gets the impression that one is reading a book made entirely of footnotes, since most books devote most of their text to discussing specific sources and their possible interpretations, rather than constructing what we might usually think of as an historical narrative.
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The Wistful and the Good, Historical Note
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This book contains historical errors. Some I am aware of, some, doubtless, will be painfully obvious to scholars of the period, but most of them will remain unknown or at least unprovable. The Anglo-Saxon period lasted over 600 years and yet we have less data about it than we do about a single modern day. How the daughter of an ordinary thegn would have lived and thought and hoped and strived, we can really only guess at. The written records we have relate mostly to royal and monastic houses. The archeology is full of hints and suggestions, and a great deal of wonderful jewelry and art, but little to suggest the specifics of the life of what we might best describe as a middle-class young woman. An enormous amount of Anglo-Saxon scholarship has been done and is being done, but it yields little in the way of consecutive historical narrative such as we would associate with other periods of history. Rather, through the interpretation of scattered documents, excavations, and placename studies, combined with analogies to other times and places, certain patterns of life and practice emerge, though tentatively at best. Reading histories of the period, one often gets the impression that one is reading a book made entirely of footnotes, since most books devote most of their text to discussing specific sources and their possible interpretations, rather than constructing what we might usually think of as an historical narrative.